To me, this movie is perfection.

Beautiful, moving film.

As Good As It Gets

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

"American Pop" is a fantastic animation directed by Ralph Bakshi disclosing the American pop music in the Twentieth Century until 1980. The storyline follows four generations of a Russian Jewish family of refugees from the Russian Revolution that immigrate to America. Along the years, the boy Zalmie discovers life and love in night-clubs as performer and musician and becomes the patriarch of generations of musicians. The big picture of the American history is the background to present wonderful music, in blues, jazz, rock and roll, in one of the most beautiful soundtracks of the cinema history. My vote is ten.Title (Brazil): "American Pop"

I must admit that I never was a big fan of the works of Ralph Bakshi. While I do admire the efforts he made in order to show that the animated medium wasn't something exclusively for kids, the truth is that I found most of his movies to be pretty weak and dated (Specially, his movie version of "The Lord of the Rings", which I consider to be terrible)However, I found "American Pop" to be a pretty solid animated film, being at the same time the most ambitious and the most mature work from Ralph Bakshi.Not only the animation ís incredibly well done (With superb designs, beautiful sceneries, and an exquisite use of colors) but also the plot is way more complex than in the other movies directed by Ralph Bakshi, with a high level of realism and vivid moments of nostalgia and melancholy.The music and the voice acting from this film were excellent, giving it the perfect atmosphere for each era where the different parts of the story of this film took place.The result is something impressive, fascinating and unique. This is possibly one of the most ambitious and daring animated films ever made, and even when this film isn't entirely perfect, the overall result is still impressive, even by the moderns standards of animation."American Pop" is the strongest film directed by Ralph Bakshi, being the one that stand the test of time.I highly recommend this movie to anyone.

American Pop is one of Ralph Bakshi's most ambitious films: it strives to show the development of American music throughout the 20th century through the story of four generations of men in the same immigrant family, all with dreams of making music.The movie has four main characters, each representing the different stages of the evolution of American pop. The first is Zalmie, a young Russian Jew who flees to America with his mother after his father is murdered by the Cossacks; after his mother perishes in a factory fire, he becomes a singer on the burlesque stage, but his ambitions are destroyed when he receives a bullet to the throat during WWI. He marries a beautiful stripper named Bella, and as he tries to make her a star, they have a talented son named Benny, who seems like he'll be able to make it big as a big band piano player, but war intervenes once again when he's gunned down by a Nazi. His son Tony grows up estranged from his family, and runs away to California, having a one-night stand with a beautiful waitress in Kansas along the way. He becomes the song writer for a hippie band, falls in love with the vivacious singer Frankie, and their songs hit number one on the charts, but their success is short-lived; drug addiction kills Frankie, and the penniless Tony discovers his affair with the waitress spawned an illegitimate child, Pete. The two scrape by in New York for a while, until Tony abandons the boy, who makes a living as a drug dealer. He eventually achieves the success that eluded his predecessors, and the movie ends with him playing Bob Seger's "Night Moves" to an enthralled audience.The plot is surprisingly linear, unlike the majority of Bakshi's output up to that point. There's also a higher level of realism, derived from the decision to have all the characters rotorscoped (rotorscoping is when the animator traces over live-action footage) and the juxtaposition of live-action clips with the animation. The voice actors all give natural performances, most of the music they were able to afford is well-chosen, and the script contains a lot of well-written dialogue and a few memorable scenes.But for all it does well, American Pop never achieves its full potential for two reasons: the running time and the animation. An hour and a half just isn't enough time to tell a story of this scale very well; there's no time for us to get attached to the characters before the movie cycles to the next generation. The deaths of characters like Bella, Benny or Frankie, or Tony's heartbreak upon learning he has fathered an illegitimate child with the waitress from Kansas have little to no impact because aside from Tony we never get to know anybody intimately enough to be invested. The rotorscoped animation, while realistic and at times beautiful in its own right, doesn't really add anything to the film. The worst part is that it limits the facial expressiveness of the characters significantly, and occasionally wanders into uncanny valley territory. I beg to ask, what's the point of making it an animated film if you're going to trace 95% of it? In the end, the film functions better as an allegory of American music and culture during the last century than it does as an epic drama. Like its rotorscoped characters, the film lacks the style or emotion to compel you to want to sit through it again.

Another feature from the one & only Ralph Bakshi, champion of adult animation. The story of four men in one family trying to find their niche in the world of American music, their stories being contrasted against the evolution of American music. First is Zalmie, the immigrant who wants to be a big shot Vaudeville singer, only to be thwarted by a throat injury he gets while performing overseas in World War 1, leaving him with a raspy, guttural voice, and then gets caught up in the mafia. Next is Zalmie's son Benny, a gifted but unmotivated piano player who manages to fall in love with the daughter of a mafia boss he is forced to marry and has a child with, only to be killed while serving in World War II - but not before he fathers a son, Tony, and not before he manages to have a brief connection with the Nazi soldier who ultimately kills him through his music. Zalmie later goes to jail for his mafia connections but not before he rats out the mafia boss he worked for, as a kind of revenge for being pulled away from his true calling. The story then shifts to Benny's son Tony, who finds success with a Jefferson Airplane type band during the 1960s, only to be thwarted by a drug addiction. Tony has an illegitimate son, Pete, who, after working as a drug pusher in the 1980s, finds success by combining the singing, songwriting and piano playing abilities of his father, grandfather and great grandfather, and hits it big by recording Bob Seger's "Night Moves".Essentially a morality tale, this is an interesting but ultimately failed venture. A noble failure, but a failure nonetheless. Zalmie is probably the most sympathetic of the four men, but the film spends way too much time focusing on the cynical crack addict Tony, who is such a whiny, obnoxious little dweeb that you just don't care about him - you simply want to hit him in the mouth.Well, worth a look I suppose for the music and the atmospheric animation.