Last Wednesday we screened a 35mm print of Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards (1977). The distributor warned me that their surviving print was pretty rough, but I took a chance on it anyway. I first saw it in Jr. High on 16mm back around 1980 in an auditorium packed with kids all somewhere in the 11 – 14-years-of-age ballpark. Whatever teacher programmed it probably thought it was appropriate for kids because it was an animated PG film about a fantasy world inhabited by elves and wizards. Of course, this was back when PG-rated films still had teeth (more like Jaws), and I’m not going to shy away from saying that, heck yeah, as far as we kids were concerned, this was the funnest thing to have happened at Baseline Jr. High since Mrs. Danielson fell asleep adjusting her bra, and was even more entertaining than Mr. Reno’s stories about the finger tips and maggots that mysteriously found their way into people’s sandwiches (our English teacher claimed the former occurred at a Deli he used to work at while the latter came from an automated sandwich dispensing machine).

While some parents in the auditorium found Wizards inappropriate for kids due to edgy appropriation of Nazi propaganda and many sexual references, this was, in Bakshi’s own words, “my first kid’s film, my family film.” As most people reading this will know, Bakshi is not an animator in the Disney mold. And while Wizards was, yes, a fantasy with elves and dueling sorcerers, it was also a film that fused high-brow multi-media experiments dealing with nationalism and propaganda with low-brow sexual fetishisms mingled with plenty of dopey gags. I think this is one of the reasons this film was such a big hit when it came out. The silly bits appealed to stoners and kids while the serious stuff connected with adults. Or, at least, that was certainly the case with me. When I saw this in Jr. High it was all about the boobs – be they Elinore’s or any of the slapsticky bits with the stormtroopers. Seeing it again recently almost thirty years later it was exactly the reverse; the stuff that worked for me was the political subtexts, the interplay of background found footage, and the films message about how to control crowds and incite them to violence.

Part of the premise behind Wizards is pure boiler-plate fantasy; a woman gives birth to two sons with magical powers, one (Avatar) is good, the other (Black Wolf) is pure evil, and destiny pits them against each other in a battle for the land. But the sum of Wizards is far from boilerplate. It begins with explosions as a narrator (Susan Tyrrell, uncredited) informs us about how the world was laid to waste by terrorism, eventually giving rise to a post-technological world. Illustrations by Mike Plug are accentuated by a kaleidoscope of colorful backgrounds that made me think of various experimental filmmakers, and then we fastforward 3,000 years to Black Wolf’s domain of Scortch, whose backgrounds were animated by Ian Miller. The iconic assassin, eventually Christened as “Peace” when later re-programmed, makes his entrance in this destitute landscape that shows us “fallen fairies” attempting to seduce an over-eager client on a street that Bakshi acknowledges as being a tip of the hat to Pinocchio – his favorite Disney film.

When we are introduced to the older Avatar (modeled after Peter Falk) and Elinore (his young, busty, fairy girlfriend, modeled after Bakshi’s first girlfriend), we see them talking to Elinore’s father the President, seen wearing a mask because, as Bakshi notes, “all politicians are fakes and frauds – they were masks because they’re two-faced.” More background artists are brought in (longtime Bakshi collaborator Johnnie Vitae and  Ira Turek).

And so it goes, layers and layers of old-school animation and animators and stock footage adding to the simple beauty of this fairy tale like the air-brushed layers of moving cell that provide the mist along with hot-ice backgrounds. Toss in allusions to WWII (Nazi’s, concentration camps, the holocaust), Vietnam, Israel, Palestine, political assassinations, and the war machine in general (always abetted by technology), and the end result shows you a labor of love, made on an exceptionally low-budget (especially by todays standards), that still packs a punch.

He killed Fritz! (Fritz voiced by Bakshi himself.)

Bakshi alludes to the Holocaust: "See the star?"

Wizards dares to engage the viewer on many more levels than you’ll find being addressed by the standard CGI fare aimed at kids and families today. And so I rejoice upon hearing Bakshi say the following words on his dvd commentary for Wizards: “…when I do Wizards 2…”

According to IMDB he is also “working on his latest feature film, Last Days of Coney Island, his first picture in 11 years, and a graphic novel based on characters from his 1977 film Wizards. Sequels to Wizards and Coonskin have also been mentioned/rumored as being in the works.”

Bakshi uses footage from Triumph of the Will, Alexander Nevsky, and more...