Lord of the Rings (1978, directed by Ralph Bakshi)
Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings is interesting, influential, but not entirely successful. Time Out included it as a qualified entry on its list of the 50 greatest animated films, saying, “The film remains a noble failure but the fact that these images stick in the mind even after repeated viewings of Jackson’s towering achievement is a testament to Bakshi’s imagination in bringing Middle Earth to life.”
Many of the images certainly do stick in the mind. The animation mixed several media—the opening prologue communicates the ring’s backstory using pantomime actors behind a red screen. The main narrative is traditional animation with rotoscoping (live-action footage converted to animation frame) for the characters. Optical effects for the magic sequences add a psychedelic feeling. The rotoscoping makes the characters more fluid than the backdrops, often taking viewers into the Uncanny Valley. However, the disconcerting look perfectly works when the Black Riders arrive, making them truly otherworldly.
Some may argue the various animation styles create a psychedelic effect fitting the 1970s. However, the strange visual mix looks more like cost-cutting than deliberate strangeness. For comparison, consider the extremely strange 1980 anthology film Heavy Metal. This anthology gleefully changes animation styles as it moves from story (fantasy, sci-fi, horror) to the next. Some stories are coherent, others not. Many stories feature strange or gratuitous content (not unlike the gratuitous sex in Bakshi’s movie Fritz the Cat). Heavy Metal has many odd and objectionable elements but captures the 1970s-1980s fascination with weird fantasy. Bakshi inserts some offbeat energy in his Lord of the Rings movie, but doesn’t put it front and center. The impish weirdness so present in his urban films (Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic) or his later fantasy films (Wizards) doesn’t manifest.
Admittedly, Bakshi was the one person before Jackson who got closest to a cinematic take on Tolkien’s material. It may show how undeveloped the rules were for making a cinematic fantasy film in the 1970s. The next decade saw many more experiments—from cartoons like The Black Cauldron to live-action genre deconstructions like The Princess Bride. Some worked. Others failed miserably. Bakshi’s fantasy projects (Lord of the Rings, Fire and Ice, Wizards) fit solidly in the middle: flawed but always memorable. At their worst, casualties of a genre that hadn’t figured itself out yet.
Come back next week for part 5, where we look at the Rankin-Bass adaptation of Return of the King.