"They say I'm a revolutionary, but they're all wrong"
About this Quote
Bakshi’s line lands like a shrug aimed at a room full of critics who want to pin a badge on him. “They say” immediately sets up a clash between public narrative and private intent: the label is external, convenient, and slightly lazy. Then comes the pivot - “but they’re all wrong” - which isn’t modesty so much as a refusal to let respectable culture turn his work into a flattering myth.
Context matters. Bakshi came up as American animation’s problem child, pushing sex, race, urban grime, and class anger into a medium everyone insisted was for kids. When you make Fritz the Cat or Coonskin, people reach for “revolutionary” because it’s the only polite way to describe something that feels like an attack on the rules. “Revolutionary” is a compliment that also domesticates: it frames the artist as a heroic exception rather than a symptom of a society that’s already burning at the edges.
The subtext is sharper: Bakshi isn’t trying to lead a movement; he’s trying to tell the truth as he sees it, in a style that refuses to behave. His films don’t read like manifestos. They read like street noise, tabloid panic, and bruised desire - messy, compromised, too alive to be converted into a clean political program. By rejecting the revolutionary tag, he’s also rejecting the expectation of purity. He’s saying: don’t canonize me, don’t sanitize me, don’t pretend this was ever about being inspirational. It was about being impossible to ignore.
Context matters. Bakshi came up as American animation’s problem child, pushing sex, race, urban grime, and class anger into a medium everyone insisted was for kids. When you make Fritz the Cat or Coonskin, people reach for “revolutionary” because it’s the only polite way to describe something that feels like an attack on the rules. “Revolutionary” is a compliment that also domesticates: it frames the artist as a heroic exception rather than a symptom of a society that’s already burning at the edges.
The subtext is sharper: Bakshi isn’t trying to lead a movement; he’s trying to tell the truth as he sees it, in a style that refuses to behave. His films don’t read like manifestos. They read like street noise, tabloid panic, and bruised desire - messy, compromised, too alive to be converted into a clean political program. By rejecting the revolutionary tag, he’s also rejecting the expectation of purity. He’s saying: don’t canonize me, don’t sanitize me, don’t pretend this was ever about being inspirational. It was about being impossible to ignore.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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