American Pop (1981)

Strong and Moving!

Just perfect...

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This is amazing. I just watched it for the first time. One of the greatest films I have ever seen. Ralph, you are truly a genius. I love how you incorporate real life themes into animated films. A story about the American music scene more than captures my attention fully. As an artist I definitely understand everything the characters are going through and feeling. This movie is so damn good I seriously completely forgot about all of the problems in my own personal life I should be totally worrying about like bills and taxes! That's how you know it's a success! I still feel very lost in the story. Which is a good thing for me. Thank you for this amazing product!

Ralph Bakshi's animated saga that follows four generations of a Jewish family in America while simultaneously following the evolution of American pop music. It's a very interesting movie and, at times, it approaches greatness. But it never got off the ground in the way I hoped it would. I'm a fan of rotoscoping so that part didn't bother me. I actually enjoyed Bakshi's use of it here. The sight of rotoscoped Playmate Lynda Wiesmeier isn't likely to be forgotten by many (male) viewers. I also liked the voicework and, of course, the music. What I didn't like was the general unpleasantness and cynicism that permeates most of the film. Rest assured if you see a character in this having a happy moment, they will be dead or at least miserable before long. To make matters worse, very few of the characters we follow are likable, particularly as we get further along. So, ultimately, it's worth a look because it is technically well-done with a lot of interesting things about it but the negativity and lack of likable characters keeps it from being as good as it could be.

American Pop is one of Ralph Bakshi's most ambitious films: it strives to show the development of American music throughout the 20th century through the story of four generations of men in the same immigrant family, all with dreams of making music.The movie has four main characters, each representing the different stages of the evolution of American pop. The first is Zalmie, a young Russian Jew who flees to America with his mother after his father is murdered by the Cossacks; after his mother perishes in a factory fire, he becomes a singer on the burlesque stage, but his ambitions are destroyed when he receives a bullet to the throat during WWI. He marries a beautiful stripper named Bella, and as he tries to make her a star, they have a talented son named Benny, who seems like he'll be able to make it big as a big band piano player, but war intervenes once again when he's gunned down by a Nazi. His son Tony grows up estranged from his family, and runs away to California, having a one-night stand with a beautiful waitress in Kansas along the way. He becomes the song writer for a hippie band, falls in love with the vivacious singer Frankie, and their songs hit number one on the charts, but their success is short-lived; drug addiction kills Frankie, and the penniless Tony discovers his affair with the waitress spawned an illegitimate child, Pete. The two scrape by in New York for a while, until Tony abandons the boy, who makes a living as a drug dealer. He eventually achieves the success that eluded his predecessors, and the movie ends with him playing Bob Seger's "Night Moves" to an enthralled audience.The plot is surprisingly linear, unlike the majority of Bakshi's output up to that point. There's also a higher level of realism, derived from the decision to have all the characters rotorscoped (rotorscoping is when the animator traces over live-action footage) and the juxtaposition of live-action clips with the animation. The voice actors all give natural performances, most of the music they were able to afford is well-chosen, and the script contains a lot of well-written dialogue and a few memorable scenes.But for all it does well, American Pop never achieves its full potential for two reasons: the running time and the animation. An hour and a half just isn't enough time to tell a story of this scale very well; there's no time for us to get attached to the characters before the movie cycles to the next generation. The deaths of characters like Bella, Benny or Frankie, or Tony's heartbreak upon learning he has fathered an illegitimate child with the waitress from Kansas have little to no impact because aside from Tony we never get to know anybody intimately enough to be invested. The rotorscoped animation, while realistic and at times beautiful in its own right, doesn't really add anything to the film. The worst part is that it limits the facial expressiveness of the characters significantly, and occasionally wanders into uncanny valley territory. I beg to ask, what's the point of making it an animated film if you're going to trace 95% of it? In the end, the film functions better as an allegory of American music and culture during the last century than it does as an epic drama. Like its rotorscoped characters, the film lacks the style or emotion to compel you to want to sit through it again.

The narrative of this Bakshi animated film follows the showbiz aspirations of a Jewish émigré family through four generations (from turn-of-the-century to the present, i.e. early 1980s), taking in the various turbulent world events and reflecting the often radical changes in culture which occurred during all this time.An ambitious if heavy-handed undertaking (Bakshi's trademark realism, displayed through rotoscoped animation, occasionally interspersed with stock footage) which is patchy overall but frequently impressive - and undeniably evocative. The necessarily eclectic soundtrack, too, is a major asset even if the last half does lean too heavily on the the hippie/rock scene; it's also amusing how the script presents the band which the protagonist eventually forms part of as the talent behind many of the best-known rock songs from the era by the likes of Big Brother And The Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Sex Pistols and even my own favorite, The Velvet Underground!!