The full moon is a time of strange, cozy nightmares, sometimes taking on cinematic forms. Animation is the freest and craziest of these forms. I would call Ralph Bakshi one of the craziest and most free animation directors, a man of extraordinary dream experience and taste for certain perversions. An ethnic Crimean, at the advanced age of one and a half years, Ralph dragged his parents to the New World, settled them in Brooklyn, and began to grow up there himself.
Growing up took place in the 1950s, dearly loved by the Moon Dogs. In 1978, he shot the epic cartoon The Lord of the Rings, some scenes from which were shamelessly stolen by the complete P. Jackson for his craft. In 1992, his strange Child Cool World, an animated feature film starring B. Pitt and K. Basinger, a surreal fantasy with “noir” and eroticism, failed at the box office.
But we will focus our claws on Bakshi’s other work, Hey Good Lookin’ (an obvious borrowing from V. Kuzmin’s song “Hey, Pretty Woman!”), released in 1982. Ralph himself has written a script in which fiction, sometimes seemingly vulgar and schizophrenic, is intertwined with facts and characters from the director’s real youth. For example, the initial dialogue between a trash can and a garbage pile is clearly a real-life event. And when, after a few maxims about God and Paradise for all slops, the garbage pile is carried off into the distance on a garbage truck, shouting: “Goodbye, fucking city, I’m leaving you! ..”, you understand – it’s vital. Like Pink Floyd’s song: “Goodbye, cruel world, I’m leavin’ you today…”
The best method to protect against the virus
However, compost is not the main character in the story, but a boy of a similar consistency, the Italian Vinnie, who started the gang of “Stompers”. His best and most loyal sidekick, like Sam in front of Frodo, is Fucking Shapiro, of a completely different nationality. The full depth of S.’s freakishness is fully revealed by the plot, suffice it to say that he would not have been accepted into Looney Tunes cartoons because of his inadequacy and incompetence. There is also the main character’s girlfriend, the curvy Rosie, whom Vinnie “fell in love with immediately after touching her perseus” (my translation of his phrase). The romance of the first sniffing scene is unceremoniously interrupted by Rosie’s dad, an old Fettersnide schmuck, who drives the dissolute daughter home with a belt and Odessa-New York interjections. Shakespearean passions!
Brooklyn doo-wop
The next day, Vinnie, having become quite upset, goes to Rosina Street, to hang out on the corner, guarding his beloved. The beloved, in turn, is raging in her hut, handcuffed to the bed by a caring dad. After waiting only for the crooked Shapiro in a zoot suit, our hero goes looking for adventures on his tux. And he does find them, to the mutual delight of adventure and tuches! A skirmish with a Negro gang of “Chaplains” leads to further dramatic plot developments…
Colleagues from the Bronx
The story, filled with nostalgia, doorways and teenage pimples, was shot by Bakshi using a combination technique familiar to us from such cartoons as “The Adventures of Captain Vrungel” by the Kievnauchfilm film studio, and Ralph also used rotoscoping (frame-by-frame copying of live actors’ plastics), which is seen in the scene of “arrow” by “Stompers” with “Chaplains”. If De Niro and Keitel had played Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, if Evil Streets had been directed by Sylvester the cat and kenar Twitty had been the producer, we would have gotten something only half as crazy as “Hey Good Lookin’.”
Behind the scenes, a certain Rick with the run-of-the-mill surname Sandler diligently portrays the music of the 1950s, as it was understood at the dawn of the 1980s. The coolest song from the soundtrack: Ric Sandler – Don’t Say Goodbye
This monument of the epoch to the epoch, Grease from Dali instead of Travolta, I would not recommend to everyone, in particular children and some women, it is better to turn away from the screen to the window or, there, to the closet… But some people, and I’m one of them, will really enjoy the plot and the original animation of one of the most original animators of the 20th century. Have a nice smooth madness, Moon Dogs!
PS: Twentin Quarantino once stated that he appreciates “Hey Good Lookin'” more than the aforementioned “Evil Streets”. That explains a lot.
