I have long been enamored of animated films that fall outside of the Disney way of doing things. I certainly enjoy the Disney films, but they all tend to be glossy, watered-down, and largely the same despite the differing stories. I recently wrote up a whole series on Hayao Miyazaki and was taken with the gorgeousness of his art and deepness of storytelling. On the completely other side of the visual and tonal spectrum is a filmmaker who was at his best playing by his own set of rules and who didn’t shy away from showing the ugliness and absurdity of the world around him. That filmmaker is Ralph Bakshi, who made a string of urban comedy-drama animated films aimed at adults in the early-’70s. By the late-’70s, though, Bakshi wanted to prove that he could make a family film, a sci-fi fantasy. The fact that his result was Wizards just illustrates how much he wasn’t going to play by the rules...
