Not for the Pixar Crowd: Ralph Bakshi on "Last Days of Coney Island" | Interviews

But you didn't just document race relations, you took a rather daring approach. Just to give another example of an approach that's rather novel and ground-breaking: you recorded real life conversations for use on "Fritz the Cat's" soundtrack, like the ones of Black Panther members talking in a Harlem bar. How hard was it to unobtrusively record those kinds of conversations?

That's a very good question. This is my learning curve: by increments, and increments. In other words—I was trying to find a way to express what I felt about living on the streets, growing up in Brownsville, having the experiences I had. And animation was always very ... storyboarded. You would walk into a studio with live actors, and each guy would say one line at a time. And if the guy slurred, or spoke over another guy, the sound recorder would cut the scene and say, "No good, we gotta keep all the lines separate." So I slowly was trying to break that down, and learning as I went. I took photographs of New York City, and I traced the backgrounds of the East Village for "Fritz the Cat." Now, that's nothing today, but that was amazing then! Because suddenly, animation was on location. These are the real streets we walked down. I was trying to get to a certain documentary realism with the sound, and everything.

The Black Panthers, and those guys: I bring them up to my studio, I turn on the tape recorder. We have a lot of drinks on my table. And we talk, and I edit the tracks. That's like old-time radio. I grew up with radio; we couldn't afford one. Radio was fantastic, with all those old stories retold. And I knew that you could edit tape to do whatever you want, to cut that line out, or cut those lines together. It was part of jazz, part of the improvisational nature of the film. It's like what the street photographers would do in their day. It was all part of my life, those textures, and those feelings. You want to get some hippie kids to talk in "Fritz the Cat"? Go find some hippie girls in Washington Square Park. Give 'em five bucks, and they'll talk your head off. [Laughs] Maybe even get laid afterwards, I don't know.

On "Coonskin," I recorded people singing and screaming in a church. The sound engineer quit. "I'm not putting my name up on that crap," because the sound was so natural. I said "What are you talkin' about?" And he walked out of the room. I had to get them all to sit down, and re-record them. Those are the kind of problems I had. It was funny, really funny. I was a young man; I was hot-headed.

Let's move, to use your phrase, to on your "learning curve" to "Lord of the Rings." You get even more audacious with that film with your "moving paintings" approach. You had already worked with a live-action cast in short sequences from "Coonskin" and "Heavy Traffic." But you only animated your "Lord of the Rings" adaptation after filming it with a live-action cast. Can you describe the challenges and the rewards you got from that "moving paintings" approach?