To Ralph Bakshi's admirers, he's a underappreciated genius. To his detractors, he's a dirty-minded, self-aggrandizing, corner-cutting hack. After experiencing the ‘Wizards' featurette, I agree with the detractors. Curiously, so does Bakshi. As least when it comes to corner-cutting.
Stylistically, ‘Wizards' is a mess. Character design oozes between 20 th century grotesqueries and traditional fantasy types. The sound effects and voice talent are strictly sub-Saturday Morning fare (except for the chilly narrator). The backgrounds range from Spinal Tap album cover to Rankin/Bass cutesy, and the admittedly creepy rotoscoping doesn't mesh with anything (Bakshi admits that he used it for financial, not artistic purposes, but was fond of the effect).
And the plot? A midget wizard with a Brooklyn accent living in a post-nuclear world must battle his evil wizard brother who's whipped the local mutants into an unholy army by utilizing ancient Nazi propaganda films, scaring the hell out of the elf and fairy population. Seriously. Bakshi considers this to be his ‘family' film, perhaps he meant the Manson family.
The sheer gonzo energy of it is, at the very least, unpredictable and unique. For all it's badly animated faults, ‘Wizards' has a genuine, organic, undeniable weirdness. Nobody else but Bakshi would have paired Nazi imagery with a Tolkien world (one could say that nobody else would want to, but I digress), so kudos for doing something about as far ‘out of the box' as humanly possible.
Bakshi's commentary and the featurette cover a lot of the same ground, mostly his history in animation and some discussions on studio politics (he links himself to George Lucas in more ways than one). Bakshi is obviously very fond of both the film and of himself, but he's surprisingly self deprecating for an egotist and you get the feeling that he takes his work very seriously in a ‘too hung over to drink, let's animate' kind of way. Other extras include an average stills gallery, two pompous trailers and a hopelessly dated TV spot.
n the featurette, Bakshi mentions that the visuals in animation aren't as important as the ‘heart' that one puts into one's work. ‘Wizards' isn't a good film, but there's something to be said for Bakshi managing to put his warped and greasy little soul onto the screen. Watch it while enjoying something cheap and skanky (I meant wine, but do whatever works for you). Ralph would approve
© 2004 Michael John Derbecker
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