“Ah, the good ol’ days when the impact of a falling safe either meant being driven into the ground like a tent stake, or a complete accordionization of the body.”
— Stefan Dollak
“It’s a natural impulse for us to bond with friends. We bowl with our neighbors and party with them — even if they are not the most interesting folks in the city. Today’s networks have come to realize this. They will leave a boring series on the air long past the period where they aren’t getting ratings — because the audience will soon get used to the characters and accept them and even believe they are entertaining.”
be remembered
- Black Book: Everyone from Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee to Peter Jackson and Matt Groening claim to have been heavily influenced by your work. How would you like to be remembered as an artist?
- Ralph Bakshi: You do something because you love it, and you do it with everything you’ve got. And then you die. What you leave behind doesn’t matter. How much money you make doesn’t matter. What people think of you doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is how you spend every fucking day of your life, how you feel about yourself — and not in the narcissistic, egotistical way. It doesn’t matter how I’m remembered, because I’ll remember everything myself. I’ve drawn every day of my life since high school and that’s a pure victory.
Crumb did a movie on himself called The Confessions of Robert Crumb, in which he yelled at me for doing Fritz the Cat. When he needed to become famous, he let someone take a camera into his house, while his mother was out of her mind, and he put all of that on film. His brother [Charles] killed himself shortly after that movie. What kind of guy is that? He has a château in France where he drinks wine every day, and is supposed to be in the underground. No one succeeds to the extent that Robert Crumb has without being slick.
— Ralph Bakshi loves to talk shit
The truth is, I walked away from Hollywood — no one threw me out. I never wanted to succeed in the sense that people wanted to succeed. It never even occurred to me that success was an issue. I wanted to find something that I loved, that I could be proud of, that could take up my time. I didn’t like the vacuum of not doing anything, so I turned to cartooning, then drawing, and then I got my first job at Terrytoons. I never for a minute thought, Ralph, you’re broke, and you can’t compete with Disney …
People throw away their lives today on that shit. I know guys in L.A. who have hundreds of millions of fucking dollars, and I think, when are you going to stop this shit? I mean, what are you doing here? Jeffrey Katzenberg still gets up at five in the morning to run this shit at DreamWorks, and gets 300 fucking million dollars for Shrek 5. What is that? He’s a billionaire, and he directs Shrek 5 and 6 and 7, like he’s trying to prove something. The short answer to your question is I don’t give a fuck.
— Ralph Bakshi
You can’t beat real life for story material. That’s why I can’t take modern animated features which seem to be made by people who have never met other people, and only get their ideas from other animated features.
