American Pop is the kind of ambitious film that only Ralph Bakshi could have made. If it were live action, it would probably be called a clichéd melodrama, but as animation, it is an incredibly evocation of our collective memory. It traces eighty years of American history and popular music, and there is not a trace of cliché or cheap, unearned tricks in the film.
Bakshi's film follows four plotlines, each around a specific character. The first is a Russian immigrant named Zalmie (voice of Jeremy Lippa) who arrives in the US shortly as a child after the turn of the century. His father, a Rabbi, was killed in an uprising in the native country and his mother dies in an industrial accident shortly after their arrival. He is informally adopted by Louie (Jerry Holland) a gangster who owns a vaudeville show, and he quickly puts Zalmie on stage, despite his dubious talent. The second plotline revolves around Zalmie's son, Benny (Richard Singer), a gifted jazz musician who becomes disaffected with his father's lifestyle and volunteers to serve in World War II. The third, and longest section concerns Benny's son Tony (Ron Thompson), who, like his father, feels he doesn't fit in and runs away from home. He becomes a beat poet and later a songwriter for a band based on Jefferson Airplane, but finds drugs his undoing. The final story concerns Tony's son Pete (also Ron Thompson), who grows up a drug dealer on the streets of New York and harbors dreams of becoming a rock star.
That is an awful lot of plot for a 96 minuet movie (and believe me, there are many important details I left out of the summary), but this movie is not so much about an epic family story as it is how this family is affected by the times in which they live. Characters rarely seems to be in much control of their own lives in American Pop, even when they seem to escape the suffocating existence they grew up in, they find only misery, addiction, or death. But the great release to all four characters is music, even to Zalmie, who is untalented himself, but sees greatness in his son.
And to the viewer, the great appeal of the movie is the stunningly evocative visuals that Bakshi uses to conjure up memories of times past. To paraphrase what Roger Ebert has said about Grave of the Fireflies, the animation means that we don't so much see a character as much as the idea of a character. Tony is every disaffected 50's youth, Zalmie is every immigrant, Louie every gangster. The visuals means the film is always visually compelling and the gorgeous animation really draws us in to the characters in a way that live action can't.
I must say, however, that the final segment, set in the 80's, seems half baked and pales in comparison to what comes before it, possibly because the music (from Bob Segar and Pat Benetar) is nowhere near as strong as what has been featured before. I got the feeling that Bakshi may have been running out of time and thus the ending was truncated. Too bad, because the first three segments are about as good animation gets, and make this film a great obscurity that movie fans every need to seek out.
American Pop (1981)