Since its inception in 2013, Steven Universe seemed like it was going to be different. Created by former Adventure Time storyboard artist Rebecca Sugar, the show thrived on its own unique brand of syncretism, combining traditionally oppositional elements of cartoons to greater cumulative effect. It takes elements of both Western and Japanese animation, indicators of “boy” and “girl” cartoons, and follows a storyline that trades equally in drama and jokes, single episode stories and a longer overarching narrative. Finally ending its first season, this blended approach has worked exceptionally well for the show, both in building up its characters and the greater universe they exist in. But can it maintain that equilibrium forever? Can Steven Universe remain a fun, lighthearted cartoon in the mold of Adventure Time, hinting at a larger story while remaining essentially about smaller events? Or will it have to let itself grow out of its current mold and become a story-arc driven series? The answer could provide insight into the long term goals of Cartoon Network’s programming.
The precursor to Steven Universe can be found in the monumental success of its originator, Adventure Time. Adventure Time had all the hallmarks of earlier surreal animated comedies on the network like Chowder and The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, but the sinister, creeping sense that something in the show’s setting was off distinguished it from those series. Throughout its run, Adventure Time has dropped references to a great, universe-wide catastrophe that occurred in the past, and in recent seasons has become less oblique and more overt about this, intertwining individual character arcs with the cataclysmic past. Very gradually, Adventure Time has built up this mythos by placing it in the background of individual episodes and dialogues, and its approach has been highly influential in Cartoon Network’s programming.
Patrick McHale’s Over The Garden Wall is a brilliant and moving series recently made in a similar mode, at least insofar as each emphasizes a specific visual style and character-driven plot. Set in an unsettling, Americana-filled purgatory called The Unknown, Over The Garden Wall is about two brothers, Wirt and Greg, and their attempts to find their way back home. Over The Garden Wall incorporates With a similar syncretic traditional cartoon slapstick, folklore and pastiche, high-minded literary references to Dante and centers itself on the timeless trope of children trying to find their home. Unlike earlier cartoons McHale worked on like Flapjack, Over The Garden Wall did not need to take recourse to surrealism or slapstick when it engaged complex philosophical themes. The protagonists experienced real moments of doubt and uncertainty in their time in The Unknown, and the show gave them no easy macguffin to escape from their problems. When Greg and Wirt do succeed in returning home, it is only after they’ve learned more about themselves and the world they became lost in, and in turn helped to make a better place in small ways. It’s a clear indication that Cartoon Network is becoming more interested in story-driven, serialized animation that moves beyond a single premise and into more complex narrative territory.
But it’s a small indication. Over The Garden Wall aired in its entirety over the course of a single week, in 10 11-minute episodes. It was a mini-series, something of an experiment for the network, and its influence has yet to be broadly seen. Steven Universe has the same format of 11 minute episodes, but it has developed over the course of a 52-episode first season. This has given it ample time to explore its characters and to produce both lighthearted, self-contained episodes and more dramatic, multi part ones. This dual storytelling style came to a head in the season finale1, the climax of a plot that had been building for more than a dozen previous episodes. Without revealing spoilers, the two episodes established much greater stakes for the show’s characters and set up a final battle between them and their hitherto most powerful foe. The way said final battle played is particularly telling for the future of Steven Universe. In a highly catchy musical number, the main characters beat their foes, escape to safety and reaffirm their commitment to friendship, love and one another. It has a Sailor Moon-like quality to it, but what happens afterwards re-orients the episode back towards high drama in a compelling yet oddly jarring way. The resulting final seconds leaves the characters as bewildered as we are. Did all of that really happen in 20-some odd minutes? Couldn’t we have gotten more?
The issue is not that Steven Universe should become a “serious” show. Animation as a whole already suffers from an inferiority complex with regards to its own maturity, and discussions of storytelling in it must move beyond the limiting parameters of “adult” vs “juvenile” media. But the scope and number of episodes of the series leaves the question of its ultimate trajectory an open one. Critical to the success of Steven Universe has been its willingness to blur the lines of serious and silly, and its structural format as a 11-minute an episode series reflects that choice. It could easily continue in its previous vein of self-contained episodes with a larger plot in the background, but doing so risks making the larger plot a set piece, something to be occasionally referenced but never seriously considered. This is the problem that Adventure Time has at least partially run into; for all the buildup surrounding its setting and the histories of its characters, we still know remarkably little about either.
Adventure Time has stuck to lighter, episodic narratives, but with its season finale Steven Universe has taken a step in the opposite direction. The challenge for the show will be in heightening the stakes while maintaining its warm and playful style. The finale of Season 1 has shown the strengths and limitations of its current structure, both in the way it centralizes character development and its difficulty in building and sustaining plot momentum at critical junctures. The result could act as a roadmap or a warning to future Cartoon Network shows. If Steven Universe can blend the dramatic and the comedic in a seamless way, it will signal a shift in the priorities of western animation that hasn’t been seen since Avatar: The Last Airbender. Yet however it develops, Steven Universe has already shifted the ground subtly but perceptibly in animation, away from self-contained episodes and towards interconnected, lengthier stories. Its existence and continued success attests to a change in animation that won’t likely abate soon.
__________
1.Season Finale is used in a loose way here; there are 3 more episodes in Season 1, but it is episodes 48 and 49 that include the climax and subsequent denouement of Season 1’s major story arc.
Trying to figure out the exact point of Zen Pencils has not been easy. Created and written by Australia-based cartoonist Gavin Aung Than since 2012, it is at least usually a series of comics about inspirational quotes made by famous people, a sort of Chicken Soup for the Cartoonist’s Soul. With its feel good premise and emphasis on inner creativity, self-realization and the transformative power of a single out-of-context quote, it isn’t surprising that the comic series has been since its inception a hit on Facebook walls and Pinterest boards alike. Whether or not you recognize the author, if you’ve seen a comic floating around about a quote by Carl Sagan, Helen Keller, or Theodore Roosevelt, chances are you’ve seen some of Aung Than’s work. Though not all focused on unrelenting positivity, the vast majority of Zen Pencils comics are small and quickly gratifying fell-goodisms, nuggets of good vibes that find their ideal germinating ground in the digital networks of chain emails your uncle likes to send out. Yet at the same time, Zen Pencils has long had an underlying current of negative, vitriolic vein of thought running through it, expressed in angry comics on teaching, the terrors of post-graduation life, and the impact of technology on society, among others. These comics received a certain degree of notoriety for this, and, as this is the internet, a certain degree of trolling directed at Zen Pencils in general and Aung Than in particular. But it is not these initial comics that the crux of Zen Pencils’ notoriety rests on, but rather the way Aung Than responded to his critics; by creating a massive, four part comic about the evils of his interlocutors. It’s an ignominious, textbook example of how one should not respond to criticism.
The comics begin with a group of internet critics and naysayers, apparently quite literally full of shit, bursting into piles of green sludge randomly and violently. As more and more cardboard cutout cynics meet their fate this way, the green sludge begins to take form, transforming into a massive slime monster aptly titled (and with a hashtag) #hate. To counter the threat of #hate, which threatens to engulf all creativity and art in the world, an anachronistic group of artists led by one “H. Miyazaki” (copyright issues and all) gather together and, with veritably Captain Planet like gumption, form a giant mecha robot called A.R.T., emblazoned with an inspirational quote by Theodore Roosevelt, and blast off to fight the evil #hate in a climactic showdown. When they finally succeed in the comics’ thrilling conclusion, they take the entrails of their slain adversary, fly to the moon, and write the word ART on its surface as a message (and perhaps a warning) to all those who may question and criticize art.
Be afraid, my fellow HU critics.
There is so much going in this bizarre four part comic, written by a man best known for writing feel-goodisms about Albert Einstein and Helen Keller, it’s difficult to know where to begin. For long-time naysayers and critics of Zen Pencils, this vociferously anti-criticism criticism is going to do little but validate their objections, that Aung Than’s work is little more than moralizing, didactic tripe that doesn’t see the world with nuance. And in doing so, of course, they will only reinforce Aung Than’s position that critics are hacks at best and slime beings at worst. So where is there to go from here? It seems all too easy to dismiss the Art vs. Hate comics as angry, senseless diatribes, long winded rants in the vein of a public meltdown, but there’s a clear form and directionality to these comics that your average twitter breakdown lacks. Aung Than has planned out these comics thoroughly, and released them successively, each within a few weeks of each other. Several weeks to a month seems a long time to hold onto the white hot rage the comics seem to project, so what is their purpose? Aung Than is clearly making a statement, however confused and angry, and this in itself seems worth at least trying to unpack. What he ends up expressing is not a rant so much as a Manichean prophecy, a declaration that we live in a world of light and dark, art and criticism, #hate and #create. And we – all of us, from immediate readers to anyone with a stake in the exploration of art itself – must take a side. Will we stand with the artists, and try to create? Or will we be swept away as critics, like so many little slime monsters?
The glaring weakness in Aung Than’s dichotomy is the weakness of most dichotomies – that the binary they are predicated upon does not really exist. In writing this article, I am at least ostensibly in the position of critic, but I do not think of myself solely as such, and dedicate much of my time to my own creative endeavors. Does this make me a critic, or an artist? Am I made of slime and hate, or goodness and creativity? In truth, I and most people are a holistic mix of both. Criticism is not inimical to art; it is the molecular reaction, the most basic process, through which art of any sort is created. Art doesn’t emerge from a vacuum; it is created in response to the world, indeed as criticism towards it, and art evolves as an active process of criticisms and reassessment across decades and centuries. The Realists would not have emerged were they not critics of the Romantics; Postmodernism would never have occurred were it not for the faults present in Modernism. The moment we strip art of its critical dimension, we strip it of its ability to grow, to change, and to affect us. Art, if it is to serve a purpose, cannot simply stop being critical or subversive when we deem it so; it cannot be made for its own sake. And if you will forgive me for trying to answer the forbidden ‘what is art’ question, I would say that art exists to inform, to reflect, and to critique, and the moment it ceases in this function it is no longer art. It is something else entirely.
I hope #Hate isn’t #trending.
Is this what Aung Than wants? To strip art of its critical component and make it a dead and static thing to be hung up on a wall and endlessly gestured to? I do not think so. Zen Pencils is based on the words of wisdom spoken by some of the most notable figures in our world, and many of those figures quoted are indeed artists. Imagine a world where artists did not exist to say inspirational things! What would Zen Pencils, Hallmark, and the chain email enthusiasts of the world do?! The horror! But in all truth, in evaluating the Art vs. Hate comics, my suggestion would be for Aung Than to think back to one specific character; H(ayao) Miyazaki, his self-described biggest idol and influence. What is it about Miyazaki’s work that he appreciates the most? What does he try to emulate, and what makes it worthwhile to him? Criticism is not merely an act of negation; it is as much choosing what to keep in creative endeavors as it is figuring out what to leave behind, and what to oppose.
I do not say any of this to condescend to Aung Than or his work, for when it comes to mindlessly negative internet trolls and their detrimental impact on discourse and the creation of art, we are in total agreement. The nastiness directed towards Zen Pencils does not constitute good criticism, but the comics as a whole could stand to realize that there is more to the process of creating than empty eulogies. In raising art to a pedestal-beyond-pedestals, Zen Pencils does not enshrine art, but merely the idea of art, an empty rhetorical figure used metonymically to refer vaguely and uncritically to everything good and pure in the world. This emptying out of art, so to speak, is not a new phenomenon; defending art for art’s sake, as if art exists independent of the world from which it arises and must be bulwarked against that very world, is a common and noxious idea that gains ground whenever one speaks of art as a goal in and of itself. It is easy to appreciate art, to worship the very idea of it and identify it as the sentinel against which all the evils of the world are kept at bay, but this is tantamount to a betrayal of art itself. Art does not preserve the world, nor does it transcend it; art creates the world, and to criticize is to define and create art itself. We make art not to transcend the world, but to critique it, and make it a better place. And when we can fully recognize and appreciate this, then maybe Aung Than’s dream will be realized, and art will truly triumph over #hate it all its forms.
I’m not the first to point it out, but there’s something truly unfortunate about the idea that “H” Miyazaki would find much wisdom in the words of noted white supremacist and American imperialist cheerleader Theodore Roosevelt.
To say the announcement that Disney is working on a new, live action film adaptation of their most revered villain, Maleficent, the wicked fairy godmother from Sleeping Beauty sent shockwaves through the internet would be an enormous understatement. Reactions ranged from excited to ecstatic, with virtually everybody (at least within the range of cartoon enthusiasts, feminist, and feminist cartoon enthusiasts I spend much of my time with) thrilled at the idea of one of Disney’s most beloved creatures of wickedness getting the chance to tell her full story. But even as I shared in the excitement, I couldn’t help to thinking back to another story that had given a similarly ghoulish green witch a chance to tell her tale – Wicked, the book musical about how the Wicked Witch of the West got as wicked as she is. And after that, I remembered the existence of two pieces of media that explored the origins of famous heroines, namely Nintendo’s Metroid: Other M and Square Enix’s 2013 remake of the Tomb Raider series. Through all these works, we see two specific themes: the subject matter of a popular and critically acclaimed female subject, who has succeeded whether through the force of her character or her execution, and the need to redress this character, to explore who she is and how she became the person we know her as. And perhaps instinctively, this realization gave me a queasy feeling. Sure, it’s great to get character backstories, but why are we seeing all these female characters, characters that never needed an in depth explanation for who they were, being given backstories to justify their characters when justification was never necessary? Is it just an attempt to flesh out characters that may have only ever been seen as villains, or is there a more salient urge here, to strip female heroes and villains alike of their mystery and autonomy and make them explain themselves to us? From this perspective, it seems necessary to ask what it is that the new Malificient film does; does it validate her, giving us an idea of why she is who she is, or does it undo her, removing the excess villainy and mystery that made her at once so captivating and inspiring to viewers?
Didn’t she play Lara Croft too? Or am I just losing it…
Like a male hero or villain, there are myriad reasons a female hero or villain may succeed, or fail, in their given function. But unlike most male characters, female characters are also caught up in the complex politics of representation and sexualization, and must be interrogated with pointed questions to determine whether they break down sexist stereotypes or uphold them. Upholding the institutions of sexism is done in ways that range from outfits to motivations; if the heroine or villainess wears the same three loose pieces of cloth everywhere she goes, she’s demeaning eye candy for men, and if her motivations are for romance, wealth, or eternal beauty, she’s a damsel, a conniving harpy, or any one of the literal hundreds of pre-formed molds made for female characters of all shapes and DnD alignments. To escape this is no easy task, for it requires simultaneously the recognition of the female character’s specific social position while also being clear to point out that her gender changes nothing about her basic human motives, objectives and desires. In this sense, characters like Maleficent and Samus Aran of the Metroid game succeed; their motivations do not rest in anything directly coded as feminine, but simply in who they are as human beings (or in Maleficent’s case, fairies). And while Elphaba and Lara Croft no doubt fulfill sexist functions (in the case of the former, being a vindictive hag and in the latter, being eye candy for 13 year olds with a PlayStation) their characters seem to exist and have motives for action outside of them. From craving treasure to craving vengeance, acting out of senses of duty, honor, wickedness and for the thrill of it, the motivations of these women are not wholly contingent on their gender; anyone in Elphaba’s position would want to avenge their sister, and the tropes of bold and brash treasure hunter like Lara Croft is as common as the adventure genre itself. And more importantly, the motivations of these characters don’t really need to be qualified; we have seen enough villains and heroes with them to not so much bat an eye at them. Does this drive to qualify the motivations of female characters represent a drive to strip them of their character nuances, as if we as viewers have trouble believing that they, as female characters, are capable of doing the things they do without qualifying it?
Is it really necessary to know how this became this?
With Maleficent in particular, this question is troubling. More than any of the previously outlined characters, Maleficent triumphs not because she is a character so much as she is a symbol, an awe-inspiring avatar of wickedness and malevolence in semi-human form. This is what, in the already impressive pantheon of comic, tragic and wicked villains of the Disney canon, makes her stand out as above and beyond the rest. The average Disney villain may have myriad motivations and reasons for being evil, be they jealousy, gluttony, old grudges or simple dislike of the protagonist. But Maleficent is above such petty mortal concerns. It is true that she is slighted in not being invited to Princess Aurora’s Christening, but this seems little more than pretext for her to unleash her evils upon the kingdom. And were it not for the meddling of the “good” fairies, she would have succeeded; by the films halfway point, she has the prince in chains, the princess in eternal sleep, and the kingdom completely plunged in darkness. Further, she never relies on the powers of her minions to get things done: for the most part, it is her who does the plotting, the trapping, and most of all the fighting, and she does it damn well. By the film’s final act, she has become evil itself, manifesting as an enormous black dragon capable of leveling entire kingdoms, before good triumphs and she is finally slain once and for all. Even as she loses, she stands out in a way no villain has before or since. Maleficent is a force of nature, an awe inspiring manifestation of villainy in its purest, most captivating form, and it is in the very force of her evil and power that she has emerged as the perennial, classic villain of the Disney mythos.
According to the Wikipedia page for the new Maleficent film, our favorite evil fairy is being recast as a defender of nature and wildlife from the encroaching forces of man. Is this how far the mighty have fallen? The dark lady Maleficent, a militant Greenpeace activist? Forgive me if I don’t sound too enthused. In some cases, fleshing out the ideas of female villains and heroes gives them an extra bit of dimension they previously lacked; with Wicked especially, we got to see an arresting and ultimately convincing portrait of the Wicked Witch, with her origins as dreamy idealist and the way the corruption of the world she lived in made her something far worse. But this recent spate of female backstories too often seems to ask questions that don’t need to be asked, namely why do these characters, characters we already know and care about, act the way they do? For Maleficent this is a pointless line of inquiry. Maleficent has never operated on the basis of everyday logic and passions, for if she did she wouldn’t be a fire breathing sorceress living in a rickety castle in the darkest, creepiest corner of the Earth. What makes Maleficent a gripping character is not who she is, but what she represents. She is evil incarnate, angry, spiteful, cunning and all-encompassing evil, and the fact that she happens to manifest this in a female form seems to make little difference. But in creating a new backstory for her, in the same vein that other classic female characters have had done for them, we see an underlying anxiety not on the part of the viewers, but on that of the producers who both want to make a buck on and feed into the ever-more pervasive idea that classic female characters have to justify their very existences as classic characters.
So, I ultimately pose this question; is a new Maleficent film really necessary? Do we have to create a backstory for a character who’s more a force of nature than anything, and deconstruct everything she represents to a world where powerful female symbols are already rare to nonexistent? In undoing Maleficent and other female characters like her, are we selling them short, and telling them that we don’t believe that they can be gripping, powerful and meaningful on their own terms?
My answer to this is yes. Rather than revisiting classic female characters, it seems a much better use of the time and energy of writers and artists everywhere to build off of them, to learn from their mistakes and appreciate their impact, and create new, dynamic characters that through their actions destroy expectations of gender and all related institutions. Rather than undoing Maleficent, we should champion her cause, and learn from the things she has taught us about character designing and building. If we do not do this, moving forward will only become more difficult, and the mistakes of the past will just keep repeating themselves.
Oftentimes, there is an unfortunate dichotomy, an almost absolute divide, in animation discussions between “American” and “Japanese” styles and modes of production, as if these are the only two countries on earth. As it happens, animation is an art form with more than a century of history, and from the very earliest times some of the world’s most creative, experimental and criminally underlooked animation has come out of Russia. From the earliest days, when Ladislas Starevich’s stop-motion animations with dead insects at once fascinated and unnerved audiences worldwide, Russian and Soviet animators have used their craft for visual and artistic experimentation rarely seen elsewhere, utilizing everything from puppetry to Disney-inspired cel animation to paintings on glass to create stories that are in turns comical, abstract, tragic and life-affirming. While Russian and Soviet animation has an enormously complex and varied history (much of which can be learned from the excellent documentary film Magia Russica, released by Yonathan & Masha Films in 2004) it remains almost completely unknown outside its country of origin, except by cartoon buffs such as your dear author. So rather than launch into a specific analysis of any one stream, movement, or aesthetic style, I wish only to recommend a few exemplary works produced in the Russian tradition, works of art that deserve appreciation, enjoyment, and yes, critical appraisement as much as any work in any place. The world of Russian animation encapsulates countless facets of ideology, history, memory and emotion, and if I can convince others to become part of a discussion about it, then all the better.
Cheburashka
The cute, precocious Cheburashka is perhaps the closest thing the USSR ever had to a Mickey Mouse (although Tove Jannson’s Moomins is probably a more accurate analogy), and his antics and adventures have delighted generations of Russian children. Alongside his closest friend Gena Crocodile and forever harangued by the mischievous Old Lady Shapoklyak, Cheburashka grew from a kid’s book written in 1966 by Eduard Upensky and starred in 4 stop-motions films produced in the 70s and 80s, all of which remain popular today. The Cheburashka films have a light, unhurried feel, as well as a great deal of philosophical and introspective discourse for ostensible kid’s films. Cheburashka remains popular, and has even gained international attention as the Russian Olympics mascot throughout the past decade. Meticulously crafted and lovingly written, Cheburashka is timeless and sincere in a way few films, animated or not, even attempt to be.
Nu, Pogodi!
If Cherabushka was the Soviet equivalent to Mickey Mouse, then Nu, Pogodi! was its Looney Tunes. Produced throughout the 70s, 80s and up to 2006, Nu, Pogodi! chronicled the misadventures of a wolf named Volk as he tried (and of course, failed) to catch a hare named Zayats in a variety of outlandish and hilarious situations. Like the best Looney Tunes cartoons, Nu, Pogodi!’s relies on almost no dialogue and prefers to use the dynamism and creativity of its own characters to convey a strange, fantastical world where animals stretch and squash, gravity doesn’t always apply, and nothing is ever fatal. And like those cartoons, it is the predator, the wolf, the coyote, the hunter, who ends up earning the lion’s share of our sympathies. Sure, he’s a crazed killer bent on getting his due, but he’s such a screw-up! He’s just tryin’ to get by! And more than 30 years since their first escapades, I still hope Volk catches that rabbit someday (or something equivalent, the guy really deserves to catch a break).
The Old Man and the Sea
The 1999 adaptation of Hemingway’s classic novel, besides being a beautiful and emotional film, is a must-see if only for one reason: its stunningly original medium of production. To create the films gorgeously detailed painting style of animation, director Aleksandr Petrov utilized more than 29,000 panes of glass painted with pastels, a technique few at the time had mastered and even fewer today. Sacrificing smaller design details in favor of smooth compositions, the film truly looks like a painting in motion, something at once unbelievable, magical, and unmistakably a labor of love.
Tale of Tales
Of all the Russian animators, Yuriy Norshteyn is the only one who can make a real claim towards international recognition. If you aren’t exasperated with my hackneyed analogies yet, you could even call him the Miyazaki of Russia: in 1984, the Los Angeles Olympics Art Festival declared by vote Tale of Tales, a short, abstract film about a little wolf looking for a home, to be the greatest animated film, of any country, ever made. Beginning with a woman whispering a poem to a child suckling at her breast, Tales tackles the big themes, showing war, jealousy, growing up, selfishness, folly and love through its transient and silent imagery. A bison and a little girl play jump rope, a poet searches for inspiration, a bitter couple argue in a snowy park, a wolf wanders about through the skeleton of an abandoned house. Memories come and go, things live, breathe and die, and by the end, you don’t feel as if you fully understand what happened, but you feel better for having seen it, more alive, more human. Nostalgic, delicate and beautiful as an unsullied snow, Tale of Tales is about, Norshteyn’s own words, “the simple concepts that give you the strength to live.” Tale of Tales is like a happy memory. You can see it, you can feel it, but trying to touch it, to make it real only blurs the image. It is a drop of the past, helping you remember to live in the present.
Hedgehog in the Fog
Although I’m personally more partial to Tales, it seems unfair to mention one of Norshteyn’s masterpieces without mentioning the other. Like Tales, Hedgehog in the Fog is deeply allegorical, telling the story of a little Hedgehog who goes to watch the stars with his dear friend the bear cub, only to find himself lost in the shadowy world of an immense fog. Following him is a sinister eagle-owl who represents the danger of the fog; silent and scary, the eagle-owl remains on the periphery of the hedgehog’s vision, an unspeakable fear that cannot be shaken off. And yet, the hedgehog remains curious; he willingly explores the fog, meeting a friendly dog, a beautiful white horse, and a whispering catfish before finding his bear cub friend and the warmth and comfort therein. The fog is impenetrable and treacherous, beautiful and imposing; nothing is certain about it. And yet, the hedgehog presses forward, knowing that even if he does not know where the fog ends and begins, somewhere is his friend, with a warm cup of tea, kind words, and a place to watch the stars. Rated the top animated film of all time in the 2003 Tokyo Animation Festival and praised by Hayao Miyazaki himself, Hedgehog in the Fog is, like Tales, deceptively simple; even with its heavy allusion and symbolism, it is the word of someone exploring the human condition, of the human seeking their place in a fog they cannot grasp, and finding it in the warmth and care of others. It is a gentle reminder to take of ourselves, and of one another, and of the world around us. Even in the fog, with danger nearby and the unknown all around, there is always some reason to push forward, something to discover, somebody to love.
Before going any further, let’s see what mental images a synopsis like this conjures: “Takao Kasuga is a shy, book-loving high school student who’s had a crush on classmate Saeki Nanako for as long as he can remember. One day, in a moment of lust and foolishness, he steals her gym uniform from class, only to be caught in the act by the quiet and lonely Sawa Nakamura. Knowing she has sway over him, Nakamura forces Kasuga to make a contract with her, or else risk having his secret revealed to the entire class!”
What you might expect from such a synopsis is a harem anime where a bemused, stand-in protagonist finds himself pulled into wacky situations by a cast of cute and quirky moe girls. What you get is one of the most genuinely disturbing and hard to watch anime series of the past 5 years.
From the outset, the most striking feature of Aku no Hana (The Flowers of Evil) is the use of rotoscoping in all of its character animation. Rather than being originally designed and drawn, the characters of Aku no Hana are played by actors in live action and then painstakingly redrawn in a way that both captures their original movements and gives them an unnerving fluidity. This technique creates a visual juxtaposition between the beautifully drawn and lingered over backgrounds and the airy, almost two-dimensional characters, who are distant drawn without any distinguishing features, like strange, faceless simulacrum posing as flesh-and-blood humans. The effect is distinctly unnerving, and has been a predictable source of outrage in fan communities in Japan and abroad, who wanted a series that sticks to the more standard moe conventions which value cuteness and stylization over realism. While most anime try to draw equal attention to foreground and background in their composition, Aku no Hana specifically prioritizes its environments over the characters; while each scene is painstakingly drawn and lingered on throughout the series, the characters within them remain insubstantial wisps, almost featureless even when viewed up close. There is no typical cuteness to be found in this series. There will be no figurines, no body pillows of its characters. There is instead an empty, boring town, filled with empty, boring people.
Kasuga Takao knows his town is a boring and hollow place. As he says himself, there’s nothing but “weeds and pachinko parlors here”. He, however, is in his own mind anything but hollow; he is a connoisseur of fine literature, a sensitive and intellectual soul who finds solace from the world in his favorite book of poetry, Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. Those familiar with Baudelaire’s work, of course, will know that the French poet had little interest in providing solace; Baudelaire was a hedonistic, scandalous libertine whose arch-nemesis was the unceasing boredom of modern society, a bête noire as potent in 19th century Paris as it is in 2013’s Japan. Although he thinks himself a poet and intellect inhabiting an ethereal world all of his own, Kasuga quickly demonstrates he’s as fallible as anyone else, and in a moment of irrational lust, steals the gym clothing of his crush, Saeki Nanako, an act witnessed by the class outcast Sawa Nakamura.
Upon seeing Kasuga’s moment of deviance, Nakamura begins to believe that he is different from the rest of their classmates and town, albeit for reasons Kasuga denies; like her, she believes him to be a fellow “deviant”*, someone who sees the world for the sad and boring place that it is and seeks to liven it up with chaos and anarchy. She seeks out Kasuga, and under the threat of revealing his crimes to everyone, forces him to make a “contract” with her, doing whatever she commands to do while she tries to break down “all the walls you’ve built around yourself.”
In a different anime, this premise might make for cute, lighthearted hijinks, but Aku no Hana plays up the inherently disturbing nature of it as often as it can. Over the course of the series, Nakamura forces Kasuga to wear Saeki’s stolen gym clothes as he takes her out on a date, stalks him and constantly undermines his ideas of Saeki being pure and virginal, and ultimately tries to make him confess to his sins to the whole classroom on a blackboard. A peculiar bond develops between Nakamura and Kasuga; even as Kasuga denies being a deviant and clings to his poetry and erudition as a way of distinguishing himself, Nakamura belittles and mocks his false sense of superiority, telling him that beneath it all what he really wants to do is give in to his base principles, fuck Saeki and fuck the world up in turn. In principle, it’s easy to see Nakamura as a standard crazy-anime-girl archetype, without a real personality besides being cute and chaotic. But the reality is more complex; even as Nakamura seeks out chaos and some end to the boredom and insubstantiality of modern life, what she truly desires is a companion, somebody who recognizes the world for what it is and hates it as much as she does. Her desire is not to destroy things, but to escape, to find what lies on “the other side of the hill” beyond the town and the world she knows.
Slowly and methodically, Nakamura breaks down the walls around Kasuga’s psyche, revealing to him the hollowness of his life and self. Midway through the series, she tries to force him to break into their classroom and write all his crimes on the blackboard, something Kasuga point-blank refuses to do. Raging at him, she accuses Kasuga of being just as boring and empty as everybody else, and ultimately tells him never to speak to her again. And for the first time since stealing Saeki’s gym clothes, it is this threat that prompts Kasuga to act autonomously and take action. He admits he’s a deviant, he writes on the board with furious tears in his eyes, and together, he and Nakamura trash the classroom in a blaze of youthful joussiance, neither feeling more alive than in destroying their shit classroom and the shit world it represents.
The anarchic impulses and desire for stable, “real” identity in Aku no Hana are reminiscent of much young adult literature and media, with their shared hatred of the mundane world they’re trapped in, the desire to escape, and the search for meaning in an empty landscape. The key difference, of course, is that while other young adult media valorize their protagonists as seekers of a purer, greater truth, Aku no Hana mercilessly savages such ideas for their naivety. In another series, a sensitive, erudite protagonist like Kasuga might be portrayed as the pure hearted hero, but here, he is mercilessly mocked for the falseness and vapidity of his character. As Nakamura continues to break him down, he also finds himself in conflict with Saeki, who genuinely cares about him even after she learns that he stole her gym clothes. When she learns that he was the one who vandalized their classroom, Kasuga and Nakamura attempt to flee to the place “on the other side of the hill,” only to be confronted once more by Saeki. Realizing he can’t make a choice between the two of them, Kasuga breaks down and admits he doesn’t even understand Baudelaire’s poetry, that he just liked the idea of himself reading it, and that he’s truly, completely empty inside. In the end, both Nakamura and Saeki draw away from him, as both realize he’s not the person they want him to be.
More than anything, Aku no Hana is about identity; it is an exploration on how human beings are supposed to grow and bloom in a world of empty concrete. As I suggested earlier, the aesthetics of Aku no Hana depict the ephemerality of their characters while emphasizing the unchanging nature of their environment; even as individual humans live, breathe, and expire, the concrete and steel they build around them long outlives their own ambitions. In a world where identity and meaning making have been subsumed to commodities and the act of living is conducted in the sterile, alienating urban condition, what choice do people have but go large or go crazy? Surely there are more constructive ways to channel one’s frustrations, but Aku no Hana isn’t interested in them.
Gleefully borrowing from the Decadent literary tradition of 19th century France, the anime savages the idea of modernist progress and the sublimation of human identity to the rigidity of codes and institutions. It wants only to incite violence and chaos, even as it suggests that there is a way to overcome the ennui of modern life through interpersonal relationships and genuine human contact. But it simultaneously is suffused with a postmodern understanding of the world, and recognizes that the antediluvian time when humans could understand one another without the artifice of code, symbol and language dividing them has long passed. All beauty, the beauty Kasuga seeks in his books and in Saeki, the beauty striven towards by the effete constructions of modernism and postmodernism, are compromised and tainted, and the human drive towards something more than emptiness is to blame for it. Beyond the facades, the feeble attempts to rationalize the boringness of quotidian life, a true and utter deviant lurks, a lunatic whose only crime is wanting to find something more, something more than the boring, boring, boring shit hole they’ve found themselves in.
As the first part of the series ends, we find Nakamura and Kasuga’s roles reversed; while Nakamura attempts to leave Kasuga behind, Kasuga asks her to make a contract with him, so they can “crawl out of this shit hole together.” Gone are Kasuga’s self-fulfilling and illusive attempts to define himself as different from everyone else, as superior because of his books and his learning. As Nakamura shows him, there is no path towards self-realization that exists within the system, that isn’t always-already compromised by its subsumation to the authorities and processes that deny autonomy to anyone. To become a person, in the adolescent and neoliberal sense, means to define oneself as free of all others, and so to fulfill the teenage fantasy of becoming more “real” than others implies nothing short of destroying everything that ties you down to the world from whence you came. This is what the final sequence shows; in order to escape the town and the people that inhabit it, Nakamura and Kasuga engage in a surreal whirlwind of violence, a premonition of what they would ultimately have to do for their fantasies of escape to succeed. The liberal idea of individual self-actualization is shown to be a split-level trap; even as one wants to escape and subvert the system, the only way to do so is to give into violence and decadence, and thus fulfill a notion of the individual that places them at the heart of violence itself. It is this paradox, between being someone without any autonomy or claiming it through violence that renders the autonomy and validity of other human lives moot, that Aku no Hana positions itself to engage by the end of its first segment.
I have not read the manga, so I do not know what ultimately happens beyond the first 13 episodes. But in speculating, I can’t help but revisit the ending poem of the series, about a flower which wants to bloom, but should not even exist:
“The flower bloomed. The flower, the flower bloomed. It was terribly afraid of the wind. Nobody had ever seen it before, and it bloomed. Nobody had ever seen it before, and it seemed to bloom. [None had seen it before..and it seemed to bloom. “There’s no flower.” “There shouldn’t be a flower.” Some were convinced it was so. But they were wrong, and it was there. None had ever seen it. It should be harsh to listen to. A flower bloomed that should not have. There it is, yes, there it is. There it is.”
As the series closes, we see the one-eyed flower, depicted on the front of Kasuga’s cover of The Flowers of Evil and a recurring motif elsewhere, finally open its eyes and look towards the viewer. The flower, it seems, has bloomed. The flower has awoken, it has become autonomous, and its time has come. But it is an evil flower. It is a flower that should not exist.
______________
*The word that is used, as far as I’m aware, is hentai, which is usually translated to pervert; however, the elastic use of the term in this series, as it refers to both sexual and social deviance, may be the reason translators use the word “deviant” instead.
Having only just escaped my own teenage years, I have a lot of mixed feelings about adolescence. Listening to people older than me, I often hear that teenagers are mean, histrionic little know-it-alls with nothing but angst, self-absorption and empty-calorie cynicism flowing through their veins. And having only just been a teenager myself, I can’t also say there’s there is no truth to that; teenagers are insecure, they’re hormone-addled, and in the 21st century have access to an array of technologies that let them broadcast versions of themselves they might later wish to live down to the entire world. But even if contemporary wisdom dictates that adolescence has always been a time of angst and cynicism, there seems to me something far more cynical about the way that teenage suffering has been normalized, made into something that everyone between the ages of 13 and 19 should anticipate. Emotional suffering doesn’t simply arise in a vacuum; it is almost always created through external conditions, and even the most banal teenage whining should be assumed to be grounded in some outside social forces. But what is the cause? Is it all hormones? Is it insecurity? Is it just a natural part of “finding yourself,” as so many young adults narratives stress? These could all very well be central factors, but a recent strain of young adult narrative – the “kill your friends because you are forced to” kind – seems to suggest something more systemic at play.
The general premise of Avengers Arena, an ongoing series written by Dennis Hopeless and illustrated by Kev Walker, is one that’s become strangely familiar in the past 5 or so years; a group of teenagers, isolated and rendered helpless by some outside force or organization, are forced to run around killing one another until only a single person, the Übermensch among them, still stands. Some of them will refuse to fight (and they die quickly), some of them will try to run (and they die just as quickly) and some will take to the game immediately, thrilled to finally have the chance to release their inner demons and kill everyone who’s ever said something rude to them. But mostly, it’s a brutal game of survival, a literal dog eat dog nightmare designed to breed the most ruthless, brutal and efficient members of society. Sounds like High School, right?
We all probably know where this train starts; when Koushon Takami’s novel was released in 1999, and adapted into a film in 2000, Battle Royale created an enormous stir in Japan and a significant one abroad. Coming out at a time when Japan was just getting out of its Lost Decade (only to fall headfirst into another one, as fate would have it), Battle Royale combined the titillation of a slasher film with the concrete issues facing Japan’s youth at the time, namely the plight of the precariat (precarious proletariat, those unable to find work beyond temporary, part-time positions) and the consequences of a prolonged recession that forced young people to go at each other’s’ throats constantly in their attempts to secure stable employment, which was thought of as a birthright just a generation before. It takes place in an alternate-world 1997 Japan, where the country’s economy has collapsed and unemployment has become so rampant most students have stopped attending school, seeing it as a waste of time. Seeing the very foundations of their society crumble, Japanese authorities pass the Battle Royale Act, stipulating that once a year a randomly chosen 8th grade class must fight to the death until only one student remains standing.
While the Battle Royale bills itself as a celebration of the idea of survival of the fittest, it is clearly a battle of the most aggressive; any alternative means of survival, such as hiding, escaping or simply choosing not to fight are cancelled out with the inclusion of an island location, detonating collars and mines that force students to continuously come closer to one another until all are dead. Class 3-B, the class chosen for the Battle Royale, initially has no idea what is going on when they’re kidnapped and spirited away, but soon after the game starts, several students take to it quickly, especially Kazuo Kiriyama, a mute, psychopathic character who willing signed up for the Battle Royale because he thought it might be fun. The movie is in turn a character study and a bloodbath, intimately concerned with the psychologies and motivations of these young people forced to kill one another. We have Mitsuko Souma, a child sexual abuse victim who ultimately killed her abuser and learned to never trust anyone, Hiroki Sugimura, a boy whose tracking device would let him easily win the game, but who ultimately uses it to track down his fellow classmates to make amends over past wrongs, and the protagonist Shuya Nanahara, whose only motivation is the protect his friend Noriko, determined not to lose anybody else after his father’s suicide and the murder of his best friend at the beginning of the film. These students are not angels, nor are they “tragically flawed” in the half-assed way slasher films make their characters to justify their deaths; they’re teenagers, hormonal and exuberant and forced to murder one another so that the adults can keep their society the way it is.
The killing, of course, is metaphorical; we can’t simply allow all these teenagers to waltz into adulthood, they’re not prepared! Adulthood is a brutal exercise in Social Darwinism, where only brute strength and cunning can be relied on for survival. But even if the forces that be in Battle Royale use this idea as a theoretical justification for their systems of domination, the practice is much different; rather than work communally towards mutual survival, the students of Class 3-B are forced to kill each other, or else be killed by their detonating collars. The artificial conditions of the Battle Royale parallel the artificial conditions of the world that created it; a system of exploitation, a neoliberalism that always reproduces conditions of deficiency and inequality so that it may continuously justify its own existence. Not enough wealth, not enough resources? Let the free market take care of it! It’ll find a place for everyone and everything. Except when it doesn’t, as is the case in capitalist crises and the system must find new means of justifying the accumulation of capital at the top at the expense of everybody else. In the case of first world countries like Japan, this usually entails an assault on a middle class anxious about their own socioeconomic status. By ensuring the middle class, and in particular the youth of that class, must cull their own numbers (quite literally) to ensure its own survival, the ruling class stays on top; while the students must kill one another, the teachers idle their time away.
The notion of class is taken a step further in the most famous American manifestation of this genre, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. In the book and film, two children from each of the twelve outlying Districts of the nation of Panem (a dystopian, post-nuclear America because we’ve never heard that one) are forced to fight to the death as a means of paying tribute to the Capitol, as penance for a civil war waged 74 some-odd years ago. The very name of the nation references its predication on inequality; the tribute the districts pay, called the Hunger Games, are a form of Panem et Circenses, bread and circuses built on the back of the lower class for the enjoyment of the higher ups. And just to keep future generations from ever questioning their position, the Capitol makes sure to keep them busy and divided by making the Games into a public, much spectacle and a means for any given District to win glory (and much needed food) for themselves.
While Battle Royale shifts panoramically across different characters and storylines, Hunger Games focuses on one character, Katniss Everdeen, a girl from the lowliest beginnings who volunteers to participate as a means of saving her little sister who is originally chosen. In her own way, Katniss represents a contemporary conception of the American dream; throughout the games, she manages to succeed not by brute force or cunning, but by being charismatic and resourceful, kind to her allies and smarter than her opponents. When she’s in danger, she is often saved by others (like Peeta, a boy enamored with her, and Thresh, who does so as part of a blood debt), and when she kills, it is only to survive or out of righteous fury, as when her friend Rue dies. Ultimately, her actions begin to sow the seeds for open revolt throughout the nation, and when it comes down to her and Peeta as the final two survivors, she chooses to take her own life alongside him, forcing the Capitol to call of the games and name them both winners.
If one continues reading the Hunger Games series, they’ll see it ultimately plays out in a similar style to Battle Royale; the system of domination and exploitation, targeted primarily at young people but also at the middle and working classes in general, cannot be defended or sustained, and must be subverted and overthrown so that the cycle of violence may end. But in the course of the killing spectacle itself, the characters of Battle Royale are often fleshed out, developed, made into believable human beings and then killed, while in Hunger Games, Katniss seems to survive without ever having to truly compromise her ethical values, the other characters either acting as shields or protectors of her. In Katniss, we see a character who manages to survive by doing just the right things at just the right time, succeeding with cleverness and just a bit of luck. In Battle Royale, the protagonists Shuya and Noriko only manage to survive when one of the teachers ultimately lets them, motivated by a combination of pity and obsession. While in Hunger Games, there is the suggestion that success in a system of domination, even a conditional, unstable success, is still attainable, still within the grasp of the most adept and resourceful regardless of status, Battle Royale maintains no such hope, acknowledging that ultimately it is only through connections and social status that one can survive.
Fans of both Hunger Games and Battle Royale vociferously argue that the two works are completely different, and to an extent I agree with them. For while both share a similar premise, one grounded in an understanding of systems of oppression as well as an anxiety regarding recession, the decline of the first world, and the long “crisis of capitalism” that has been ongoing from the end of the 20th century to the 21st, they ultimately approach their own metaphorical models in different ways. In Battle Royale, we find little reason to hope for anything but full overthrow of the system at hand, while Hunger Games seems to suggest there might still be hope for success. But even if we accept the intimations in Hunger Games and agree that even the lowliest and meanest among us can rise to greatness, what of the remaining tributes killed? Were they not resourceful, kind and determined like Katniss, with their own backstories and hopes and dreams? We never get to know, as the majority function either as allies dedicated to Katniss, evil enemies determined to kill her, or nameless, faceless casualties we never know anything about. For the Hunger Games narrative to work, we must believe in the power of the individual to overcome, even if this requires one individual being prioritized above all others. In Battle Royale, such a gesture is futile.
Is this difference in attitude towards the system a reflection of the mindsets within their respective countries of origin? In Japan, the economic recession has been an ongoing crisis for more than 2 decades, while we here in the States know it as a largely new phenomenon. In Hunger Games, we can still see the potential for success in a rigged system, however fleeting; in Battle Royale, there is an overwhelming sense of resignation, a sense that if we cannot escape the system of domination, we must enjoy it or seek to destroy it. And on the topic of enjoyment it should be noted that as a film, Battle Royale is far gorier than Hunger Games. W hile Hunger Games actively attempts to distance the viewer from scenes of gratuitous violence, Battle Royale revels in them and even sexualizes them, titillating the viewer with a spectacle they ought to otherwise be horrified by. While Hunger Games takes a principled stand against the violence, Battle Royale submits to it, even enjoys it.
So what can be said of this nascent genre? Is it political, or decadent? Should it enjoy its own violent spectacle, or take a principled stand against it? Will it become the new “zombie film” of pop culture? God let’s hope not. Although I haven’t read much of Avenger’s Arena, where it ultimately takes the genre will be most telling; it could go down the Battle Royale route, positioning itself along the lines of horror films in saying that hey, if we can’t escape the violence, we might as enjoy it, or the Hunger Games route of keeping one’s chin high even in the direst of circumstances. Neither approach is perfect, each has its merit; while Hunger Games refuses to revel in the spectacle of violence or enjoy it, Battle Royale shows that the only way you can hope to beat a system of exploitation is to resist it with everything you’ve got. Avenger’s Arena has the potential to push the genre in one of two directions; towards gory, ideologically hollow exploitation, or towards a political attack on the ways in which youth are brutalized, sexualized and forced to fight one another in media and society, a critique especially salient in this age of precariatism, unpaid internships and the never-ending recession. Either way, as long as it keeps being fun to watch and continues giving grown-ups the middle finger, it will find an eager audience amongst adolescents and young people alike. Whether it will be pure entertainment or motivation towards some greater, more nebulous and worthwhile goal, remains to be seen.
Perhaps against all odds, Ralph Bakshi’s recent success in getting his latest project funded via Kickstarter attests, if not to his current relevancy, then at least to his tenacity. Working in a medium monopolized by Disney and its copycats, Bakshi has been a figure in the American animation scene for decades, producing controversial, if not altogether attractive, animated films that have on occasion gone head to head with the Big Mouse itself. Throughout his career, Bakshi has never tried to make films that are palatable; his breakthrough film, Fritz the Cat, was the first X-rated animated film to get a wide release and was described by no less than Underground Comix grandfather R. Crumb as “repressed”, “fascistic” and “twisted in some kind of weird, unfunny way.” As if trying to live up to such harsh criticism, Bakshi’s films are often raw, angry creations, full of a manic energy that ambles frantically from acerbic subversion to a desultory, formless racism and misogyny that would drive away nearly anyone within the first half hour. Bakshi, especially in his earlier films, works from a paradigm of art popular during the 60s and 70s in the Underground Comix scene which states that anything that makes your mother and government cringe is gold, a philosophy that validates all manner of perversion and political protest as well as any racism, misogyny, or homophobia that happens to creep up on part of the part of the usually white, straight and male artist. Despite, or perhaps because of, the frantic and vitriolic nature of his work, Bakshi remains one of the only artists who has ever locked horns with the animation industry and come out clean; with Fritz and the subsequent film Heavy Traffic, Bakshi became the first animator since Disney to produce two back to back commercially successfully films. But alongside his penchant for controversy and money making ability, Bakshi had, and perhaps still has, something exceedingly rare in the world of American animation; a political drive, an ideology, a statement he wanted to shove in the face of The Man with nothing but his cartoons.
The paradox of Bakshi lies in the disparity between the movement of his work and its actual content; even taking his greatest failings into account, his impact on animation as an artistic medium in the United States cannot be questioned. Taking inspiration from the Underground Comix movement of the time, Bakshi suggested that animation, like any medium of expression, had a social obligation to rearticulate complex social and political issues in new and subversive ways, a line of thought far removed from either mainstream Disney logic or the more mischievous ideology embodied in its counterparts, Warner Bros, Hannah-Barbera, and currently Dreamworks. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times in 1971, a year before Fritz was released, he famously said “The idea of grown men sitting in cubicles drawing butterflies floating over a field of flowers, while American planes are dropping bombs in Vietnam and kids are marching in the streets, is ludicrous.” Alongside this, Bakshi’s animation studio, Bakshi Productions, gave unprecedented opportunities to female and PoC animators at a time when they were virtually nonexistent in the industry. In this respect, Bakshi is unique. Even as animation has matured in the Umited States, developing if not a sense of moral obligation than at least a sly self-awareness, no past or contemporary animator has made a claim as bold nor attempted to follow through on it as Bakshi has.
This drive, towards a redefinition of animation and a shifting of its central paradigms, constitutes the movement of Bakshi’s oeuvre; the content of it, however, falls significantly short. Bakshi once said R. Crumb hated his adaptation of Fritz the Cat because of the added social commentary; Crumb himself said it was because the film was “repressed” and “fascistic”, especially when its climax ended as a condemnation of the radical left. Among the highlights of Fritz are graphic cartoon rape, the depiction of African-Americans as lusty, atavistic crows who only gain a modicum of revolutionary spirit when Fritz wills it into them and an endless parade of women as nags, sex toys and brainless groupies that would make Jack Kerouac uncomfortable. Fritz delights in sex — angry, ubiquitous and in your face sex that feels less revolutionary than it does a big middle finger to mom and dad. That isn’t to say that sexuality shouldn’t have a place at the table, or even that it shouldn’t make the viewer uncomfortable, but watching the endless repetition of cartoon humping carries all the pointed commentary of a Bansky cartoon where the villain is a McDonalds logo wearing a Mickey Mouse hat and carting an M16 Carbine. An idea is present, perhaps, but its execution is so muddled and caught up in its own cleverness it might as well start railing about “the man.” And the main character, Fritz, is a walking, humping manifestation of everything bad on a college campus; a navel-gazing, whiny, misogynistic pseudo-philosopher whose endless drive for “meaning” in a cruel and empty world where he occasionally has to go to classes and gets rejected for sex is supposed to make him a sympathetic character in the viewers’ eyes. Had the movie, perhaps, decided to cast Fritz as a completely unsympathetic character, someone who plainly isn’t fit to run a lemonade stand, let alone a revolution, the tone of the film would be different and its content more palatable. As it stands, however, Fritz remains an almost unwatchable film, and not for the reasons either Bakshi or his right-wing critics would attest.
After the tempest that was Fritz the Cat (and box office success, in no small part due to its notoriety) Bakshi’s films seemed turned towards the personal rather than the heavy-handedly political. Heavy Traffic, the film immediately succeeding Fritz the Cat, sought to latch on to the latter’s momentum in what Michael Barrier described in his seminal Hollywood Cartoons as an effort “to push beyond what was done in the old cartoons, even while building on their strengths.” Bakshi, a Palestinian native who grew up in working-class Brooklyn digging through the trash for comics, used the film to channel an aesthetic vision of American urbanity at once instantly recognizable and deeply personal; an America dominated by pinball machines, wafting cigarette smoke, one-word ethnic caricatures and, in the words of the trailer, an amalgamation of “hoods, hustlers, freaks, creeps, cops, crazies, weirdos, rhinos, hardhats, lowlives,” and most interestingly, “god.”
The Brooklyn Heavy Traffic shows us is one of juxtaposed creations; diseased streets filled with tender hearts, crude ethnic caricatures concealing complex interpersonal relationships, slapstick violence masquerading the very real blood shed on the very real streets. It is a crude, violent and raw film, like the best of Bakshi’s oeuvre, and it brims with hazy meditations on the intersections between race, class, gender, and faith in god that defined urban life in this country for generations. What Bakshi lacks in finesse, he makes up for in passion; the film seems at times cobbled together, its live-action, psychedelic, crudely sketched and improvised bits seemingly held together with popsicle sticks and glue. And yet, it holds; the film’s heterogeneous composition only further its vision of animation and of America, both of which position themselves as feel-good, moralistic, and patriotic creations of a master spirit. Bakshi, conversely, seeks out their contradictions, their concealed violence and sex and malice, and creates a pulsing, poetic landscape dominated by the raw beauty of sex and violence, poverty and anger, a contraction of everything America stands for and a declaration of what America truly is.
Following the success of Heavy Traffic, Bakshi’s works over the next two decades divide into three categories; meditations on American life, angry slapstick comedies that are at times, like Fritz, completely unwatchable, and fantasy/sci-fi works that draw as much on pulp-fiction magazines as the traditions of Tolkien. In the span of 10 years, Bakshi had released the quasi-blaxpoitation film Coonskin, the fantasy film Wizards, an adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, and the more Heavy Traffic-esque American Pop and Hey Good Lookin’. Despite being markedly different on the surface, a consistent palette of themes emerge from them; an artistic occupation with bricolage and cut-up techniques, a gritty and purposefully unpleasant aesthetic that often delves into pure surrealism, and the subversion of traditional cartooning techniques to create caricatures of ethnic groups, organized crime, violence and sex, and what it means to have an identity in America. He never, however, fully escaped his prejudices, and the constant stream of misogyny and racism that colors his already hard to watch films is always apparent (Coonskin in particular was a cause célèbre in its time; while Bakshi considered it his masterpiece, its premiere was protested by the Congress of Racial Equality). His fantasy films forcefully attempted to redefine the scope of animation as a narrative device, but often hit walls with recalcitrant producers unwilling to provide funding and had to cut corners; the battle sequences in The Lord of the Rings, achieved through a combination of rotoscoping and tracing animation cels onto live action sequences, look almost embarrassingly amateurish. The animation industry was, and remains, a pathetically timid creature, and even the most successful of directors have had to fight tooth and nail to get any semblance of funding for works not focus-grouped to hell and back. Since Bakshi’s heyday, this has only gotten worse; a proliferation of “self-aware” cartoons, led in part by Bakshi protégé John Kricfalusi’s Ren and Stimpy, fall far short of the in your face fuck you bravura of Bakshi’s works, but manage to slip in a few “adult” references as if to assure themselves they’re not just kid’s cartoons. But the discomfort that Bakshi’s work stirs up is meant to be explicit; it is a calculated political gambit, the kind that the masters of the Underground Comix specialized in. By splattering shocking and perverse imagery throughout their works, Bakshi takes the viewer’s preconceived and carefully crafted notions of cartoons and comics as kid friendly creations and smashes it in their face.
Bakshi’s later films, from upper-left; American Pop, Lord of the Rings, Coonskin, and Wizards
The comic and cartoon, in many ways, has historically functioned as a visual representation of the American political consciousness; it is a sterilized mask behind which imperial machinations thrive, the visual signifier of a moral cosmology that delineates two forces, the strong and just Mickey Mouse/Superman archetype on one hand and the dark, formless evils of communists, fascists, and everyone else on the other. The comics and animation industry, with their blacklists and their codes authorities, were more than happy to play the role of arbiter of American hegemony to children worldwide, and through their influence, a whitewashed, always-smiling artifice of pop culture that took root from Texas to Tokyo. By contesting these novel art forms, the Underground Comix movement hoped to breathe new life into them, to free them from their moralistic restraints and utilize them for methods of individual, political, and sexual expression. But while comics have continued to thrive since the 70s in this aspect, any underground animation movement remains moribund. Bakshi remains perhaps the only exception to the rule; throughout his career, he went head to head with major animation companies and even managed to on occasion break into the mainstream, albeit for reasons he might not have wanted.
But even in the most positive light, Bakshi falls into the traps of so many artists of the time; in attempting to establish a counter-hegemonic force to the mainstream corporate forces they opposed, Underground Comix developed an antagonistic strategy that lamented “political correctness” as much as it did corporate authority, creating a space unwelcoming to anyone who were the victims of systems of oppression those so called “subversive” artists never perceived, i.e., anyone not white, straight and male. Bakshi’s racism and misogyny, no matter how embedded in irony he may have thought they were, are still racism and misogyny at their core, and this remain critical to understanding the shortcomings of Bakshi’s political goals. Also critical to understanding Bakshi’s limitations is examining the direction his work has taken since the 80s; rather than boldly confronting new social and political issues in the aftermath of the Cold War, like globalization, ecological threats to the planet, heightening tensions with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or 9/11 and its aftermath, Bakshi seems almost rooted in his own nostalgia, producing little more than the film Cool World, which animation historian Jerry Beck called a “pointless rehash of many of Ralph’s favorite themes,” and a slightly more risqué remake of Mighty Mouse, the cartoon that gave Bakshi his start as an animator in the 60’s.
The mix of race, sexuality and culture in Underground Comix and Animation was rarely a comfortable one.
And what of his most recent film, you may ask, the one mentioned at the beginning of the article? Its title is Last Days of Coney Island, and it promises to have everything you’ve come to know and love from Bakshi; the underside of New York, prostitutes, gangsters, seedy character designs that younger audiences might mistake for Ren and Stimpy characters, and more. There’s something almost tragic to see the man who once produced more bombast (and on occasion, genuine artistry) than any other cartoonist this side of the Pacific working with a set of motifs that haven’t been relevant since the 80s. But such an assessment is enormously unfair to Bakshi; at 74 years old, he’s earned the right to work on personal projects, to conceptualize and illustrate his experiences as an individual rather than as an artistic rabble-rouser. But where Bakshi himself may not have succeeded, the need for a Bakshi-like manifesto remains for animation, for the fact remains that there simply isn’t anyone in contemporary American animation that is doing the type of political bomb throwing he did. That’s not to say that there isn’t excellent work being done by underground artists and animators in the United States, for their certainly is, but little of it has had the scope and reach of movies like Fritz and Heavy Trafficin their heyday. This can partially be attributed to changes in the animation industry in the whole as well as to changes in the political composition of underground artists that have made it refreshingly more queer, PoC and female-friendly, but any attempt at synthesizing the techniques, outlooks and technologies developed since the ‘70s has been minimal.
Ultimately, I would predict many of Bakshi’s films as individual works will be forgotten. Their racism, their misogyny, their formless anger and hatred makes them politically “incorrect” but more importantly politically conservative, reactionary and morally reprehensible. Aesthetically, they have not aged well with time, and their ultimate artistic value for many may simply be as relics of a long-forgotten counterculture movement and its sensibilities. But the need for a political Bakshism, and for the opportunities Bakshi’s animation studio created, will remain. In the years since Bakshi’s semi-retirement, animation has become increasingly complacent, animators increasingly maligned and mistreated by their production companies, and with the exception of more amateur creations produced through online collaboration, the medium itself has been increasingly displaced by more technologically advanced live-action works. In order to develop critically as a medium and retain clout in the way comics, and increasingly video games, have, animation needs more Bakshism, more rabble-rousing and anger and impetuses to collaborate, to subvert, and to pursue “adult” themes and narratives without needing to dress them up in kid-friendly formats. What it does not need is Bakshi’s racism, sexism or the general immaturity that colored so much of the Underground Comix movement of the time. Even if we forget Bakshi, we cannot, and should not, forget the movement that he struggled for, a movement both towards subverting American culture and media and redefining the parameters, depth, and meaning of animation itself.
