Still mining the same vein of grotesque unease that’s been the hallmark of much of his storied career, Fritz The Cat and Cool World director Ralph Bakshi has released a nightmarish trailer for his latest short, Last Days Of Coney Island. Introduced by a voiceover from Bakshi, in which the animation legend waxes poetic on the untold stories of Brooklyn in the 1960s, the trailer wastes little time in waging a full-on assault on good taste, cutting almost immediately to the Zapruder footage of JFK getting shot in the head. Not content to show the assassination merely once, Bakshi cuts back to the shot again and again, interspersing it with sketchy animation of his vile, long-necked characters fighting and screeching at each other in a Bosch-esque vision of Hell.
If the trailer proves nothing else, it’s that Bakshi hasn’t lost his skill at provoking disgust, with his vibrantly awful creations leaving the kind of viscerally upset lump in the stomach that even his most gifted imitators—like Ren & Stimpy’s John Kricfalusi—struggle to reach. Funded by Kickstarter, Last Days Of Coney Island ugly madness will likely give Bakshi fans exactly what they hoped to see when they shelled out for more of his work.