Last Days of Coney Island (2015) User Reviews

Under the Paving Stones, The Beach!

[nikitalinivenko · 6/10 · 9 September 2019]

Not long ago, I watched Frank Mouris' "Coney" (1975), a five minute short bit of film composed of dynamic shots of mid-70's Coney Island, captured from smart angles, and skillfully edited together into an afternoon project where one can feel how ecstatically Mouris approached his subject. Bakshi approaches the same subject thru his animation at least as enthusiastically and fondly and wonderfully roughly. And just like "Coney", this brief snippet of nostalgia is a haze, it is a mood of a time and place, it is a hunter Thompson-esque memoir. It's Fear and Loathing come to Coney Island, and it's a helluva fun trip. It took Bakshi a whole lifetime to get there, but he got there - his finest work.

The quality lies in the absurdity

[Horst_In_Translation · 6/10 · 12 April 2018]

"Last Days of Coney Island" is an American English-language animated short film from 2015. It runs for slightly over 20 minutes only and was written and directed by pretty legendary filmmaker Ralph Bakshi. And if you take a look at that, you really would not expect this from a man in his mid-70s. It is obscene, it is over-the-top (mostly in a good way) and it is pretty nasty. But these adjectives are also the reason why it is fairly good. It just fits in terms of animation, general approach, story and characters. It took me a little while to get used to it, but once you manage to look past, or even better appreciate, the absurdity, you are in for a bit of a treat. I may consider watching a series based on this little movie, even if it seems highly unlikely at this point that it ever gets made I guess. And if it is one thing, then it's different and that is where the charm of it is hidden. I am sure many people won't see any appeal in this one at all and maybe give it a 2 out of 10 or even lower, but I cannot even blame them. Personal taste and perception play a major role in how you appreciate this work and if you don't like it, then that's perfectly fine. I may be a bit of an exception here because I think it's one you will either love or hate. it is fast with all kinds of transformations and never makes sense really. But it does not need to in order to be a success. And a lesson on style. i give it a thumbs-up. Worth checking out.

as out of this world as anything Bakshi's done (probably more-so)

[Quinoa1984 · 10/10 · 29 October 2015]

Finally, on his 77th birthday, the first film from Ralph Bakshi in many years has hit the web. One wonders after so many years if it will still have the same punch and kick that those films from the 1970's that knocked people off their feet did (Heavy Traffic, Coonskin, Wizards, Hey Good Lookin, American Pop). Oh boy does it ever! It's 22 minutes of unfiltered Bakshi, almost (no, definitely) to the point of over-load. I couldn't get enough of it and watched it twice back to back.

Does it have a story? Yeah, it kind of does. It follows two guys, one is Max, a shlubby sort of man who loves Molly, and the other guy is Terry, a guy who runs the 'freak-show' on Coney Island, and we see their fates rise and fall over time. It's set in the 1960's, but it's not at all set in any kind of realistic world. Or, I should say, it IS realistic to what Bakshi was feeling and thinking back then and for all the years since: he has backgrounds and buildings in jagged shapes and smears, with watercolors that look like they're bleeding profusely all around the characters. It's like Max, Terry and Molly are in the middle of a gigantic cluter-f*** of a collage.

In other words, this is Bakshi working without a net, and it's thrilling and brutal to watch. Brutal in not just the violence - there's some parts where you see these cartoon characters get cut up and (no s***) butchered, and it's shocking and at the same time very funny because of how manic it comes out as - but also in its general presentation. Bakshi's characters are drawn and we can see that, even as this was likely animated in a computer; they all seem to have the pencil lines going about, and that's rare to see today (maybe just unheard of in a time where animation is cute and hip like on TV or with what Pixar is doing). This isn't really 'cute'. Last Days of Coney Island feels like a howl of pain and misery, but done up in such an artistic way that it's invigorating in a strange way.

Here, it's like you get an entire world poured out of some guy's head with animation: sometimes there's clips from old movies or newsreels (i.e. Lee Harvey Oswald and Kennedy loom large here, like the ghosts that never can really leave, certainly not in 1960's working class places). It's only 22 minutes long, again, not a feature like in the past (only so much money from online donations), but it feels like you get more than you could've expected. Just in the story Terry tells about "My True Story" from when he was a kid, I felt like I got a rich experience that felt more like poetry than traditional storytelling.

I should note as the one criticism: it's crude. Oh God, it's so crude. But in a sense that's what I love about it; it definitely will not appeal to all tastes, and its maker I'm sure intended it that way. It's a jazzy riff on an era and mind-set, of big dumb guys and big broads who sometimes, once in a while, slept with circus clowns. If this is Bakshi's last work, he went out with a cannon shot to a skull.