American Pop is the product of a mature Bakshi. The anger, frustration, and intensity of Traffic and Coonskin are more controlled and focused. Bakshi's vision of America, while still ambivalent, reflects the changes that have occurred in both the filmmaker and his society in the last decade. Bakshi equates his personal and fantasy life with the recent American experience, synthesizing the two in this dramatic history of four generations of an immigrant family trying to make it in America. He understands both the creative and destructive power of the American Dream as only someone who has believed in it and has been disillusioned can. American Pop is in the tradition of The Great Gatsby: a brilliant indictment of the American Dream of Success.

American Pop follows a poor Jewish family from turn-of-the-century Russia, where a pogrom forces them to immigrate to America, to Los Angeles in the Eighties...