Wizards: An Interview with Ralph Bakshi, Part One
In celebration of the 35th anniversary of the animated classic, Wizards, FOX has released the epic fantasy film on Blu-ray, complete with a commentary by legendary filmmaker Ralph Bakshi, a still gallery, and—much to my delight, a 24 page booklet featuring concept art of the film as well as a brief background telling the trials and victories in producing the picture. Bakshi was able to take the time out of his busy schedule to sit down with Geekscape and bring us up to speed on his views of the world, answer some questions provoked by the movie, and shed some light on his hopeful next project, the long awaited Wizards II. This interview will be spread over the course of multiple articles, so check back to keep up with the story!
A: I wasn’t lucky enough to see Wizards as a kid— an ex-boyfriend of mine introduced me to it and I thought it was just amazing. It was everything I had ever remembered from leafing through old fantasy art books, and that style of art and animation is something that I rarely see anymore, not to mention the intense ideological content that it had. I feel like we have lost so much meaning in our cartoons and now it’s stuff like Sponge Bob Squarepants— which I know has its own place, but it saddens me that animation just doesn’t seem to have the meaning it used to.
RB: It’s interesting you should say that, and I’m totally in agreement with you. When I first started making cartoons, Disney didn’t have meanings either, cartoons were sort of the bastardized medium done for children to merchandise things. And it has continued on without real ideas—I mean animation is the darling of the industry. It wasn’t the darling of the industry when I was animating. But even in my day there were no ideas at all and that was my whole point: why make a film without ideas? And why make a film talking to children when you can’t give children ideas? We talk down to children.
I remember when I was a kid, I didn’t understand everything, but I understood I didn’t understand so I tried to find out. So many people come to me who have seen this film as children and have said that they weren’t sure about what I was saying, but they knew that I was saying something that they had to understand and everyone says that to me—that they knew it had ideas, they respected that, and they felt better about themselves that I wasn’t treating them like idiots.
I think that today, when I watch television animation and things like Cars 2 and Toy Story 3, I mean, why bother making those films when it’s all benign film or asinine bad toilet jokes? You know, I was telling someone about Fritz, how you could take all the violence and sex out of the film— whatever there was—but the ideas were still there: the racist issues, white kids coming down to go to college from rich families and starting revolutions, and the minute the trouble really started, they ran away and whoever was left had to fend for themselves. Black people, man, they had to fend for themselves. It was all full of ideas and about revolutionaries and about greed. Fritz had its own ideas—past the extranea everyone jumped on—that’s what all my films try to be to the best of their abilities.
Yeah, I don’t see it today and I don’t understand it. But then again, I don’t understand what happened to the banking community, and I don’t understand why we spent ten years in Afghanistan and I don’t understand why we spent all that money and people are starving in America, and I don’t see what’s going on, I haven’t a clue anymore. I grew up in a different time when money wasn’t the issue—ideas were. In the fifties, when I grew up, my time, there were great things happening in art. Pollack was painting, there was great music with jazz: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk. It wasn’t about money— nobody was doing that for money, everyone was just doing it to do it. So I grew up where the ideas were important but now everyone’s getting rich, and getting rich is important. You know, you can’t get animators today, they’re making fortunes working at these companies and that’s great and they want to hold onto their money so they’re not rocking the boat.
A: When do you think that shift happened, when it stopped being about ideas? Was it immediate or more of a gradual move?
RB: Look, I don’t know everything, but I think the shift came at Kent State when those kids were shot, when the United States government opened fire on its own students that were protesting peacefully and that order was given to the National Guard to shoot. When JFK was killed, when Martin Luther King was killed, when Robert Kennedy was killed, when Malcom X was killed—an awful lot of people were shot. So the revolution stopped cold there, their ideas stopped cold there, and something changed at that point in the country, the country shifted somewhere else and— as with everything else—that’s been slowly, year after year, permeating until we have nothing left but money and greed to strive for. Things don’t happen overnight, so that shift— to me— started then. Now I’m not calling it a coup, but I would say it was. In other words, you couldn’t put together all those people killed, who were all pretty much thinkers of people’s rights, without it affecting the country. So all the young kids thought, whether they realized or not, that they better stop, they better stop revolting, they better sit down and shut up because they’re going to get killed and they can’t win anyhow.
So if you ask me when it shifted, which I think is a great question, and I’d get plenty of arguments on this, I’m sure, but that’s when I think it shifted and continues with a slow progression until today. I mean, how could this country elect Bush in twice? How could we be in Afghanistan for ten years? How could only the poor people be fighting for this country? I can’t understand it. The same people keep going back on tours over and over and that’s crazy, I mean, no one gets out. They keep sending the same people in and they’re mainly from the poorer class, so the poorer class is fighting these wars for the richer class, who are sitting there ripping off everybody, and the banks and everything are going crazy with the real estate market and the bad loans and blah, blah, blah. I see Santorum trying to put church and state together and people are voting for him. That’s what’s happening today, and that’s what Wizards II will be about. I’m not politically minded, I’m just looking at it honestly and saying that, in the world I came from, I saw the soldiers come home from World War II and I saw how we felt proud of them, but the black soldiers still had to go to the back of the bus. We kids said, “No!” and that taught us a lesson. So, yeah, I think it changed when people started getting assassinated for their ideas, when people started getting killed for their ideas.
A magical princess shows you two doors labeled “Part Two” and “Part Three”. If you choose the door labeled “Part Two”, turn to page 25. If you choose the door labeled “Part Three”, wait until Monday to open the door.
