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American Pop

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American Pop
Theatrical release poster.
Directed byRalph Bakshi
Written byRonni Kern
Produced byRalph Bakshi
Martin Ransohoff
Edited byDavid Ramirez
Music byLee Holdridge
Distributed byColumbia Pictures
Release dates
February 13, 1981
Running time
96 min
CountryUSA
LanguageEnglish
Box office$6,000,000

American Pop is a 1981 American animated film directed by Ralph Bakshi. The film tells the story of four generations of a Russian Jewish immigrant family of musicians whose careers parallel the history of American popular music.

The primary animation technique used in the film is rotoscoping where live actors are filmed and then animation is drawn over the footage. However, the film also uses a variety of other mixed media incluiding water colors, computer graphics, live action shots, and archival footage. Critics at the time noted that given that the animation and storyline depicted such a realistic topic, there seemed little point to it being animated at all.

The film performed decently at the box office, but it did not perform well enough to cover the costs of the licensing for the music used in the film, so the picture was considered to be a flop. However it was released during a period when animation was thought to be dead and a significant audience for adult-oriented animation was still a decade away. After Who Framed Roger Rabbit was released in 1988, animation went through a renaissance and American Pop began to be rediscovered. It quickly became a cult classic on VHS and DVD, earning praise for its emotionally powerful story, and for its unique use of mixed-media animation.

Synopsis

Template:Spoiler

Jaacov

The beginning is set in late 1890s Russia under the rule of the Tsars: A rabbi's wife urges her husband to flee from the Cossacks who are engaging in a pogrom. However, he refuses because he hasn't finished his prayer (a blessing for his son). His wife and their son, Zalmie, escape to America, but Jaacov, the rabbi, is killed by the Cossacks. This sequence, set to Aneinu, a traditional Jewish prayer, is edited like a silent film, and the dialogue appears on intertitles.

Zalmie

Shortly after their arrival in America, Zalmie's mother dies in a sweatshop blaze (possibly the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire) , and Zalmie begins working for a burlesque house owner. He grows up to become an entertainer. However, a World War I throat wound ends Zalmie's dream of becoming a singer. He falls in love with a stripper and he ends up working for the mob. He gets married and has a son, Benny, who grows up to be a great jazz pianist.

Benny

Benny gets married to a mobster's daughter. After she becomes pregnant, Benny leaves to fight in World War II seeking redemption for his family, despite pleas from his father. In Germany, Benny finds a piano in an abandoned house, and puts down his gun. As he plays "As Time Goes By" on the piano, a Nazi soldier sneaks up on him. Benny hears a piece of furniture being kicked to the side, and turns around and sees the Nazi. As the Nazi holds an MP-40 on Benny, he plays a short segment from "Lili Marlene." The Nazi says "Danke" to Benny, cocks his gun, and kills Benny, who collapses onto the piano.

File:American Pop cityscape.JPG
Long Island cityscape.

We fade to Long Island, where Benny's wife and son are now living. Benny's wife has been forced to remarry. Benny's young son, Tony, watches Zalmie on television testifying against the mob. Zalmie explains, "This country (America) has been good to me in its way. 'I took,' my son said, so...now its time to give back" While the gangsters complain that they should have killed him, one of them notes that Zalmie was finally able to "sing" in some fashion after all.

Tony

Tony grows up with the back drop of the Beat poets and jazz music. Though he has plenty of material possessions, he wants something more and is bored with his middle class suburban Long Island life. The lad eventually succumbs to the Beat philosophy and hits the open road. Tony meets a blonde, blue-eyed girl in Kansas and immediately falls in love. They spend the night together in a corn field. He leaves the next day for what may lie ahead in California.

There he finds a niche writing songs for a rock group fronted by Frankie, a self-destructive female lead singer who is a fictionalized amalgamation of two of the most famous female rock stars of the 1960s, Grace Slick and Janis Joplin. Among the songs he writes for them there are "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right", both by Bob Dylan. The band becomes successful but slowly starts to decompose because of drug addictions. An animation sequence showing the group in concert is set to Jefferson Airplane's 1960s hit, "Somebody to Love", and is inter-cut with live action stock footage and photos of various important events of the decade. Tony is given LSD and he staggers on to stage and falls off. In the next scene he is in the hospital in a body cast. For a while he is seen using a cane though he soon recovers.

The band plays a concert at a venue in Kansas where the band complains about having to follow Jimi Hendrix ("we're going to look like shit after Hendrix!"). Their manager reassures them that they're performing last because they're the bigger stars now. Once Tony realizes where he is, he looks up to see a boy who identifies himself as Little Pete. Named after his stepfather, Pete never met his real father. Tony realizes that Pete is, in fact, his son (by the farm girl Tony had slept with). Frankie dies of a heroin overdose.

Pete

Tony and Pete move to New York City and live on the streets, barely getting by. Tony resorts to peddling drugs while Pete begins learning how to be tough on the streets and tries to learn the guitar. Tony takes any money that Pete earns. Tony gives Pete his grandfather's harmonica, then he takes Pete's guitar and tells him to wait on a park bench. Sometime later, another dealer comes by and gives Pete a small package saying that it was from Tony and that Tony says, "Goodbye." The package presumably has cocaine in it and this is how Pete begins dealing.

The movie skips ahead ten years or so, without leaving the park bench. Pete is now a grown man and a cocaine dealer for the burgeoning New York new wave and punk rock scene, all the while developing his own talent as a musician.

One day while passing a synagogue Pete hears a rabbi complete the prayer that his great grandfather Jaacov started over a century ago. Returning home Pete finds himself inexplicably able to play the piano with ease and writes a song. The next day while delivering cocaine to a group preparing to record their album, Pete refuses to sell them anymore drugs unless they are willing to listen to his music. They agree to listen to one song and Pete performs "Night Moves" by Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band. His talent stuns both the band and the management and they agree to record and hire him on the spot. The final sequence shows Pete (harmonica in hand) appearing in a concert sequence performing Blue Suede Shoes. The sequence not only features rotoscoped animation, but inverted live-action footage with an optical effect.

File:American Pop blue suede shoes.JPG
"It was old fashion optical work. You can change colors on the negative. You start with high contrast black and white of the live footage and optical houses can change color per frame. It's a basic optical effect. Then you overlap and print it with the original neg so you have like a double negative print. The shape you lost, you get back. It's a technical thing I knew about in my old days of film."
- Ralph Bakshi[1]

The ending credits are set to Lynyrd Skynyrd's Freebird. Template:Endspoiler

Trivia

  • Bob Seger recorded a special version of "Night Moves" for the film, but it was never released on any album, even the film's soundtrack. Many fans of the film believe the newer version, which does away with Seger's guitar and replaces it with piano, is far superior than the original.

Cast and crew

Cast

Crew

Note

  1. ^ As quoted on the official Bakshi forum
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