American Pop (1981)
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American Pop Movie Review
American Pop is a 1981 animated period film directed by Ralph Bakshi. It’s a typically problematic and flawed, though admirable effort from the director.
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“A stripper gettin’ dressed ain’t beautiful
unless she’s ugly to begin with“
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Here he obviously strove for too much as the film follows literally a century of American music and that scene through the eyes of this family as we follow it throughout generations. This movie simply doesn’t make sense and by that I mean that this project shouldn’t have happened as it’s way too ambitious for its own sake.
You cannot possibly make a century-spanning period piece with just the runtime of 96 minutes. That was implausible and of course they failed at it. The end result is never as strong as the director wanted it to have been clearly, though it’s still better than half of his other efforts.
I really liked some of the serious and more melancholic conversations near the end and I really liked how serious and dramatic the movie is without ever being overly graphic in violence and sex and that departure from his previous works I really appreciated.
Unfortunately, the characters themselves are entirely forgettable. I did like the voice acting, but the characters come and go constantly and again the runtime is to blame as we never properly meet them and start caring for them in any meaningful way.
American Pop is well animated, though a bit crude in the character movements. It isn’t his worst animation, but it’s far from his best too. I wanted more artistry in it, though it was present in a couple of sequences here and there.
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The dialogue is solid and I found the direction from Bakshi serviceable too, but simply the music did not appeal to me in any way. I don’t like music like this and for a movie called American Pop, there’s surprisingly little actual pop in it as it mostly focuses on your regular rock and that’s it. I was very disappointed in that and overall the score felt angry and aggressive more than truly essential in this instance.
American Pop is a highly ambitious, but very flawed effort from Ralph Bakshi. It’s a movie that spans almost a century in its story and thus its 96-minute runtime was a terrible decision that backfired and the movie felt incredibly rushed. I did like some of the conversations here and how serious and dramatic the movie is, but the characters are underdeveloped and the score can be overly loud. It’s an interesting departure for the director that did not really work.
