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Ralph Bakshi: RANKED

You know what’s funny? Every time some new “adult animated” show pops up on a streaming service and people act like it’s this brand-new, edgy invention, like animation just discovered profanity and sex and politics yesterday, I want to gently take them by the shoulders, turn them around, and point them directly at Ralph Bakshi.


Because if an irreverent, TV-MA, adult animated comedy like Strip Law can debut on Netflix in 2026 with a big-name voice cast and a mainstream platform behind it, it’s because Ralph Bakshi kicked down the door decades ago and left it hanging on one hinge.


Bakshi is one of those names that, if you’re a real animation fan, if you’re a real film fan, if you’re someone who cares about the medium beyond “cute” and “family-friendly,” you say it with a certain kind of respect. Maybe even a little awe. Maybe with a little fear. Because his stuff is fearless. Sometimes messy. Sometimes infuriating. Sometimes brilliant.


Sometimes all of that in the same scene. But it’s never safe. Never polite. Never designed by committee. He is an American animator and filmmaker known for fantastical animated films, yes, but even more than that, he’s the guy who proved animation could be personal, angry, sexual, political, confrontational, hallucinatory, adult, and absolutely auteur-driven.


And look, the basic history is kind of incredible on its own. Ralph Bakshi was born October 29, 1938, in Haifa, in what was then Mandatory Palestine, and his family came to the United States when he was a baby.


He grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and that matters, because you can feel it in his work. You can feel the city in his movies, the grit, the streets, the racial tension, the poverty, the heat, the danger, the music, the whole urban stew.


That environment doesn’t just influence him, it becomes part of his visual language.

He starts at Terrytoons in the most unglamorous way possible, as a cel polisher, literally cleaning other people’s work, and then climbs his way up to animator and director.


Then he moves to Paramount’s animation division, and eventually forms Bakshi Productions. This is not some silver-spoon art-school-to-Hollywood story. This is a guy who built it from the bottom.


And then comes the big explosion: Fritz the Cat in 1972. The first animated film to receive an X rating, based on Robert Crumb’s comic strip, and it becomes a massive success. It’s still regarded as the most successful independent animated feature of all time, and whether you love it or hate it, it changed the game.


It broke the Disney monopoly on what people thought animation was “allowed” to be. Animation wasn’t just for kids. Animation wasn’t just talking animals doing musical numbers.


Animation could be dirty, satirical, violent, political, and very specifically aimed at adults, and Fritz is the brick through the window that makes that point loud and clear.


Now here’s where it gets personal for me, because my first experience with Bakshi wasn’t in some classroom or film society setting. I saw Fritz the Cat when I was a kid, way too young, and it blew my mind.


Not because it was “naughty,” although, yes, it was, and it was X-rated, and that was part of the forbidden thrill. But because it rewired my brain about what animation could do.


I grew up on Saturday morning cartoons like everybody else. The classic stuff, the Looney Tunes, the Hanna-Barbera factory line, all of it.


And then Bakshi comes along and says, no, no, no, animation can be a street poem, a nightmare, a rant, a fever dream, a cultural scream. And once you see that, you can’t unsee it.


And it wasn’t just Fritz. It was what followed. The early ‘70s Bakshi stuff, the urban, cultural, racial explorations, the movies that felt like they were made by a guy who actually lived life, who actually walked streets, who actually watched people, who actually got angry.


There was sex, drugs, violence, profanity, and this raw, abrasive aesthetic that was the opposite of polished. He wanted you to see the pencil, the sweat, the grime. He wanted the work to feel handmade and dangerous.


And then he swings into fantasy and does it his way. Wizards. The Lord of the Rings. American Pop. Fire and Ice. He uses rotoscoping, tracing live-action movement, to create this strange hybrid of realism and dream imagery that, when it works, is hypnotic. That technique becomes part of his signature, and it becomes part of animation history.


He directed nine theatrically released feature films between 1972 and 1992, and just saying that out loud matters. Nine. Theatrical. Feature films. In a world that didn’t want animated features unless they were safe, family, marketable, and merchandisable. And he did it as an alternative to mainstream animation with independent, adult-oriented productions.


He also wasn’t just a film guy. Bakshi’s television work is a huge part of his legacy. He produced Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures in the late ‘80s, and later did Spicy City in the ‘90s, and he’s been involved in TV as a director, writer, producer, animator, the whole deal.

And then, when he stepped back from features, he pivoted hard into fine art and painting, because he’s always been an artist first. He even co-founded an animation school with his son in the early 2000s.

He’s been honored, too, with major recognition like an Annie Award for distinguished contribution to animation, and other tributes over the years, which is nice, because for a long time he was treated like the troublemaker in the corner, the guy everyone benefited from but didn’t always want to invite to the nice dinner party.


And the influence is everywhere. Everywhere. Adult animation as we understand it in pop culture doesn’t exist without Bakshi blazing the trail. If you love edgy animated TV, if you love the fact that animation can be political and profane and risky and personal, you owe him.


Even the stuff that isn’t trying to be Bakshi is able to exist because he proved the audience was there. And that’s why I’m thinking about him right now, with something like Strip Law landing on Netflix, because that kind of mainstream adult animated presence doesn’t happen in a vacuum.


Now, Ralph Bakshi made nine feature-length films, and what follows is my ranking of those nine movies, in order of preference.


I admire all of them on some level, even the ones that frustrate me, even the ones that don’t entirely work, because the point is they exist. They’re real. They’re audacious. They’re important. They’re historic.


They’re the work of a guy with guts and balls and vision, who changed the rules of feature-length animation.


Ralph Bakshi is the king. And here are his nine feature films, ranked by me, in order of my preference... and I can't stress enough: You MUST watch the trailers that accompany each entry, because they are truly magnificent.


RALPH BAKSHI'S FEATURE FILMS: RANKED (in order of my preference):


This is Bakshi at his most raw, most street-level, most “you can smell the garbage and hear the sirens” peak. Heavy Traffic is like a greasy neon nightmare scribbled on a bathroom wall in the best possible way, and it’s also weirdly beautiful.


It’s angry and funny and filthy and sad, and it feels like it was made by a guy who actually lived in the city, walked the streets, watched people, and didn’t romanticize any of it.


This is the Bakshi movie that really captures that “urban poem” vibe, where the animation style itself feels like it’s sweating. It’s not polished, it’s not cute, and it’s not supposed to be. It’s a punch in the face from an artist who’s got something to say and doesn’t care if you’re comfortable while he’s saying it.


This is the earthquake. The breakthrough. The movie that basically yelled, “Animation is not just for kids,” and then backed it up with an X rating and a giant middle finger to everything polite. It’s a cultural artifact, a time capsule, and a historic game-changer.


And yes, it’s messy, it’s dated in some ways, and it’s got that grimy early-’70s counterculture stink all over it, but that’s part of what makes it so fascinating. When I first saw it, my brain was rewired. Suddenly cartoons weren’t just Saturday morning sugar cereal nonsense. They could be satirical, sexual, political, and insane.


This movie kicked open a door that never fully closed again, and whether you love it, hate it, or feel conflicted, you can’t deny what it did.


This is one of the toughest sits in Bakshi’s filmography, and also one of the most important. It’s confrontational by design. It’s purposely abrasive, purposely uncomfortable, and it attacks racism by putting the ugliest stereotypes right in your face and then turning them into a weapon.


It’s also this wild collision of animation and live-action that feels like a fever dream from the worst corner of America’s psyche. People argue about this film, they always will, and I get it.


But it’s a film made by someone who wasn’t playing it safe, who wasn’t interested in being liked, and who was trying to shove a mirror into the audience’s face. And I will never forget seeing it in a Chicago grindhouse environment with an almost entirely African-American crowd, because the energy in that room was electric, shocking, hilarious, and mind-blowing.


That experience alone is burned into my memory forever.


I love Wizards. Always have. This is Bakshi doing fantasy his way, and it’s like nothing else. The images, the vibe, the oddball humor, the weird sadness, the political undertones, the mash-up of myth and apocalypse and absurdity.


It’s got that handmade, rough-edged Bakshi aesthetic, but it’s also got real imagination, real world-building, and real personality. I remember taking two buses to see it at the Lincoln Village Theater when I was young, by myself, and I stayed for it twice. That’s how hard it hit me.


It’s one of those movies where you feel like you’ve entered somebody’s sketchbook brain, and you either get on that wavelength or you don’t. I got on it immediately.


Pure sword-and-sorcery pulp, and I mean that as a compliment. This is Bakshi and Frank Frazetta aesthetics colliding into a sweaty, muscular, brutal fantasy pin-up come to life, with rotoscoped action and that primal, barbarian-era energy that was floating around in the early ’80s.


The story is basically an excuse to move from one cool-looking set piece to another, and honestly, I’m fine with that. This is an animation showcase. It’s Bakshi saying, “You want action? You want movement? You want bodies and beasts and blades?” and delivering exactly that.


It’s not his deepest film, but it’s one of his most visually satisfying, especially if you grew up on this kind of fantasy imagery.


This movie was ahead of its time. It really was. The way it uses music, the way it flows through decades, the way it connects pop culture to identity and history and emotion, it feels like a feature-length animated music experience that predates MTV.


And Bakshi’s rotoscope technique actually works beautifully here because it gives the characters a lived-in physicality, like you’re watching real people caught in the currents of American culture.


It’s ambitious, it’s heartfelt, and it’s one of his most accessible films without being watered down. There’s something genuinely moving about it, too, which sometimes gets lost when people talk about Bakshi like he’s only about shock and controversy.


This one is fascinating, frustrating, and absolutely historic. It’s the first major serious attempt to bring Tolkien to the screen in a big way, and it has moments that are genuinely stunning, especially when the rotoscoping hits just right and the scale feels epic.


But it’s also uneven, and it’s famously incomplete, and the technique doesn’t work in every scene. Still, I admire the hell out of it because it’s Bakshi taking on something enormous, trying to make fantasy feel physical and gritty and heavy, not cute and storybook.


And whether people realize it or not, this movie’s influence is huge. A whole generation saw it and got inspired, including filmmakers who would later take their own swings at Tolkien. Even when it stumbles, it’s bold.


This is a weird one. A messy one. A cult one. And it’s got a vibe I really enjoy: Bakshi doing 1950s Brooklyn through his own memory filter, mixing nostalgia, street energy, fantasy, and comedy into something that doesn’t always hold together, but has bursts of brilliance.


Parts of it feel like Bakshi riffing on his own obsessions, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but it’s never boring. And that’s the thing with Bakshi: even his lesser works have moments where you go, “Yeah, nobody else would do that.” There’s value in that.


This is the disappointment, and it’s a shame, because you can see the bones of what it could have been.


This is the movie that got swallowed by studio interference and the desire to cash in on the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and it ends up feeling like a diluted version of Bakshi’s worst nightmare and his wild imagination at the same time.


There are great moments. There are striking visuals. There are sequences where you can feel Bakshi fighting to get his weirdness onto the screen. But the whole thing feels compromised. It feels like a guy who built his career on not obeying rules being forced into a box, and the result is uneven, frustrating, and ultimately unsatisfying.


It’s still Bakshi, so it’s still worth talking about, but as a final theatrical feature, it’s not the note you want him going out on.




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