Ralph Bashki

(On Cable TV, October 2022) I didn’t like American Pop as much as I expected to. On paper, the project sounds terrific—a multi-generational trip through twentieth-century America via a Russian Jewish immigrant family history with pop music, fully animated. Produced and directed by notorious animation renegade Ralph Bashki, it’s an immensely ambitious attempt at elevating the nature of animated films, tackling very different subjects than the norm for the genre (even today). Unfortunately, being confronted with the result is the definition of disappointment. For one thing, almost the entire film is rotoscoped—footage of actors being painted over in solid block colours. I can’t overstate how ugly I found the result—even allowing for the technical imitations of the time, the choice of colour is more psychedelic than realistic, and the art direction seems to be wildly inconsistent even when going through the decades. Some of the material is pulled from obvious sources—you can instantly recognize the snippet traced over the Nicholas Brothers’ performance in Stormy Weather, for instance. Then there’s the story, which sweeps large but often ends up being a pretext for a jukebox musical. It doesn’t help that the film ends in 1980—from today’s perspective, this is a conceit that could have used another twenty years to bring it to the end of the twentieth century. Most of those problems are much worse now in 2022 than they must have been in 1981—in other words, this is not a film that has aged well in execution or in principle. I still like the ambition of American Pop, and the subject matter helps make it the most interesting Bashki film I’ve seen so far—but the problem with big ambitions is that they make disappointments look even worse. If anyone wants a go at a remake with today’s technology and hindsight on the twentieth century, well, go ahead…