Politics & Power Quote by Ralph Bakshi

Bakshi’s compliment lands with a barb hidden in the bouquet. “The rise of anime had to happen” frames anime less as a quirky import than as an inevitability: the medium didn’t just arrive, it filled a vacuum left by an American animation industry that spent decades treating cartoons as disposable kids’ fare. Coming from a director who spent his career fighting that prejudice, the line reads like a veteran’s grudging respect for a rival market that took the form seriously.

Then he swerves into cultural gatekeeping. “If the Japanese could tell better American stories” is praise packaged as a condition: anime’s global dominance, in his view, would be complete only if it mastered the myths America considers its own - the Western, the gangster saga, the superhero arc - with greater sophistication than Hollywood itself. It’s an oddly imperial benchmark, as if artistic greatness is measured by fluency in American narrative grammar.

The word “oriental” is the tell. It’s dated, and it carries a faint whiff of othering: anime is celebrated, but kept at arm’s length as aesthetically foreign, even when it’s already remixing noir, sci-fi, and melodrama in ways that have shaped American pop culture for years. Bakshi’s “I take my hat off to them” is sincere, yet it also suggests a hierarchy: admiration from an elder statesman of edgy Western animation granting respect to a form he still positions as “the East.”

The subtext is less about Japan than about America’s creative complacency - and Bakshi’s frustration that it took an outside industry to prove what animation could be when it stops apologizing for itself.