Coonskin has met with protests from some who assert that it's racist. I'm not going to comment on the justice of the protests…. But if there are going to be protests, then they ought to be by everyone, because the whole human race, as exemplified in this country at this time, is what is being skewered by this scintillating, vicious, outrageous and outraged film. (p. 165)

Coonskin, on any vulgarity meter, may be the worst of [Bakshi's films]—for instance, the very first words are "Fuck you," and there are such scenes as one in which a character gets tugged along by his infinitely elastic phallus—but it's hard to think of this good film as having any other tone than the one it has. I'm glad that other people had more faith in Bakshi from the start than I had. (p. 166)

The episodic story line, which lags and pants, doesn't much matter. What does matter, greatly, is the way the picture is made, and the material to which the story line gives occasion.

The story of the three animal characters is done either in straight animation or a mixture of cartoon and photography…. In Coonskin [Bakshi uses it] purposefully. Here it can be seen as the old con's fantasticated story, in cartoon, poised against the real world as he imagines it to be—shown sometimes in photography.

Bakshi only rarely uses real and animated characters in the same shot; usually, when he mixes, he puts animated characters against photographed backgrounds that have been altered or juxtaposed to fine effect. When the three animals decide to go North, we cut to our first view of Harlem, live: a wintry street at night with a lone bareheaded black man playing a trumpet in the middle of it; a "squeezed" shot—that is, a very wide-screen shot shown through a regular lens so that we get a compressed and elongated El Greco touch. Bakshi uses this effect again behind animation from time to time. (pp. 166-67)

Many of the cartoon characters are drawn with wild wit, especially a hippo-like black religious leader and the Godfather (white, of course)—not a Brando caricature but a puffy, incredibly ravaged old face with an obscenely dyed mustache. One usage is startling. Some of the young black women are drawn with faces like snouts—not just snout noses, the whole face from the hairline forward looks like the end of an elephant's trunk. But Bakshi, unsentimental, refuses to spare the people he likes: they, too, have to pass through the channel of his wit.

The flood of pictures—ingenious, bitter, funny, beautiful, lewd, touching—cascades across the screen. Although the script sags, the pictorial inventiveness never does. Oppression of blacks, black crime, black anger, black silliness, black resilience—all the elements of black life that are the center of the film—are not editorial matters to Bakshi, they are artistic matters. He is no Stanley Kramer of animation, inflated with a Good Cause, then plunking it onto film somehow. As in all good art, the way he works is part of why he works. Bakshi has been finding his style through his first two pictures, fairly firmly in the second. Now he has it. What he sees—what he saw before he started—is, first and finally, what the picture is about, what he has to "say."

But I've omitted an important element of his style: the sound track. Bakshi has ears as well as eyes. First there is fine music by Chico Hamilton. Second, those voices, those black speaking voices. It's not a matter of yuk-yuk har-har chocolate gargles. It's a matter of richness, orchestration of timbres, the humor and pathos of inflection, the acute interplay. Bakshi's animated sequences have one of the best sound tracks I can remember in animation, immediate and warm. (pp. 167-68)

The only scene that stands out as extraneous is one between a live white couple and cartooned blacks that is just warmed-over Lenny Bruce. Most of the rest—the Godfather and his blatantly homosexual sons, the devil-angel who flits around the Mafia (a fantastically good touch), the "God-fearing" black brothel where the preacher marries couples at night and divorces them in the morning, dozens of other sharp scenes—is digested into a flashing acid stream. Bakshi has even found a way to work in a Jewish caricature, as if he had looked over the film when finished, had found that his blistered New York contained no Jews, and mended the lack by putting in a Jew as Mafia crony.

But, from the wry joke of the title on, this film is not against groups—it's against snarling, short-sighted, scrabbling, egocentric, murderous American city life, particularly as it beats up on blacks. Progressively through his three films Bakshi, who is white, has staked his territory—the American city as hell, racially torn hell, engulfing people who are learning how to live in hell. Coonskin is a flawed but fierce little work of art, done at a high level of imaginative energy and with some touches of brilliance. (p. 168)