Ralph Bakshi Quotations

Cartooning at its best is a fine art. I'm a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, which also allows me to paint my cartoons.

Animation is tremendously resilient. Animation will recover, as art always recovers. There's always cycles of good art.

Live action writers will give you a structure, but who the hell is talking about structure? Animation is closer to jazz than some kind of classical stage structure.

Most of the animated films I watched, the emotions are all prepackaged like canned music, the hand actions, the sighs.

What's most important in animation is the emotions and the ideas being portrayed. I'm a great believer of energy and emotion.

I'm having the same problems today that I had when I first started, saying that outrageous adult animation works.

I had the X rating on my films. Now they do as much on The Simpsons as I got an X rating for Fritz the Cat.

Wizards was my homage to Tolkien in the American idiom. I had read Tolkien, understood Tolkien, and wanted to do a sort of fantasy for American kids, and that was Wizards.

I thought I had the rights to The Lord of the Rings. I don't know how Jackson ended up with the rights.

Lord of the Rings made me realize that I'm not interested in doing anyone else's work.

Painting pictures didn't make me a lot of money. I have to eat.

Too many of Disney animators, and a lot try to emulate Disney, are trying to hit what they call quality levels. They're boring mannerisms.

I am not interested in slickness for the sake of slickness.

I'm the first to admit that I can't be as good as Tolkien, and a movie can never be as good as Tolkien.

Look what Disney's done to their animation department. There wasn't an animator in charge of their animation unit!

Sweetheart, I'm the biggest ripped-off cartoonist in the history of the world, and that's all I'm going to say.

I animated 20 years at Terry Toons. It's important to know that animators like pizza and a raise once in a while, and you've got to treat them with love.

The rise of anime had to happen. If the Japanese could tell better American stories, it would go through the roof. They still tell stories which are very much oriental. I take my hat off to them.

As an artist, I want to interpret my feelings - not run across the street and ask what my mother thinks.

I draw what I feel, which is no more than doing my job.

I miss animation very passionately. Not continuously, but every once in a while I would die to do another film.

My good films were independent and my bad films were not.

My movies continue to be found and be sold because there's something going on in them.

They say I'm a revolutionary, but they're all wrong.

I wouldn't leave Disney to do Disney.

I hired Bob at Terrytoons. He was my assistant animator, and then became an animator himself. He had just come from Boston with his family and was a brilliant draftsman as well as a great jazz guitarist. We had lots of fun nights in Greenwich Village together and then later hanging in LA. Bob worked on Fritz the Cat , Heavy Traffic , Coonskin , and on Wizards . I am terribly saddened by his passing and will miss him dearly.

All the old great companies were run by guys who knew what an animator meant, and guys who knew how to draw. All the companies today are run by executives.

I would like to have the original ending to my Lord of the Rings instead of the one they released. In my original cut I had the victory at Helm's Deep as the final sequence.

You cant second-guess yourself as a filmmaker.

One of the best animated films I've seen come out of Disney was the Tarzan movie. I wasn't crazy about the story or the design on Tarzan's face, but the traditional animation was spectacular.

The art of cartooning is vulgarity. The only reason for cartooning to exist is to be on the edge. If you only take apart what they allow you to take apart, you're Disney. Cartooning is a low-class, for-the-public art, just like graffiti art and rap music. Vulgar but believable, that's the line I kept walking.

It's curtains for you, Mighty Mouse! This gun is so futuristic that even I don't know how it works!

Every character in each of my movies is a different side of myself.

Someone's been mean to you! Tell me who it is, so I can punch him tastefully.

John [Kricfalusi] is so arrogant. He thinks he's me!

Its all big money, high rent, high prices in New York City now. The poor people completely got rolled over. I've never seen anything like it in my life. It's disgusting.

I'm from the East Coast. I love the city. I love the characters. I love the kind of people we are, the kind other people look at in amazement.

Disney had such a hold on the mind of America-they were Adolf Hitler. The whole country thought Disney was some sort of god and that animation was some sort of pure thing for children.

As an artist, I want to interpret my feelings

I separate cartooning, which is fun and wacky and soulful, from illustration, which is very well-drawn and extremely uptight to look at. There's a difference. I'm a cartoonist.