First of all, a digression: last Saturday, like in so many cities across the world, there was a march in Lisbon to protest the murder of George Floyd. I attended with my daughters. People chanted “BLM”, “I Cant Breathe” etc, the best thing about protest marches being the slogans, posters, T-shirts etc people hold and wear, an instance of ephemeral urban art that provided inspiration and fun. Far too many to list, “I'm not Black and I'm not Proud” is in hindsight obvious but nonetheless opportune, but my favourite has to be “It is Literally 2020 and We are Still Protesting this Shit”. Indeed. On to today's entry, Ralph Bakshi's 7th feature animation, Hey Good Lookin´.
Hey Good Lookin´ is set in Brooklyn in 1953 and tells the possibly vaguely semi-autobiographical story of sharp dresser Vinnie, appropriately nicknamed tag along Crazy, and their business with teen gangs Stompers and Chaplains and girlfriends Roz and Eva.
With American Pop out of his system, Bakshi may have felt the need to go back to his roots and that's what he did. No more rotoscope, no live action, just standard animation, the style recognizable if more polished and the vernacular and splatter comparatively subdued. As usual, anecdote and wisecracks make up, however insufficiently, for coherent plot, the only thing almost salvaging the movie being Richard Romanus priceless voice over of Vinnie.
In sum, if you want a CBGB version of West Side Story (Robert Wise, 1960) or a spiced up version of American Grafitti (George Lucas, 1973), you got it. If not, you got it just the same.