a review of 魔界传奇

2024 CULT MOVIE CHALLENGE WEEK 5: RALPH BAKSHI WEEK I've now seen the top four most popular titles in Bakshi's filmography, and I still have yet to see anything that really justifies his cult following among animation buffs. This one's got a lot of the same hallmarks of Bakshi's other films: Corner-cutting "animation" consisting of barely-rotoscoped live action footage or static storyboards, inelegant off-model character animation that seems to kind of float on top of the backgrounds, and largely incoherent, on-the-fly storytelling. All of that is mixed in with some truly godawful '70s hippy fantasy cliches and horny Heavy Metal-style art colliding with cutesy/twee Precious Moments kitsch, and the result is just a weirdly dated mush. If you compare this to what was already starting to happen with Japanese anime around the same time frame, it's clear that American "alternative" animation was just high off of its own fumes, while Japanese artists were really pushing things towards a more dynamic, cinematic standard.