Ralph Bakshi’s Urban American Folklore
I’ve always loved folklore — well, the idea of it anyway. Though it can sometimes be an expression of bigoted hearsay, I am still fascinated by any story that can survive generations of telling and retelling, despite many tellers with differing versions. Moreover, these tall tales often evoke cultures that vanished before cinema, TV and the Internet became modern society’s myth-makers.
Village of Idiots, currently airing on The Jewish Channel, is one such folktale. The product of Canadian animators Eugene Fedorenko and Rose Newlove, this animated short film tells the story of Shmendrik, his mythical town of Chelm, and evokes with humor the hard lives of Old World European Jewry — a subject that’s also influenced several American animators.
Don Bluth’s 1986 film An American Tail is arguably the most widely recognized Jewish-subject animated feature to come out of the U.S. market. Taking place in 19th-century New York City, it features a Jewish family of immigrant mice — a plot point which upset cartoonist Art Spiegelman, because Maus used that same gimmick as a metaphor for Jews in the Holocaust. But while the talking cats of Maus were Nazis, the feline protagonist in Robert Crumb’s classic 1960s comic strip Fritz the Cat was a youthful hedonist. So when Ralph Bakshi animated Crumb’s work for the big screen in 1972, it received an “X” rating and promptly went on to become a smashing financial success. The clout Bakshi earned from this allowed him to direct a series of wide-release adult animated features whose plots draw heavily from the fine art of the folktale.
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