With Coonskin, Ralph Bakshi convinces me that the sum total of his talent was exhausted in Fritz the Cat, and that even there the chief interest lay in novelty rather than ultimate worth….

As in the equally bad Heavy Traffic, Bakshi is once again mixing live action and cartoon footage, alternating, juxtaposing, and superimposing them by turns. This is stylistically deleterious, rather like mixing Bach and the Rolling Stones. Each genre may have its own validity, but each sets up different responses, different degrees of involvement: the cartoon sequences try to make the fantastic real, which is fair enough; but the obtrusion of live action makes the real people look out of place, ridiculous, unreal (especially since Bakshi uses a great deal of deliberate distortion and coloristic hocus-pocus), and, finally, makes even the cartoon characters diminished and impotent, dwarfed by the human presences.

Moreoever, Bakshi proves yet again...