Quotes by Ralph Bakshi

• I would like to have the original ending to my Lord of the Rings instead of the one they released. In my original cut I had the victory at Helm's Deep as the final sequence.
• Wizards was my homage to Tolkien in the American idiom. I had read Tolkien, understood Tolkien, and wanted to do a sort of fantasy for American kids, and that was Wizards.
• All the old great companies were run by guys who knew what an animator meant, and guys who knew how to draw. All the companies today are run by executives.
• Animation is tremendously resilient. Animation will recover, as art always recovers. There's always cycles of good art.
• As an artist, I want to interpret my feelings - not run across the street and ask what my mother thinks.
• Cartooning at its best is a fine art. I'm a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, which also allows me to paint my cartoons.
• Film has to describe and show.
• I am not interested in slickness for the sake of slickness.
• I animated 20 years at Terry Toons. It's important to know that animators like pizza and a raise once in a while, and you've got to treat them with love.
• I draw what I feel, which is no more than doing my job.
• I had the X rating on my films. Now they do as much on The Simpsons as I got an X rating for Fritz the Cat.
• I thought I had the rights to The Lord of the Rings. I don't know how Jackson ended up with the rights.
• You can't second-guess yourself as a filmmaker.
• One of the best animated films I've seen come out of Disney was the Tarzan movie. I wasn't crazy about the story or the design on Tarzan's face, but the traditional animation was spectacular.
• What's most important in animation is the emotions and the ideas being portrayed. I'm a great believer of energy and emotion.
• Too many of Disney animators, and a lot try to emulate Disney, are trying to hit what they call quality levels. They're boring mannerisms.
• They say I'm a revolutionary, but they're all wrong.
• The rise of anime had to happen. If the Japanese could tell better American stories, it would go through the roof. They still tell stories which are very much oriental. I take my hat off to them.
• I miss animation very passionately. Not continuously, but every once in a while I would die to do another film.
• Painting pictures didn't make me a lot of money. I have to eat.
• I'm having the same problems today that I had when I first started, saying that outrageous adult animation works.
• My movies continue to be found and be sold because there's something going on in them.
• My good films were independent and my bad films were not.
• Most of the animated films I watched, the emotions are all prepackaged like canned music, the hand actions, the sighs.
• Lord of the Rings made me realize that I'm not interested in doing anyone else's work.
• Look what Disney's done to their animation department. There wasn't an animator in charge of their animation unit!
• Live action writers will give you a structure, but who the hell is talking about structure? Animation is closer to jazz than some kind of classical stage structure.
• I'm the first to admit that I can't be as good as Tolkien, and a movie can never be as good as Tolkien.
• Sweetheart, I'm the biggest ripped-off cartoonist in the history of the world, and that's all I'm going to say.