Agent Palmer

In 1989, Ralph Bakshi submitted “This Ain’t Bebop” to PBS’s Imaging America anthology, consisting of four shorts. The whole short is based around one man, played by Harvey Keitel, trying to reclaim the life he once had. It’s origin lies in a poem recanted throughout the short, which was written by Bakshi himself.

In 1994, Ralph Bakshi directed his first, and to date his only, live-action feature-length film titled “Cool and The Crazy,” a made for TV movie for Showtime’s Rebel Highway series. It starred Jared Leto and Alicia Silverstone and takes place in the 1950’s or 1960’s era .

His influences were Bob Dylan, Jackson Pollack, Elvis Presley, Superman comic books, beatniks, jazz, Jack Kerouac, and the old school creators of cartooning and animation. This, coupled with the time periods he lived through, gave Ralph Bakshi the perfect storm of a foundation for his beliefs and the perfect medium to tell his stories.

Thus far in my Rotospective on Ralph Bakshi, I’ve taken a deep look into his films and for all but the first look into Wizards, I discussed the conclusions of those films and their meanings and lessons. The reason being that my first post on Wizards was relatively or arguably spoiler free, unless you’ve seen the film in which case I’m not spoiling anything by ending the post with a [BANG!].

In February of 2013 Ralph Bakshi launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund “Last Days of Coney Island.” The project to be “an animated cop, mafia, horror movie set in the 1960s in Coney Island, with political overtones both realistic and outrageous” was funded by a very successful and impressive Kickstarter campaign, which garnered the sum of $174,195 from 1,290 backers. Release is slated for 2014.