#tag edit: no dig at those white jews cause like i said they both made very fun and interesting works blazing saddles my beloved

[fruitsofhell]

CW for an anti-black slur cause it's the name of a damn movie title, also mentions of historical racism in cartoons

Get really pissed off whenever I think about Coonskin by Ralph Bakshi because I need to rewatch it to see if it might be a fave movie of mine. I want to go over all of Bakshi's filmography sometime and really digest how he deals with depicting black people (especially Fritz the Cat cause the black crows are so cute!), cause he's in an interesting perspective where he is undoubtably sympathetic to us and grew up around us, but expresses this in ways that are soooo over the top we commonly see them now as only acceptable For A Black Person To Do.

Like, he's some white Jewish guy from the slums, he doesn't really have the right to reclaim the racist iconography as we think of it but at the same time it's like if someone's doing interesting artistic work they're doing interesting work. And I as a black person have actually been really inspired by that film ever since I watched it.

Ever since the rubber hose style became super hot again cause of Cuphead and Bendy I've seen people actively downplay how goddamn racist old cartoons were, or I've seen people pick up a clip from an old film and I just go "Chat, they don't know this is a quietly racist animation trend...". But it's not even just that old cartoons were racist and had racist trends, it was baked into their fundamental styles of comedy and cartooning - they were built to either exclude or humiliate blackness. And I feel like Coonskin is a work that expresses that very very loudly but with some sense of purpose.

I personally have wanted to tap into that idea since I started playing with golden age art styles, but for the tone I set in my shit that's way too overbearing. Plus, maybe as an actual black person something unique for me and not Bakshi is a wish to actually see myself represented in those old cartoon styles as more than as an object of controversy. I've also been meaning to watch more of the Proud family and works by Bruce W. Smith cause of that too, I heard in an interview he was motivated to draw because he wanted to see black folks in that mid-century, modernist style and like, SAME.

But it's actually way easier to work black features into that incredibly flexible style than it is to brute force them into the centerline/rubberhose ones where their origins can be traced back TO BLACKFACE. You guys remember that fucking lesson right? How the entire generic rubbergose face is a play on blackface, that's why the mouths and eyes are white but the body is black. If you're unfamiliar with that idea or don't believe it, look up Bosko, Warner Bros first attempt at a mascot, and see if you can tell what he's supposed to be.

It's more of an uphill battle, but not impossible to make it work in those styles. Though I have also considered the utility of borrowing directly from those racist designs to express a meta-contextual feeling/understanding that that is what you look like as a black person in this time period - that is you in the dominant narrative vision of the time. No matter what you are as a black person, to the historical zeitgeist you just appear as some flavor of coon yknow.

It could be a very potent visual tool I think, and I don't know if I'd be considering that if not for Bakshi and my relationship to Coonskin and its themeing. Which is the point, Bakshi was one of those racey types who always wanted to get people upset to start a convo or whatever. It's interesting to look at older but earnest expressions of this that would seem disastrous by today's standards - imagine "They couldn't make Blazing Saddles today" but true and on steroids.