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American Pop (Ralph Bakshi, 1981)
American Pop’s
sheer amount of content works more impressively in its first half, when it can
hardly stop to establish a character, than it does in its second, in which
Bakshi focuses on exploring the parental link between the last two characters in
this chain. Still, this is a film that asks us not to consider these characters
as individuals so much as people caught up in a culture that allows them to
flourish then just as certainly as it forces them toward their self-destruction.
The result is a different take on melodrama than the average musical biopic, in
which the death of the artist is presented less a tragedy than a way of life.
Perhaps most troubling in Bakshi’s selective take on history is the film’s
marginalization of the contributions of African Americans to popular music.
While the family that sits at the center of the film is Jewish, this omission
gives American
Pop a specificity that seems at odds with the overall thrust of the film,
which emphasizes how history is bigger than any of these folks. American Pop is a
multimedia extravaganza that capitalizes on its animated nature without being
beholden to it. Snippets of live action stock footage are frequently used to
establish the shift to a new time period, many of the compositions reference
familiar paintings and photographs, and the score is loaded with classic songs.
The quality of the animation is variable, with Bakshi’s usual rotoscoping
techniques used to bring his characters to life, even as they are often placed
against completely static backgrounds. Still, the technical qualities of
American Pop are perhaps its least
interesting aspect. This is a film that grandly overreaches, attempting to
condense a century’s worth of triumph and tragedy into ninety minutes. To a
surprising degree it succeeds. 62 Jeremy Heilman 07.18.12 |
One
of the most serious-minded animated features ever made, Ralph Bakshi’s
American Pop is a sustained fantasia
that uses our collective musical history to examine how our country got to where
it’s at. This film is nothing if not ambitious, spanning some seventy years of
American life. Wars, fads, fashions and changes in attitude are all documented
over the course of this rambling tale, which spans four generations. Throughout
this parade of cultural touchstones, popular music’s development is traced from
its roots in European religious ceremonies to vaudeville acts to jazz clubs to
vocal standards to the emergence of rock and roll. Because of the sheer scale of
his project, Bakshi cannot devote much time to any particular strand of his
story. What he does instead, cannily, is tell his story through archetypical
characters and familiar situations so that additional elaboration is usually
unnecessary. The sins of the absent father are repeated here, time and again, on
the sons that follow, which Bakshi, perhaps simplistically, offers as his
musicians’ creative impulse. As Bakshi races through their lives, watching as
they each find their muse then die tragically,
American Pop moves toward an odd
statement about both the possibility of upward mobility and tragic falls from
grace in America.