Film Forum

U.S., 1973
Written and Directed by Ralph Bakshi
Starring Joseph Kaufmann, Terri Haven, Beverly Hope Atkinson
Approx. 79 min. 35mm.

Virgin loser Michael Corleone (no, not that one) lives with his axe-wielding Jewish mother and his deadbeat Italian father while the weirdos in his neighborhood give him inspiration for his underground cartoons. Bakshi’s most praised and personal work mixes reality and fantasy as it does live-action and Bakshi’s trademark animation.  

Reviews

“A cruel, funny, heartbreaking love note to a city kept alive by its freaks, and always, always dying.”
– Roger Greenspun, The New York Times

“In the same year Scorsese was examining his formative life in Little Italy with MEAN STREETS, Bakshi was looking back at his Italian-Jewish upbringing in Brooklyn and doing something just as loose and expressive. Bakshi employed a lot of the last gasp of golden age animators he had worked with previously on FRITZ THE CAT, once again putting them to work on another experimental, X-rated animated feature. Bakshi also taped a lot of the movie’s dialogue with real characters off the streets of New York, lugging around a Nagra and mic and picking up all sorts of additional dialogue and atmosphere. To me, the biggest and brightest example of freedom in an AIP movie: its genre elements were fool-proof after the success of FRITZ and Bakshi could do his weird, wild thing.”
 – Owen Kline