Movies - American Pop

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	Movies - American Pop

American Pop is a 1981 American animated film directed by Ralph Bakshi. The film tells the story of four generations of a Russian Jewish immigrant family of musicians whose careers parallel the history of American popular music. The primary animation technique used in the film is rotoscoping where live actors are filmed and then animation is drawn over the footage. However, the film also uses a variety of other mixed media incluiding water colors, computer graphics, live action shots, and archival footage. Critics at the time noted that given that the animation and storyline depicted such a realistic topic, there seemed little point to it being animated at all.

The film performed decently at the box office, but it did not perform well enough to cover the costs of the licensing for the music used in the film, so the picture was considered to be a flop. However it was released during a period when animation was thought to be dead and a significant audience for adult-oriented animation was still a decade away. After Who Framed Roger Rabbit
was released in 1988, animation went through a renaissance and American Pop began to be rediscovered. It quickly became a cult classic on VHS and DVD, earning praise for its emotionally powerful story, and for its unique use of mixed-media animation.

Synopsis

Jaacov

The beginning is set in late 1890s Russia under the rule of the Czars: A Rabbi's wife urges her husband to flee from the Cossacks who are engaging in a pogrom. However, he refuses because he hasn't finished his prayer (a blessing for his son). His wife and their son, Zalmie, escape to America, but Jaacov, the rabbi, is killed by the Cossacks. This sequence, set to Aneynu, a traditional Jewish prayer, is edited like a silent film, and the dialogue appears on intertitles.

Zalmie

Shortly after their arrival in America, Zalmie's mother dies in a sweatshop blaze (possibly the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire) , and Zalmie begins working for a burlesque house owner. He grows up to become an entertainer. However, a World War I throat wound ends Zalmie's dream of becoming a singer. He falls in love with a stripper and he ends up working for the mob. He gets married and has a son, Benny, who grows up to be a great jazz pianist.

Benny

Benny gets married to a mobster's daughter and then, despite pleas from his father, leaves to fight in World War II seeking redemption for his family. During this time, his wife has a son. Benny is killed in Germany when he puts down his gun to play a piano. His son, Tony, grows up during the 1950s on Long Island with the back drop of the beat poets and jazz music. It is during his childhood that we see the last of Zalmie now an old man and abandoned by his mob, on TV who's testifying against the mob explaining "America has been good to me. It's time I gave something back". While the gangsters complain that they should have killed him, one of them notes that Zalmie was finally able to "sing" in some fashion after all.

Tony

Though Tony has plenty of material possessions, he wants something more. The lad eventually succumbs to the Beat philosophy and hits the open road. Tony meets a blonde, blue-eyed girl in Kansas and immediately falls in love. They spend the night together in a corn field. He leaves the next day for what may lie ahead in California.

There he finds a niche writing songs for a rock group fronted by Frankie, a self-destructive female lead singer. The band becomes successful but slowly starts to decompose because of drug addictions. An animation sequence showing the group in concert is set to Jefferson Airplane's 1960s hit, Somebody to Love, and is inter-cut with live action stock footage and photos of various important events of the decade. Tony is given LSD and he staggers on to stage and falls off. In the next scene he is in the hospital in a body cast. For a while he is seen using a cane though he soon recovers.

The band plays a concert at a venue in Kansas following Jimi Hendrix (who "performs" Purple Haze). Frankie ODs and Tony--a heroin addict himself--plunges into despair. Little Pete, Tony's illegitimate son (by the farm girl Tony had slept with), shows up. Tony recognizes him immediately, and it is implied that the boy does too, but they never address one another as father and son.

Pete

Tony and Pete move to New York City and live on the streets, barely getting by. Tony resorts to peddling drugs while Pete begins learning how to be tough on the streets and tries to learn the guitar. Tony takes any money that Pete earns. Tony gives Pete a his grandfather's harmonica, then he takes Pete's guitar and tells him to wait on a park bench. Sometime later, a guy comes by and gives Pete a small package saying that it was from Tony and that Tony says "Fairwell". The package presumably has concaine in it and this is how Pete begins dealing.

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