Tim's Toons review: Last Days of Coney Island
Friday, October 30, 2015 at 1:07AM 
Tim here. One of the most important events in animation in all of 2015 happened this week; it is important to stress that this doesn't mean it's also one of the best things. But the first new piece of animation from living legend Ralph Bakshi in almost 20 years is certainly worth spending a moment with, though now that I've seen the 22-minute Last Days of Coney Island – currently available for rental on Vimeo, where it just had its world premiere – I can't really claim that I want to stretch that moment out too long.
The film finds Bakshi, whose 77th birthday was October 29, returning to the territory of his most characteristic works from the early 1970s, including Heavy Traffic, the infamous race relations fable Coonskin, and his groundbreaking debut, Fritz the Cat. That is, it's a story about the New York City of Bakshi's battle-hardened memories of youth, involving deeply wearied souls scratching their way through an apocalyptic vision of the '60s counterculture.
The new film has clearly defined characters in the form of explosively violent Shorty (Omar Jones) and the hapless-in-love Max (Robert Costanzo), and it even has something that looks pretty clearly like a plot, though you have to work pretty diligently to carve it from the energetic blast of frenzied activity that makes up the film (it's a condensed version of a feature Bakshi has been trying to make since the '90s; it was shortened without losing any content).
Mostly, Last Days of Coney Island is about capturing place and mood: a vision of Coney Island as both a haven for the dispossessed and as a ring of Hell designed to punish sinners guilty of being outsiders in an America gone mad. The backgrounds are a staggering collage of photographic elements, live-action film footage, and roughly scrawled sketches mostly made by Bakshi himself – the film had a minuscule staff, owing to the director-animtor's discovery of the joys of a digital workflow – and they provide a dizzying vision of Coney Island turned into a site of degradation, standing in for the city and the country as a whole.
The film is not optimistic; it relentlessly returns to the Kennedy assassination as a touchstone, and it invests heavily in the notion of that event serving as either the cause or symptom of a protracted period of purposeless wandering in American life. Not just in the narrative, either, though Shorty and Max are nothing if they're not purposeless men meandering through a broken-down landscape. The animation itself is loose and aggressively artless, lacking any kind of fluidity as the characters flail about as collections of swirls and loops that feel almost about to de-coalesce from too much movement. The character designs are a dead ringer for the squashy round cartooning of John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren & Stimpy and longstanding Bakshi acolyte, but this is no cartoon. The savageness of the drafting, and the blocky stiffness of the animation (it feels at times like a more brutish version of Bill Plympton's highly limited animation), leave it more like herky-jerky snapshots from inside Bakshi's very id.
Two things about all of this: first, Last Days of Coney Island is striking as all hell. It's rough far beyond anything Bakshi has ever done, a howl of dismay about life going to hell married to visuals that are transfixing in their ugliness. The mixed-media nature of much of it recalls a lot of Bakshi's work, where the mixture of film and animation was frequently dreadful, but here it's often startling and exciting, giving a more precise, honed-in sense of historical document. So all in all, this is something that you basically need to see if you're interested in the modern face of indie animation.
Still, the second thing: this is enormously unpleasant. Comically so, I'd say, except part of the unpleasantness comes from the film's bitter, nihilistic sense of comedy. With an early scene that depicts viscera and blood literally raining down for what feel like minutes, Last Days of Coney Island can't be said to hide its nihilism, but that doesn't make it go down any easier. It's vintage Bakshi in that respect: the astonishing singularity of its vision only calls the more attention to how rancid that vision can be. The filmmaker has burst into the 21st Century with his voice not just intact, but arguably stronger than ever, and yet that voice wasn't always one worth listening to, and frequently was worth sprinting away from. Still, Bakshi's back with a vengeance, and that's... well, it's not something I'm going to dismiss just like that. High-profile alternates to the mainstream are always worth having around, even when they're kind of not.
Rating: B-
Reader Comments (6)
You write so well on animation, but there is no way I'm watching this adventure in Nihilism.
Bakshi is a great artist, but I get depressed enough with the reality of GOP candidates from Hell.
The decline of America is such an easy target.
Was a great honor to play one of the main characters (Shorty) and was my first voice acting debut and was a fantastic production to work on because it was a film that was truly driven by Director/Writer doing what they wanted to do regardless of the social norms. Could you imagine if there was more independent visionaries like George Lucas and Ralph Bakshi, it would be an honor and a great honor to work have with these men.
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