Philip Gaston, called The Mouse (Matthew Broderick) escapes from the prison of the medieval city of Aquila. Chased by the guards of the evil Bishop of the city, Philip meets a mysterious knight (Rutger Hauer) with a beautiful hawk and begins to follow him. Philip soon discovers that the knight has been cursed by the Bishop, so that when the night falls...

Udo Kier is a witch hunter apprentice to Herbert Lom. He believes strongly in his mentor and the ways of the church but loses faith when he catches Lom strangling Reggie Nalder to death for calling him impotent. Kier begins to see for himself that the witch trials are nothing but a scam of the church to rob people of their land, money, and other personal belongings of value and seduce beautiful big breasted women. In the end, the towns people revolt, Herbert Lom escapes and poor Udo is tortured to death by the towns people with his own torture devices.

This sweeping epic of Americana follows four generations of angry young men and their music via the animation of director Ralph Bakshi. As the story begins, Russian immigrant song-and-dance man Louis fathers Benny, a jazz pianist who gets killed in WWII but not before fathering Tony, a sullen Brooklyn youth who runs off to San Francisco to write lyrics for a Jefferson Airplane-style acid rock band. Crippled by low self-esteem, Tony blows his chance at the big time and winds up a New York junkie in the 1970s, along with his illegitimate son, who later becomes a cocaine-dealing cartoon composite of Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, and Billy Idol. Featuring music by everyone from Scott Joplin to Jimi Hendrix to Pat Benatar, this rambling feature is a powerfully moving experience thanks to its sheer bravado and endless supply of great music. Bakshi integrates his animation style of rotoscoping (tracing the animation from live film) with historical photos and film footage to tell the story of American popular music in a unique way that sets this ambitious picture into a class all its own.