.....
by Jon M. Gibson & Chris McDonnell
Foreword by Quentin Tarantino)
"......But before the industry caught wind of Lookin's bleak prospects, he pitched an idea - a "family picture" - called War Wizards to Twentieth Century Fox.
"My city films were being road-blocked from theaters," Ralph says. "I wanted to get back into all the fantasy drawings I was doing in high school. I wanted to prove that Ralph Bakshi wasn't all sex and drugs - that I could bring the same impact to something PG."
Impact, indeed. At the end of a two-million year nuclear holocaust, twin brothers - the righteous Avatar and the nefarious
Blackwolf -clash in an epic battle.
Avatar is a believer in the powers of love and magic, while Blackwolf utilizes the ancient technologies of the past. Digging through society's radioactive ruins, Blackwolf 's army uncovers the perfect war machine - tanks, guns, bombs, and Nazi propaganda. "Hitler is the ultimate villain," Ralph says.
"No one is going to deny that, Jew or not. Nazi propaganda isn't unlike how the press and government manipulate information today - it's just harder to admit because we actually pay the cable bill and watch the news willingly. Basically, it was about the Jews getting their homeland - the struggle never ends, whether you're an artist or a Jew. That was my mother and my father. It's a very emotional film."
Written in two weeks, Ralph's script drew on both his love of fantasy and the previously unnamed doodles from his Terrytoons days - bizarre creatures, plump adventurers, floppy-hatted sorcerers.
Bakshi's Development Doodles while away writing Wizards (above & Below)
Ian Miller - Wizards Development Art
As an homage to one of his unproduced shorts at Paramount, he named the hero elf Weehawk - but beyond the name, the world of War Wizards was treading new and deeply personal territory for Ralph.
"Since this was fantasy and not New York, it was the perfect excuse to bring in new blood like artists Michael Ploog and Ian Miller," Ralph says. "We did a ludicrous amount of concepting to get the world right. This was a Bakshi fantasy epic - my Lawrence of Arabia
with magic, guns and naked fairies!"
Miller was responsible for the decayed, scarred landscape of Scorch - Blackwolf 's home - while Ploog focused on Avatar's Montegar, a place of classic majesty, rolling hills and all.
The crew, including Johnnie Vita, Ira Turek, John Sparey, Art Vitello, and Irv Spence
- all of whom were more than comfortable with the Bakshi tradition of loose storyboarding and zero pencil tests - was assembled.
As usual, Ralph divided his time between several roles on the picture - writer, director, designer, and first-time feature producer. At the same time, he was also supervising Bob Taylor as he slowly, but surely, completed animation on Hey Good Lookin'
.
"I loved Lookin', and I wasn't about to let one of my films get buried.
Since Warner Bros. wouldn't give me the money, I paid for it out of my own pocket!"
Avatars Tower in Montagar - Bluth
Production on War Wizards went smoothly, until it was time for the climactic finale. "We were producing chronologically," Ralph remembers. "But when we got to the big battle, the union instituted a hike that could have been the end of the picture."
Alan Ladd, Jr., president of Fox was unsympathetic to the major hit the budget was taking as a result of the salary increases.
"I went to Ladd to beg for $50,000 more to finish the film, and he flat-out said, 'No way!' I said, 'How can I finish a war movie without the war!? It's gotta be huge!' But Ladd wasn't hearing it."
At the same time, Ladd was also dealing with the ever-inflating production costs on George Lucas' Star Wars
.
Since both Ralph and Lucas negotiated contracts entitling them to franchise ownership, merchandising, and generous back-end stakes, Ladd looked to the filmmakers to make personal investments in their respective projects.
The deals put substantial control into the hands of the creators, but also threatened to bankrupt them.
"We were doomed," he says.
Ian Miller (above)
Ian Miller & Mike Ploog (below)
But Ralph had a plan - kind of. "Rotoscoping," the process of tracing still frames from live-action film, seemed like a potential solution. Invented by Max Fleischer in the early 20th century, it was used to assist in animating lifelike motion into cartoons like dance routines in his studio's own Betty Boop to the human characters in Disney's Cinderella.
.
But Ralph couldn't actually afford to hire a crew, stage a massive military conflict, or even develop the 35mm stock, so he improvised.
MILLER SKORTCH T
"Since home video didn't exist yet, directors in Hollywood could request prints of films to do private screenings," he explains. "It was research - and the studios didn't think twice about it! I asked for as many epics and war pictures I could get my hands on."
Ralph began splicing together scenes from films like Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky to create the intense action backdrop for Wizards
' big finish. Cleverly disguising tanks and troops in silhouette and overlaying rich fields of color, he figured no one would be the wiser.
Years before Danger Mouse and Jay-Z, Ralph was "sampling" his predecessors. Still, the largest roadblock remained. "It would have taken me three million dollars to get photographs of that footage printed out - that's on a picture that cost
a million-two," Ralph laughs. "I had the action to cover the footage that I couldn't animate, but I couldn't get it reproduced."
Coincidentally, IBM had just unveiled industrial-sized photocopiers to the market. "I asked one of their tech guys if you could feed 35mm reels into the machine and get blown-up copies. He had no idea, so we tried it. And it worked!
That's when I told him that this could revolutionize the animation industry, and everyone in the world would be knocking down his door to use the machine...if I proved to them that it worked in War Wizards
. So he gave them to me for a penny a copy.
A penny instead of five dollars a photo for traditional rotoscoping!
...It was madness!"
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