Agitating With Animation: ‘When the Wind Blows’ and ‘Coonskin’ By J. HOBERMANMARCH 13, 2015 Photo
Hilda and James Bloggs (voiced by Peggy Ashcroft and John Mills), an English couple preparing for Armageddon in “When the Wind Blows” (1986). CreditFilm 4 International
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No one, post-Charlie Hebdo, can doubt a cartoon’s capacity to change the world — R. Crumb’s breezy remonstrance “It’s only lines on paper, folks!” notwithstanding. Animated cartoons are generally more circumspect than static drawings, but some have been agitators as well.
Winsor McCay made an animated propaganda short, “The Sinking of the Lusitania,” to support America’s entry into World War I; during the Second World War, the Disney studio produced the feature-length “Victory Through Air Power” as an argument for strategic bombing. On another front, Warner Bros. cartoons like “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs” (1943) were attacked for their racial caricatures — as was Disney’s softer-edge blend of live-action and animation “Song of the South” (1946).
A few animations have directly addressed such propaganda or stereotyping. Jimmy T. Murakami’s “When the Wind Blows” (1986), released on Blu-ray late last year by Twilight Time, is a subversively cute and cuddly, surprisingly graphic cartoon on the effects of a nuclear blast. By lampooning stereotypes found elsewhere in the movies, Ralph Bakshi’s“Coonskin,” a cartoon-and-live-action amalgam from 1975 out on DVD from Xenon Pictures and distributed by Facets Video, evoked (and incited) another sort of firestorm. Both are sendups, but if “When the Wind Blows” has the deadpan mockery of the early-’60s British revue “Beyond the Fringe” (which included a skit about the end of the world), “Coonskin” owes much to Richard Pryor’s extravagant ghetto sketches. Ph
Ralph Bakshi blended live action and animation for “Coonskin” (1975), a corrosive satire inviting strong reactions. CreditXenon Pictures
Adapted by Raymond Briggs from his graphic novel, “When the Wind Blows” concerns an elderly English couple in rural Sussex. Warned that nuclear war is imminent, the moon-faced pensioners Jim and Hilda Bloggs (voices supplied by John Mills and Peggy Ashcroft) do their gently dithering best to follow government instructions, laying away supplies and building a rudimentary fallout shelter. Hilda is doubtful, but Jim is resolute: “Ours is not to reason why — we must do the correct thing,” he explains more than once.
“When the Wind Blows” is more satirical than sentimental in evoking the traditional stiff-upper-lip stoicism of Britain’s salt of the earth. Mr. Murakami, a Japanese-American animator who worked largely in Britain, handlesthe bomb’s impact with impressive restraint — a delicately throbbing conflagration rendered in a monochromatic wash — and the onset of the Bloggses’ subsequent radiation sickness is quietly relentless. (Moral: There won’t always be an England.)
Like Mr. Bakshi, Mr. Murakami introduces elements of photographic reality into his animation — most subtly in his use of a miniature model for the Bloggses’ cottage. The presence of flat, animated characters in a three-dimensional set produces a subliminal neutron weapon effect. The rubble of their hitherto cozy lives appears more substantial than their increasingly ghostly presence. Perceived by some as propaganda for Britain’s unilateral nuclear disarmament, “When the Wind Blows” came in for a measure of political criticism — a smug film, one commentator wrote, made not for people like Mr. and Mrs. Bloggs but “radical yuppies” who took their children to peace marches. “Coonskin,” which begins peppering the audience with the N-word seconds into the movie, was designed to outrage. It did. Led by the Harlem chapter of the Congress for Racial Equality, the campaign to suppress “Coonskin” was started during a stormy preview at the Museum of Modern Art in November 1974; with the original distributor scared off, its release was delayed for nearly a year. Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story Mr. Bakshi, a Jewish kid raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn, had an education in street jive. His first feature, the X-rated “Fritz the Cat,” was adapted from R. Crumb’s underground comics, but “Coonskin” is more corrosive in its caricatures of Italians, Jews, gays and women, as well as African-Americans, who are by and large the most sympathetically drawn of a grotesque lot.
A live-action framing narrative has the animated story — a contemporary folk tale acted out by an assortment of cartoon animals in a slum — told by an old convict (Scatman Crothers) to a younger one (Philip Michael Thomas) as they await escape from a Southern penitentiary. With its cast of rabbits, bears and foxes, “Coonskin” parodies “Song of the South,” a movie informally banned in the North but still revived below the Mason-Dixon line. (I saw it, less than a year before “Coonskin” was previewed at the Modern, at a Savannah, Ga., theater down the street from the site of the city’s former “slave block.”)
“Coonskin” has a generic resemblance to the violent social consciousness of a blaxploitation film like “Across 110th Street,” but the movie, bawdy, outrageous and frantic (the tempo set by Chico Hamilton’s percussive score), has a more lacerating edge. “Coonskin” is a missing link between the freestyle fury of Melvin van Peebles’s “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” and Spike Lee’s scattershot “Bamboozled.”
Anger inspired anger. There were pickets at some Manhattan theaters and six bomb threats on opening day — the situation extensively reported in The New York Times and The Amsterdam News. Reviews were mixed, but audiences stayed away. In 1982, the Village Voice music critic Carol Cooper wrote a post-mortem that recalled the fracas as “among the most extraordinary cultural lynchings in American history.” She also praised “Coonskin” for its “radical application of animation in the service of unpleasant truth.”
Mr. Bakshi’s effrontery obscures his movie’s other innovations. Mixing live action and animation more inventively than “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (or “Song of the South”), “Coonskin” sets its fantastic characters in the context of gritty streets and old movies. The drawing is thick with references, not just to Looney Tunes but also to George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat.” Mr. Bakshi’s brash, brutally carnivalesque vaudeville may be difficult to watch without wincing, but it is a jeremiad with unexpected visual grace.