“I’M A N*GGER MAN, WATCH ME DANCE” – COONSKIN (1975)

It seems like it’s always been an all too common thing in the art world for artists to view themselves as provocateurs. Viewing everything they do as breaking some sort of boundary even if those boundaries never existed to begin with. However, for a lot of artists, the boundary pushing and trailblazing nature of their art exists entirely in their head, and “provocateur” is almost strictly how they describe themselves rather than how anyone else views them. Ralph Bakshi, a Palestinian born Jewish-American animator and filmmaker, is however, probably the one artist who status as an ever fearless innovator is almost without question to anyone who’s actually familiar with his work.

Ralph Bakshi in recent years has enjoyed a surge in popularity, with the films he made during the 70s finding a cult audience in fans of semi obscure adult animation. His movies are famously violent and sexual to a ridiculous extent; an exposed boob will always finds its way into every other scene and characters kill themselves in this most grotesque ways you could imagine; but his movies are also very black, very queer and are also known for being very honest (if sometimes stereotypical) portrayals of the marginalized communities in downtown New York and Brownsville where he grew up; which is what brought us the 1975 masterpiece Coonskin.

Everything about Coonskin (1975), from the title to the character design reminiscent of a savagely racist minstrel show, seems designed to shock you. You look at it once and you already have a million questions (Who made this? Why did they think this was good idea? What the ever loving fuck does ‘Coonskin’ even mean?). It’s a movie designed from conception to completion to challenge its viewers and 40+ years after it was made it continues to do so. The story is told from the perspective of two men in the middle of a prison break, as one of them starts to tell the other about a black urban tale of Brother Rabbit, Brother Bear, and Preacher Fox, who go up against everyone from the Mafia to a disturbingly corrupt police force, in an effort to rise through the ranks of organised crime in Harlem. The story however is not its main selling point, as everything is told through a series of vignettes. Bakshi takes many segues and explores the lives of characters that are either only tangentially related to the main plot, or not even at all. All of which further emphasise the main theme of the movie, which is that to be black in America was and continues to be an uphill battle, and America’s specific brand of capitalism has a way of keeping you exactly where it wants you. From the single mother who starts a friendship with a cockroach when her man leaves (only to have the cockroach leave too), to the man whose continuous flirtationship with “Miss America” (a busty naked white woman painted in the colours of the American flag) ends in his death. The movie is also a technical marvel of its time, with very primitive examples of mixing live action footage and animation. The animation quality sometimes ranges from clearly low budget to gorgeous trippy sequences with watercolour and stylised photo backgrounds. It featured a majority black animation team which included the first black female animator, but was still received rather negatively by the general black community at the time and did pretty poorly in the box office. Everyone hated it and it’s not hard to see why. But decades after its release it’s a lot easier to see it for the brilliant but sometimes incredibly misguided piece of biting satire of America that it is.