Film Series
Cool Worlds: The Animation of Ralph Bakshi
The outrageous, groundbreaking, rude, crude, and weirdly beautiful films of Ralph Bakshi pushed the art of animation into bold new territory. Bursting onto the scene with the first X-rated cartoon, Fritz the Cat, he combined frank depictions of sex, violence, and societal ills with a freewheeling, surrealistic style that resisted decades of Disneyfied fantasias. His work demonstrates the medium’s capacity for ultra-personal, defiantly uncompromising expression.

Ralph Bakshi’s tale of pimps, pushers, and pinball in sleazy 1970s New York.

Bakshi’s savage satire of racism was one of the most controversial films of the 70s.

Bakshi’s psychotropic journey was famously the first animated film to get an X rating.

A dazzlingly ambitious sci-fi epic shot on a grindhouse budget.

Ralph Bakshi’s hallucinatory saga relates the history of 20th-century popular music.

Ralph Bakshi’s rough, rowdy recollection of his teenage years in Brownsville.

Brad Pitt, Gabriel Byrne, and Kim Basinger star in Ralph Bakshi's madcap cartoon-iverse.

Bakshi applies his eye-poppingly surreal style to this ambitious Tolkien adaptation.