Ralph Bakshi

Raised in the same rough Brownsville, Brooklyn ghetto that would later produce boxer Mike Tyson, Ralph Bakshi began his career following his high school graduation as an animator with Terrytoons, inking such cartoon characters as Heckyll and Jeckyll and Mighty Mouse. Appointed creative director of Terrytoons in 1965, he became president of Paramount's New York cartoon division the following year, and though his early work was all in the Disneyesque style that prevailed in animation at the time, his brush with poverty had formed a sensibility that bristled at all the cuteness. After Paramount's cartoon department disbanded, Bakshi formed his own company with Steve Krantz and brought out a series of X-rated cartoons--"Fritz the Cat" (1972, adapted from the characters by cartoonist Robert Crumb), "Heavy Traffic" (1973) and "Coonskin" (1975)--delighting some critics and offending many others with their frank coarseness and irreverent street humor and language.

While "Fritz the Cat" shocked people with its sexual explicitness and drug use, it was really sending a message about the state of a nation that was struggling with riots, racial barriers, Vietnam and the sexual and drug revolutions. "Heavy Traffic" and "Coonskin", both drawing from his own disenfranchised youth and combining live-action with animation, mined the same vein. "Coonskin", which dealt with the status of blacks in America, proved particularly abrasive and controversial, drawing a picket by members of the Congress of Racial Equality at its 1974 preview at NYC's Museum of Modern Art that prompted Paramount to drop its plans to distribute the film. With the end of the Vietnam War, Bakshi moved away from such highly-charged material to pioneer rotoscoping, the tracing of live-action figures to create a new realism in animation, in the futuristic "Wizards" (1977) and "The Lord of the Rings" (1978), adapted from the popular Tolkien trilogy.

Bakshi continued developing his technically innovative and strongly personal style of mixing animation, background paintings and live-action in various combinations in the historically conscious music-history saga "American Pop" (1981) and the sword and sorcery offering aimed at younger viewers, "Fire and Ice" (1983), featuring the graphic design of fabled illustrator Frank Frazetta, The end of the 80s saw him return to TV as the producer and supervising director of "The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse" (CBS, 1987-89), as well as directing and producing "Tattertown" (Nickelodeon, 1988), TNT's "The Butter Battle Book" and NBC's "Hound Town" (both 1989). Bakshi suffered his greatest disappointment with his foray into big-budget movie making, "Cool World" (1992), thanks in part to executive over-involvement. Since then he most notably served as creator and executive producer of the short-lived animated HBO series "Spicy City" (1997), which attempted to recapture the flavor of his early features.