Coonskin

Ralph Bakshi – 1975 – USA

Highly controversial film from animation filmmaker Ralph Bakshi, coming right on the heels of his almost equally notorious Fritz the Cat (1972) and Heavy Traffic (1973).  With its racially charged themes, Coonskin was so provocative that it was eventually informally banned and buried under an innocuous alternate title; Street Fight.  This is unfortunate because the film’s style is quite revolutionary, as much as other little-seen late 60s/early 70s works like William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968) or Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash (1974), films that also threatened to redefine what cinema could be.  In Coonskin, Bakshi blends animation and live-action in a way that alternately ridicules and pays homage to Disney films that did the same; in particular Song of the South (1946), a much more famous banned film dealing with black stereotypes.  The reaction to Bakshi’s revisionist Song of the South is doubly ironic, though, because he is obviously not reinforcing stereotypes  at all but mocking them.  In a sense, you could say that the film is about the ways in which people from all different cultures – (in this case: black, Italian, transgender) – often can only deal with each other in terms of stereotypes.  Featuring an impressive and offbeat roster of actors, including Barry White, Scatman Crothers and a very young Philip Michael Thomas, the film is a strong expression of Bakshi’s style and interests in the 70s, even more so, in my opinion, than his more famous Fritz the Cat because he originated the material himself rather than merely adapted existing work.