Review: Last Days of Coney Island

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Do you want to never un-see the uneasy dreams that, presumably, wake up Ralph Bakshi during the very darkest hours of the night, and leave him sketching semi-lucid cartoons about the grisly, raw edge of society that was 1960’s Coney Island? Good, because Bakshi and his bare-bones team delivered a short film that feels like the punch and the broken jaw.

Last Days of Coney’s dedication to brevity tells a feature-length story in 22 minutes. The assassination of JFK plays here and there, and lends context – context not exposition – to this swirling pot of what-am-I-watching. Bakshi’s cluttered, layered backgrounds and haphazard animation are products of concise storytelling (hint: the backgrounds seem to tell the real story, while the characters and foreground simply exist.) Nothing is reserved for reverence or explanation.

The film holds the audience hostage with a story that read like a serial killer’s note, a collage of depravity and reality. Every character, from the cross-dressing cop to a dwarf that murders his own mom, is a heartbreak that leaves you wishing two things: that a giant ACME nuke would annihilate them and their entire 2D world, and that they make it out of there.

The story revolves around Shorty, the mom killer, and his parasitic relationship to Coney Island. Along the way we meet all the people your parents warned you about: star-crossed lovers Max and Molly, a transvestite prostitute with a heart of gold, and many, many other scream inducing monsters portrayed in jolting, jittery animation. This cartoon doesn’t sugarcoat it kids – and by “kids” I mean Adults Only – we’re all going to die and life is pointless. At least that’s what the heavy-as-a-truck, nihilistic “undertones” suggest.

Ralph Bakshi’s Last Days of Coney Island dissects the components of traditional animation with razor precision, and presents them, fully intact, on a silver plate.