The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
Tim here with as big a story as animation is apt to produce: Ralph Bakshi will debut Last Days of Coney Island on Vimeo on October 29th, on his 77th birthday no less. It's his first animated project since a pair of short films in 1997.) This makes the second time in 2015 that a triple-A Animation God has used that platform to show the world his newest project. (The first was Don Hertzfeldt's World of Tomorrow in March; but as much as we should all of us love and adore Hertzfeldt and his work, there's no comparing his prominence in the animation ecosystem to that of Bakshi, a figure who earns every bit of the phrase "living legend".)
I write these words as a person who, confessedly, doesn't have much affection for Bakshi's output. Still, it's impossible not to be curious what the mind behind the most visible underground animation in history has up his sleeve, now that the 21st Century and digital distribution have come around to offer him new avenues to showcase his art.
I'd like to share a short primer of the offbeat corners that the always-ambitious, frequently hapless auteur has explored in his 43-year career (after the jump)
Part of the joy of film festivals (I’m told) is discovery, and so, this being Manuel's first full New York Film Festival, he figured he’d give its various Shorts Programs a chance.
It’s not a form I watch often though you’d think it’d be growing in popularity given our ever-shrinking attention spans. And with that in mind, rather than review all thirteen shorts I watched, I’ve singled out highlights from the programs screening at the festival, which include Pixar’s latest and a dazzling black and white queer short from Argentina. More...
August has been 1954 Month here at the Film Experience, and it now falls upon me to share with you the animation of that year. And man, it was a weird 'un. The important place to start is noting that in '54, Walt Disney - the man, not the multinational entertainment corporation - was massively obsessed with the creation of his brand-new theme park out in California, and the brand-new television show on ABC that shared its name and served as the new funnel for all his creative and commercial instincts.
With Disney - the multinational entertainment corporation, not the man - thus a bit rudderless, there was a void in American animation like there hadn't been since Mickey Mouse's 1928 debut, basically. Disney itself was beginning to experiment with form in ways that Walt did not approve of, since Walt wasn't paying attention anymore, and the result was things like the Oscar-nominated short Pigs Is Pigs, one of the very weirdest shorts in the studio's history.
Tim here. We're coming hard upon one of the most important birthdays in animation: Bugs Bunny is turning 75 this week. It was on July 27, 1940, that the world first got to see the Merrie Melodies short A Wild Hare, written by Rich Hogan and directed by the legendary Tex Avery. And it was in this short that the unnamed comic rabbit character that the cartoonists at Warner Bros. had been noodling around with for a few years reached the final form of his personality. Though not, in fairness, anything close to his final design.
An ever-changing face notwithstanding, it was here that voice actor Mel Blanc premiered the sarcastic Bronx accent and the instant catchphrase, "Eh, what's up, Doc?", that separated the one true Bugs from the Bugs-like characters tormenting the primitive form of Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd in a few cartoons up to that point. And while refinements were still to be made – he wasn't yet an effortless in-command wit, but still a manic slapstick creation; it would also be five years before he'd take his first wrong turn at Albuquerque – it's remarkable how stable the character has been through all of the intervening decades.
The Movie Scene weighs in on the twitter vitriol for Pixar's Lava NYT on famed movie producer Jerry Weintraub (1937-2015) Film Stage Penélope Cruz returns (finally) in Spanish drama Ma Ma about a teacher with breast cancer - I'd expect fall festivals AV Club impressive mashup of Ant-Man trailer as 50s weird science type movie, complete with Vincent Price narration /Film in very against-type casting news, Michael Fassbender will play The Big Lebowski's "Dude" in one of Jason Reitman's live-read events
Pajiba Your first look at Pedro Pascal in Netflix's new drama Narcos -- will it be Netflix's next big hit? Kenneth in the (212) Seems that Amanda Peterson of the 80s youth hits Explorers and Can't Buy Me Love has died at only 43. No cause of death yet Playbill this sounds like a bad idea: Ian Fleming's James Bond aiming for a stage musical adaptation in 2017 or 2018 i09 every Justic League hero in one montage - yes, Batman v. Superman is trying to boost excitement via Comic Con -- including many so lame they'll surely never make the big screen Comics AllianceGuardians of the Galaxy promos its new animated series with poster, etcetera Playbill have you heard this awful 'what are audiences coming to?' story? Some guy tried to charge his phone in on the stage (in a fake electrical socket) at the hit comedy Hand to God
Magic Mike XXL keeping the interwebs talking... Peter Labuza on 35mm "whiteness" and filming black blodies in Magic Mike XXL Pajiba unanswered questions about Mike's furniture career. You know, the important stuff Salon on XXL's dedication to a thematic taboo: Failure Cosmopolitan has Disney princes reimagined as strippers -- hasn't this erotic Disney trend reached its sell by date yet? I mean the craze started, what, 11 years ago or something
Showtune to Go In addition to Magic Mike being in the pop culture air lately, during channel flipping this week I caught Hugh Jackman's filmed stage show of Oklahoma! again and remembered how much I loved Patrick Wilson in it on Broadway and began wondering why he doesn't do musicals anymore? To be frank, I don't understand his career choices at all but he should definitely do another stage musical. It's a no brainer. So let's combine the two threads with a Tony clip of Patrick Wilson's stripper musical based on the 1997 Best Picture nominee which predated Magic Mike by a lot. (Lots of fun star cameos in this Tony clip including some we've lost -- Anne Bancroft. *sniffle*)
Monday, October 12, 2015 at 11:00AM 
Tim here with as big a story as animation is apt to produce: Ralph Bakshi will debut Last Days of Coney Island on Vimeo on October 29th, on his 77th birthday no less. It's his first animated project since a pair of short films in 1997.) This makes the second time in 2015 that a triple-A Animation God has used that platform to show the world his newest project. (The first was Don Hertzfeldt's World of Tomorrow in March; but as much as we should all of us love and adore Hertzfeldt and his work, there's no comparing his prominence in the animation ecosystem to that of Bakshi, a figure who earns every bit of the phrase "living legend".)
