Uncle Remus, '75

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

COONSKIN

Directed and Written by RALPH BAKSHI

Before it was released, Coonskin was a "controversial" movie. Representatives of CORE who saw it in preview denounced it for trafficking in vicious racial stereotypes, and this anger caused its original distributor, Paramount, to relinquish it gratefully to a smaller, less visible competitor. Once this happened, of course, the film was defended by other black groups charging censorship. They claimed that although Coonskin indeed showed blacks as hookers, hoodlums and con artists, it also showed the principal characters as tough, smart and ultimately victorious over still worse oppressors--mainly, corrupt cops and vile mafiosi.

As so often happens when hassles like this break out, people get so busy taking a position that they lose sight of the fact that the object of their contention is not worth the hot air they expend on it. In the case of Coonskin, a slovenly ineptitude of design and execution, not a desire to affront, should be the subject of all the debate.

Abortive Attempt. The film is a blend of animation and live action. Like Director Bakshi's previous inexplicable successes, Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic, the movie labors under the delusion that outrageousness is a synonym for wit, ugliness of line and color a form of style, crudeness a necessary ingredient of vitality.

The ineptly staged live sequences, which add nothing to the film but enough footage to bring it to feature length, deal with an abortive attempt by two black men to spring a colleague from a Southern jail. They frame an animated tale in which three more successful crooks--Rabbit, Bear and Fox--come North and conquer Harlem by wresting control of its rackets from Whitey.

If Bakshi had any genuine skill as a satirist or draftsman, these spiritual descendants of the Uncle Remus characters might have become participants in the sort of Swiftian drama he apparently intended. There are hints here and there of a desire to demonstrate that black street styles are not stereotypes at all but put-ons. Such disguises can--sometimes--help individuals to get at least some of what they want with out permitting a hostile world to know that they are trying. Bakshi's sensibility is too vulgar for such an exercise. With a newspaper storm breaking around him, he has been reduced to protesting that "I love black people, I love the guys I grew up with" (in Brooklyn's Brownsville section in the '50s, when it was becoming a black ghetto). One is inclined to believe him. No one who does not wear white sheets in public could intentionally offer such a blatantly distasteful representation of blacks on the screen at this late date and hope to get away with it. Irony was surely intended--and sorely missed in the end. Bakshi has been condemned for the wrong reasons, but condemnation of some sort is, alas, richly merited in his case.

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