[a shorter version of this interview was published at MSN Movies in March 2012]
Wizards debuts on Blu-ray this week in illustrated Blu-ray book with commentary by director Bakshi and the excellent interview featurette “The Wizard of Animation” (both originally produced for the DVD release).
To mark the film’s 35th Anniversary, Ralph Bakshi, now 73 years old and long retired from animated features (“I live on a mountain in New Mexico,” he said by way of introduction), talked to Videodrone about “Wizards,” his career, and his long, strange trip to bring personal storytelling to animated features.
Before he embarked on his impressive but unfinished adaptation of Lord of the Rings, maverick American animator Ralph Bakshi created Wizards (1977), a futuristic fantasy set in the aftermath of the apocalypse. A mix of Tolkein-esque quest epic and seventies attitude, it was like a PG version of an underground comic book made for the big screen, and was Bakshi’s first effort to reach a mainstream audience. It was a hit that got overlooked when another 20th Century Fox science fiction film, a little thing called Star Wars, opened just a few weeks later, but a cult following kept it alive through revival house, college campuses, and video releases ever since.
The interview, conducted by phone, opened with an awkward moment that was quickly overcome. Bakshi, reading from what I assume was a call sheet, mispronounced my name: “Is this Seen”? “It’s Sean,” I correct him gingerly, and then added, “just like the elf that gets shot in Wizards.” Before he can respond, he starts laughing, and then slips into hearty belly laughs before saying, “Ahh, you made my day. I’m sorry, how do you feel?”
The rest of the conversation was regularly punctuated with hearty laughs.
Sean Axmaker: I have to tell you that Wizards was the cult movie that my friends and I embraced. It played only for a week in our town and we begged our parents to drive us to the theater downtown to see it. For weeks we went around doing the “They killed Fritz!” bit and doing imitations of Peace. That’s my story. When I was thirteen, that was my favorite movie.
Ralph Bakshi: How old are you now?
I am 48.
Holy shit. (and then another belly laugh)
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel old.
Where did it all go?
Anyway, I just wanted to tell you what the film meant to me when I was growing up.
Thank you so much. You never know how anything is going to be received out there, you know. And I’m sorry I shot you.
What are you watching?
Japanese, Korean, and oriental films off of Netflix. I’m stunned by Netflix. I live on a mountain in New Mexico and I just love it. I go to stream a movie every night. Most of the films I wouldn’t even otherwise see. These Japanese and these oriental films are amazing. Absolutely stunning. I don’t remember the names, but the ones that are subtitled are the good one and the production values and the shooting and the camerawork is incredible. And there are also some low budget detective films that they do. I think it’s sensational filmmaking. I’ve been watching an awful lot of that, and I’ve been watching British street films, films made in England about the working classes and their problems, and they’ve been very, very excellent. I’ve been doing a lot of that because they are films I never would have gone to the movies to see. I’m watching no animation.
It sounds like it’s working well for you and you’re seeing some great films.
I’m seeing some absolutely great stuff. I’m inspired into movies by what I’m watching. I know a lot of the critical acclaim that certain directors get in America. I’ve seen Oriental films that defy description, they’re so good, and set design, and those period pieces with the armies marching toward each other, with the flags waving and the camerawork and the horse, I’ve never seen anything like them in my life. The attention to detail is overwhelmingly great. And then the choreography of the fight scenes. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. So I’m a very big fan of the Oriental, Korean, Japanese films. I saw this one film, a film called Ichi (Miike Takashi, 2001), you wouldn’t believe what I was looking at.
You say you’re not watching animated films. What’s it like revisiting Wizards again after all these years.
How do I say this? My complete budget on Wizards, to make the entire film, is spent in a Pixar film in the first minute and a half. What they spend on a minute and a half of a Pixar film, I made my complete movie for. It’s hard looking at these movies that had so many problems. I had no money to do it the way I saw it in my mind, so I get very edgy looking at it. The fact that people are still finding it and enjoying it after all these years is kind of stunning to me. To be quite frank, I thought that they would never be shown again, they were so low budget, so I’ve come to the conclusion that though the work is important and quality is important, what films say might be more important than how they look and what their production values are. The Pixar films and the Sony films and the Fox films are all done incredibly well, visually, and it’s so hard to compete against that with my $1 million “Wizards.” But somehow it does and I don’t quite understand that except maybe it’s content. They’re hard to look at, is what I’m trying to say. They’re hard to look at it.
Before you made Lord of the Rings, your films were like the underground comics of animated cinema. You made them independently on low budgets with a lot of attitude for adult audiences, making films with things that no other animated filmmaker would ever try. Were you directly influenced by the culture of underground comics or was it a matter of being on a similar path?
You are part of your time and in my time, of course, underground comics were crucially important to me, they were a breath of fresh air. But so was jazz music, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, so was Jack Kerouac, not that he was a great writer but his whole attitude of being on the road, Jackson Pollack, the peace marches, Bobby Dylan, and you had great underground writers like Burroughs and Henry Miller. What I’m saying is the whole drift during my generation was for honesty and reality. All the work being done that I loved and respected, including underground comics, was moving in this direction. I wasn’t alone, it wasn’t just me. The fact that animators didn’t move along with me was basically because of the tremendous love of Disney. They were so enamored by Disney and his greatness, which I don’t believe, that they were afraid to budge off that line. I had a disdain for Disney because of what he didn’t do. He went to World War II and there was a thing called the Holocaust, where millions of people were being burned alive, and nothing of that shows up in his films. That to me is absolutely despicable. In other words, you can think about making money all the time, but sometimes you’ve gotta stop and think about, if you’re in a position of such power, why don’t you make a film that shows what was going on in Nazi Germany. And I’m talking about a joke. I lost respect for the man at a certain point because of his wishing upon a star all the time and not looking at reality. So I was a part of a different kind of movement. It wasn’t just underground comics. It was a good time. It was a good time for art.
You have a direct connection to Mean Streets, one of the defining independent films of the seventies. Richard Romanus and David Proval, who play Michael and Tony in Mean Streets, voice Weehawk and Peace, the two warriors who begin as enemies and end up a warrior buddy team, in Wizards.
Well yeah, I saw them in Mean Streets and fell down. When I did Hey, Good Lookin’, I cast them in five minutes. It was a no-brainer. I loved working with them. So I cast them again in Wizards, David Proval plays Peace and Richard Romanus plays Weehawk, which is not exactly right but he needed to work. (laughs)
I like Romanus as Weehawk because doesn’t fit the cliché of an elf. He comes off as a warrior, a street-wise guy in a Middle Earth kind of world.
That’s why I hired him. But… take a look, it was chopped up a million times, but some of the greatest lines ever delivered were by Romanus in Hey Good Lookin’. He did such a brilliant job in Hey Good Lookin’ as Vinnie, and of course Proval was Crazy [the character Crazy Shapiro]. I love those guys, thank you.
In the documentary on the disc, “The Wizard of Animation,” you said that after making all those personal, streetwise, adult audience movies, you wanted to make science fiction-fantasy film, but also a family movie, a PG-rated film. And to this day, it is the only animated family film I’ve seen where the heroine is almost naked and her nipples protrude from the sheer strap over her epic chest. Through every scene she’s in.
(laughs) You’re a wise-ass kid.
Why not? As a 13-year-old, I thought it was the greatest thing ever!
I made it for little bastards like you sitting in the theater. (laughs more) First of all, I’ll get on my high horse. There’s nothing wrong with the human body, there’s nothing wrong with any part of the human body, and nipple peak through… I don’t see where that’s not something that kids would love or understand. What can I say? I think it’s family, in a sense. There’s a fine line between being honest and being sexual, even for a young boy, as opposed all the Victorian hang-ups and lack of sexuality that you see in these other family films that lie to kids. The whole point is I don’t like films that lie. I don’t mind movies that are entertaining but if you start lying, and there’s a fine line in there, you’re not delivering anything except hang-ups. Wizards didn’t lie. That’s why it’s a PG or PG-13 that was successful as a family film, but there wasn’t anything I was lying about. That’s how she looked, that’s how she dressed, and that’s fine. She didn’t flaunt it. Well maybe she did to Avatar, but he was a lecher. I can’t explain it better than that. I never thought about it at the time, is what I’m saying. It wasn’t a plan on my part.
Rewatching “Wizards” the other night, it occurred to me that Avatar, the old wizard, could be the brother of Mel Brooks’ Two Thousand-Year-Old Man. This wise-ass old guy who talks like a Catskills comic…
You’re close. You’re right on the money. Oh yeah. You think of Peter Falk and think of a rabbi. So basically he was a rabbinical Peter Falk and a wise-ass who wasn’t quite that good a rabbi, so that’s how I played him. He was a rabbi but he wasn’t Hassidic, he was kind of a fake, you know? Which is kind of a comic in the Catskills.
Mike Ploog does those neat illustrations of the idealized fantasy world at peace in the opening sequence, and then when you get to the animation, it is not nearly as cute and cuddly. It’s like the animated section is the reality of how they lived, a little messier, a little less harmonious.
That was exactly the discussion I had with Mike. First of all, I did it because I didn’t have the money for animation. So I thought, I’ll get it illustrated. So it’s exactly like an illustrated book. And we had that discussion. Basically, it was going to have to look different because it was an illustrated version of the history, it wasn’t the actual history. That’s why we opened up with the book. I wanted that difference as a director.
I think the contrast is telling about the film. Ploog’s illustrations, which are accompanied by the narration, is like the storybook version of the film. And then when we get into the world, it’s a lot scruffier and the characters are far less idealized.
You’re very good, you nailed it. That was exactly the discussion I had with Mike. First of all, I did it because I couldn’t afford to animate it. Let me be very clear, that idea came about like rotoscope. I didn’t have the money for animation, I thought, ‘How do I do this?’ And I thought, I’ll get it illustrated. So it’s exactly like an illustrated book that Mike was doing, that was different from the film. And we had that discussion. Basically, it was going to have to look different because it was an illustrated version of the history, it wasn’t the actual history. That’s why we opened up with the book. I wanted that difference as a director. I couldn’t have hired a better artist to do the drawings than Mike Ploog, and if I could do “Wizards II,” which I’d like to do, I’ll try to find Mike and put him to work because he’s just a great artist.
I don’t want to make more out of this than is actually there, but there is distrust of technology in Wizards, a film from 1977. And here in 2012, it is hand drawn animated film, and even with the solarized live-action footage of the battle scenes, it is an old school production in an era where almost every animated feature made in the U.S. is made completely digitally. That’s not say there are not artists involved, because clearly there are some very talented artists working in modern animated, but that artisan quality is disappearing.
Technology for the sake of technology doesn’t work. Technology and how we use technology burns up resources on this planet and heats the atmosphere and puts the entire in danger as we tear down trees to make stuff with and pump out all the oil there is, it’s quite disastrous. We’re going in a desperate path. The world’s resources are getting less and less and all this violence throughout the entire planet has to do with overcrowding and resources that people are fighting for. In the future, when the history books look back on this time if we’re alive, and I wonder about that, all the Iraqs and Irans and the wars we get into for liberation and democracy are really all about oil and resources and how do we get our hands on them. In Pakistan and in Afghanistan, the biggest deposits of minerals are in the desert. There was a big story in The New York Times about it about half a year ago. Trillions of dollars of minerals that are sitting there and can’t be dug up yet. That’s what we’re doing in Afghanistan. So technology for the sake of technology isn’t very good. I still think that plays well today. I don’t like where the world is going. Technology-wise, I don’t see where it’s helping us become better people.
Is that why you’re on a mountain in New Mexico?
That’s right. I get up in the morning and there are no billboards and I can see Mexico in the distance and the sky is beautifully pure and the land is pretty much the way it looked the day it was formed and there are wonderful wild animals running around and there are dirt roads that I drive down all the time. It’s quite beautiful and it’s good for the mind, it’s good for the eye, it relaxes you. It makes me more part of the planet. I’m serious. I’m not a hippy. It has to do with a certain honesty. It has to do with who we are as human beings and what part of the planet we’ve forgotten we’re part of. I drive to L.A., I can’t believe it. So yes, I don’t see “Wizards” being that far of a reach.
What are you doing now? I’m painting and I’m drawing. The bottom line has always been, I was a cartoonist and I was an animator, that’s how I stared. Animators love to draw. They don’t care what they move, they just like to move stuff, so I love to draw. I draw and paint and I have shows and I’m very, very happy doing that. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. I got into animation because in my day it was a drawing medium, everything had to be drawn, and what better place, if you love drawing, than an animation studio? I would love to do Wizards II, though. I don’t understand why Fox doesn’t want to do Wizards II, but maybe they will now. That’s what I would like to do as my last film, Wizards II and III. Because I think with the new technology, I can do the Wizard technology much better and I can still animate the 2D characters to show the wonderful contrast that you picked up on. Between technology and good old-fashioned animation, there’s a difference there, and it’s a difference I didn’t realize I was showing at the time. But other than that, I’m very happy doing what I’m doing, is what I’m saying.