Because his style does have to be styleless—flat, simple, unelaborated for the most part—Bakshi has stuck to naturalistic stories with human characters and bildungsroman plots. If you use today's abbreviated animation techniques on animals, you get something about as affecting as Crusader Rabbit. The animals constantly remind the viewer that this is a cartoon he's watching, and as a consequence he remains aware of the art work. With human characters, the viewer more readily sees a cartoon the way he does a live-action movie, as if it were real life. This makes him oblivious to the cartoonishness of it. It also keeps him from asking himself why this movie should have been made as a cartoon in the first place. The whole aesthetic of the cartoon is so extraneous to American Pop that Bakshi actually had his sketch men work from photographs of live models acting...