Reading Unfiltered mimics the experience of watching one of Bakshi's films.

Ralph Bakshi, during the course of his tempestuous and controversial career, managed to do virtually everything described in the above quote, at least in a figurative sense. That career is now chronicled in a long-overdue biography by Jon M. Gibson and Chris McDonnell. When I interviewed Ralph Bakshi in 2001, my first thought was that Ralph Bakshi does not think like anyone doing animation in Hollywood. My second thought was that Ralph Bakshi does not even think like most independent animators, either. It is this Ralph Bakshi, tearing through the cultural landscape like a cartoon juggernaut run amok, that can be found in the pages of Gibson and McDonnell's book.

In the pages of Unfiltered, Bakshi comes across as an unstoppable force; when the man had something to express or create he did so with a raging disregard for the opinions, viewpoints, and sensitivities of others, yet this is not as sociopathic as it sounds. Ralph Bakshi followed the muse of his own creativity through obstacles and barriers that would probably have stopped other animators at the storyboard stage.

The author's coverage of the early years at Terrytoons (Ralph's first job) is essential to understanding the man. He took advantage of a loose and virtually rudderless studio system and essentially promoted himself to animator in defiance of union rules. As Bakshi put it, "I wasn't there to paint fuckin' cels." Bakshi was able to do so, as this book reveals, through the utter conviction that he was making important statements while raising the cultural capital of animation in American culture. To a large degree, he succeeded. Bakshi inspired and influenced countless numbers of today's animators; in his semi-retirement today he is a figure of esteem and respect.

Gibson and McDonnell write in a rough-hewn, colloquial style throughout the book. This works rather well since many of the quotes by Bakshi seem to be either angry or profane. The prose is, in fact, as unconventional as the subject of the book, including such locutions as "Ralph's aim to make cartoons balls-out honest." Reading Unfiltered thus mimics the experience of watching one of Bakshi's films.

The book is uneven in some regards. Gibson and McDonnell seem to present Bakshi as animation's equivalent of Quentin Tarentino (who wrote the forward) or at least Sam Peckinpah, even though Bakshi made a different statement with his use of violence. Three of the double-page spreads in the book depict characters getting riddled with bullets, and the most violent images from Bakshi's film are inevitably the ones that show up in the book. The authors also give very heavy coverage to Bakshi's first three films (Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic, and Coonskin), which were also the most controversial. Later films in the Bakshi canon get far less print, even though they were as daring in their way as the aforementioned three.