Love this film. Actually, the only Bakshi I’m keen on, the others never seem to live up to the hype.
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I need to get about to seeing that one. Mostly just cause I like Bakshi when he is going all out on the crazy and just for the cinema oddity of it.
And I should say what I find interesting about Mantan Moreland is I can see where Lou Costello got a lot of his influence from and Mantan does it better even if some of it is terribly stereotyped.
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Most of his Fritz the Cat stuff just seemed like animated softcore porn, IMO…
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It’s probably the most Bakshi of all of his movies, from the uncensored nuttiness of it to all of the combined visual techniques he uses. And Scatman Crothers is a gem.
Fritz has some good bits but feels like the badly-adapted comic book it is. Wizards is a haphazard cash-grab of 70s stoner-sci-fi stuff (Vaughan Bode etc). And American Pop just drags and drags.
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Before it was released on DVD, just about the only way to see Rock & Rule was to track down an out-of-print VHS or a bootleg at a comic con, and the bootlegs were almost always labeled “Ralph Bakshi”, so you aren’t alone. It was Nelvana’s first feature film! O Canada!
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Not really. It was well underway in his later years. Daughters of the Confederacy were formed in the 1890s, and were some of the primary promoters of such ideology in the 20th century. But prior to that, it was built along with Jim Crow which started after the end of reconstruction, but in earnest after the Plessy decision. He would have been familiar with the movement and arguments around the lost cause. He was living and working in ATL during the last years of his life, and was still alive and well during the infamous Atlanta Race Riot (which I believe he criticized in the the Atlanta Constitution).
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Yeah. I have trouble keeping dates straight without staring at them. Thanks.
Your probably making the point more clearly than I was. What was trying to get at was that the Uncle Remus books were during that process. Drawn from that context and feeding it. Rather than something that was adopted by it after the fact, or that we’ve applied a modern judgement to. And its one of a couple of key pop cultural works that ossified the Lost Cause take in the public imagination by that later period.
Yeah, the first time I rode it, I recognized the reference from the book, and simply thought to myself, “Gee, I didn’t know Disney ever did The Wind in the Willows!”
Wizards: yeah. “They killed Fritz!” is the best line of the movie, and not just because of the oblique reference to the cat. Wizards is better if you’re tripping balls. Or so I’m told.
For most Bakshi of the Bakshi films, I vote Heavy Traffic. Although I wonder how much more gonzo it might have been if Krantz hadn’t tried to clean it up. (I hear that the home video versions available now are censored further.)
Coonskin: added to my “must find and watch someday” list.
Back to the topic: does anyone have a good source for the folktales that doesn’t bear the print of Joel Chandler Harris’s heavy hand? On reflection, they’re what I don’t want our culture to lose. Uncle Remus can sink into the swamp he arose from, and Song of the South can fall apart into a handful of catchy musical numbers, for all I really care about them.
Disney has always been replete with racism, through and through, including the whole idea of calling the park workers, ‘cast members.’ That was a way of skirting equal employment opportunity rules: the guy sweeping the floor wasn’t a janitor, he was an actor playing a janitor, and of course the Black applicant “didn’t look the part.”
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For what it’s worth, Disney has been at the forefront of equal opportunity employment since the 50s and has always employed people from all backgrounds (as long as you didn’t have a beard or wear earrings!). Disney himself hired Black and Asian animators when nobody else was hiring them back in the 40s-50s. The idea of “cast members” wasn’t a racist ploy, it was part of the whole philosophy of seeing the theme park as a big stage with guests to entertain.
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I think the two views may not really be inconsistent, because it did mean that up front, where the guests were, a cast member had to look the part. It surely had the effect of institutional racism; we can argue all day about whether that was the intention. The Black and Asian animators were, of course, in the back where nobody could see them.
Practically doesn’t exist. From what I understand some folklorists had collected some of the stories earlier and there were independent recordings of some of the tales since. But Uncle Remus remains the only comprehensive corpus. Harris wasn’t exactly academic or rigorous about it either. He never documented when, where or from whom he collected them. Never documented alternate versions, or the tales as originally told. He wasn’t doing folklore work. So there are open questions about how many and how much of his versions are interpolations, alterations or just additions from unrelated traditions. Like some of the Remus stories are near identical to Aesop’s fables, with no way to tell if Harris just popped some fables in or if that represents a legit tradition of Aesop among slaves and post war African Americans.
That’s kind of why it sticks around. Apparently it doesn’t have much academic standing in terms of folklore and actually studying the culture of American Slaves. But it’s kinda the only thing, and it did actually preserve these tales. I’m sure there are versions out there without the nasty vernacular, but they’ll still be rooted at least in part in Uncle Remus.
The bulk of them are mostly identical to west African Folk tales about Rabbits and the spider Anansi. Some are identical to Eastern Native American tales about a trickster Rabbit. So you’re probably better off looking at those for non-Harris versions. And IIRC there’s plenty on African American folklore and Southern or Appalachian folklore that are less focused on Br’er Rabbit and the other features of the Remus books.
But I haven’t followed up on the subject in a while. So maybe someones finally gone and done something comprehensive with it.
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They’ve also employed quite a lot of people from all backgrounds in the parks, ‘on stage’. I personally know Black and Filipino people whose parents have been park cast members for over 30 years, and not as janitors. The “Disney Look” has been about things like tattoos, beards, and long hair on men. Not about ethnicity.
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You’re carrying a lot of water for the “Disney isn’t quite so bad” camp.
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I agree, but from a different angle. Whenever it’s been a choice between capitalism and racism, Disney’s corporate culture has always chosen the former. When it came to dealing with staff members and labour relations, sometimes Disney didn’t perceive any choice that had to be made. But in terms of customers, the only colour Disney ever cared about – even in the waning days of Jim Crow – was green.
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Even less so since they rebranded that as Tarzan’s tree house about 20 years ago.
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I understand why they did it, but (unlike putting SotS on ice) that does make me a bit sad.
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Wikipedia mentioned the connection. I think I saw “Coonskins” shortly after it came out, but my memory of it is hazy. I did see Ralph Bakshi films back then, so if I saw it, it was because he made it.
Maybe this?
The collection begins with the Anansi tales of West Africa, stories featuring a trickster character who is both a human and a spider, a decision that Ms. Tatar describes as “pragmatic” because so many of the later tales borrow from these foundational myths.
From there, they follow the tradition to the United States, where tales about magical instruments and flying Africans played a significant role in the lives of slaves, inspiring resistance and enabling a sense of community. The last half of the book takes a more scholarly turn, considering the work of folklorists such as Zora Neale Hurston and Jessie Redmon Fauset, the editor of the first magazine for African-American children. There is also a chapter dedicated to The Southern Workman, a monthly journal of the Hampton Institute founded in 1872 to explore the achievements of African-Americans.
But, it does include the Joel Chandler Harris stuff-- if you were hoping to avoid it.
The kindle preview has Gates’s Forward, and much of Tatar’s introduction.
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