Hey, Good Lookin'

The VHS, portal to yesterday.  Savior of film so forgotten there's no money to be made on the DVD.

Together with Coonskin, Hey Good Lookin' is Ralph Bakshi's only film not available on DVD (although the former can be found on high quality 'unofficial' DVD releases).  [note: while writing this I discovered a DVD of questionable origins which calls this film "Coonskin 2"]


Michael Sporn has an excellent post in Johnny Vita and Ira Turek's background work in Fritz the Cat.   And their work on this film is equal to their exceptional backgrounds in that film, even if they don't feel as fresh a decade later.

What sticks out most in Hey Good Lookin' isn't so much the backgrounds, or the story (with similarities to Heavy Traffic), or the design (which maintains that Bakshi problem- too ambitious for the budget) -what sticks out is the sometimes bizarre animation.  Bizarre in a good way.  The animation his cartoon films never really stuck out apart from a scene or two in Coonskin.

Here, some scenes -especially the animation of the character "Crazy" -elevate the film in a way unlike Bakshi's other pictures.

Over the next week, we'll be posting clips from one particular sequence which showcases the dichotomy of animation styles in the film.

Above we have a three field pan over the ancillary characters to begin the sequence.

They're mostly on 8 drawing cycles. Really funny an interesting cycles.

The last two characters fighting aren't on a single discernible cycle.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

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8.

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16.

This animation plays on 2's and 3's.  Leather jacket hooks drawing 11 into 4 for #12.  This is a good way to make a cycle -have different hook up points so the action isn't a constant  repeat.  It gives this animation a lot of it's impact.