150 Word Review: 'American Pop' (1981)

Awkward teenage blues

Photo: Columbia Pictures

Director Ralph Bakshi is the anti-Disney, a countercultural animator whose movies were for adults only. Some may say his masterpiece was 1972's X-rated Fritz the Cat, or his chaotic 1978 adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, but they’re wrong. It's American Pop, which tells the epic story of music during the 20th Century. We begin in late 19th-century Russia during a pogrom and end in the 1980s, in a high-tech New York City music studio full of coked-up rockers. The characters in American Pop—immigrants and their children—chase showbiz dreams, sometimes right to hell. They're wannabes and junkes and geniuses.

Bakshi uses the "rotoscoping' technique: animators tracing over live-action actors. Like many of Bakshi's works, American Pop feels rushed and unfinished, as if he's running out of budget or time. But it also hums with passion and heartbreak. The music spans four generations, from ragtime to Bob Seger's Night Moves.

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