"Live action writers will give you a structure, but who the hell is talking about structure? Animation is closer to jazz than some kind of classical stage structure"
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Bakshi’s swipe at “structure” is less a technical note than a cultural provocation: he’s refusing the prestige hierarchy that treats live action as the grown-up medium and animation as the cute annex. The first clause concedes the conventional wisdom - live action writers hand you a scaffolding, a screenplay logic that reassures investors and awards voters. Then he detonates it with a street-level “who the hell,” a deliberately anti-academic burst that frames structure as an obsession of gatekeepers, not makers.
The jazz comparison does real work. Jazz isn’t chaos; it’s disciplined improvisation, a form where timing, riffing, and feel matter as much as a predetermined map. Bakshi is arguing that animation’s power lives in its ability to pivot mid-gesture: a character can stretch, snap, dissolve, become metaphor instantly. That elasticity rewards artists who think in movement and rhythm, not just in plot beats. “Classical stage structure” becomes shorthand for inherited rules - three acts, blocking, realism - the polite architecture of theatre and filmed drama. Animation, for Bakshi, doesn’t have to obey gravity or decorum, so why should it obey the same dramaturgy?
Context matters: Bakshi built his name by dragging American animation out of the Saturday-morning nursery into adult mess, satire, sex, and racial tension. He’s also pushing back against the industrial pipeline where animation is treated as storyboards executing a script. The subtext is a demand for auteur freedom: let animation swing, riff, and get ugly if that’s what the moment needs.
The jazz comparison does real work. Jazz isn’t chaos; it’s disciplined improvisation, a form where timing, riffing, and feel matter as much as a predetermined map. Bakshi is arguing that animation’s power lives in its ability to pivot mid-gesture: a character can stretch, snap, dissolve, become metaphor instantly. That elasticity rewards artists who think in movement and rhythm, not just in plot beats. “Classical stage structure” becomes shorthand for inherited rules - three acts, blocking, realism - the polite architecture of theatre and filmed drama. Animation, for Bakshi, doesn’t have to obey gravity or decorum, so why should it obey the same dramaturgy?
Context matters: Bakshi built his name by dragging American animation out of the Saturday-morning nursery into adult mess, satire, sex, and racial tension. He’s also pushing back against the industrial pipeline where animation is treated as storyboards executing a script. The subtext is a demand for auteur freedom: let animation swing, riff, and get ugly if that’s what the moment needs.
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