Well, everyone, it’s happening, we’re
coming up on the 20th anniversary of Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings, which means it’s the season for comprehensive
retrospectives on all things Tolkien. Jackson’s adaptation is an undeniable triumph:
both a lushly realized, cohesive vision of the text, and a masterpiece of savvy fandom
marketing. Jackson made extremely effective use of the
internet during production, curating an official fan club that lent the
production a sense of authority and consensus. Whatever disagreements over adaptational decisions,
the boxed set Extended Edition DVDs still stand as a masterpiece of filmmaking and an
undeniable set of bonafides, the display of a passion project wrought on
a scale that comes along once in a lifetime, with dozens of hours of documentary combing
over every minute detail of the process and effort that went into lovingly rendering the
world. But, before we all get swept away in that
fervor, like Nazgul in the river, I wanted to turn some attention towards Ralph Bakshi’s
1978 adaptation. [Swelling Music] Now, I’m not setting out here to pit these
adaptations against each other, but comparison is unavoidable.
The Jackson trilogy looms large in culture, monolithic even.
Not only is it the first version of the story an entire generation was exposed to,
it has effectively mediated an agreed-upon interpretation of the text by virtue of its
success as an adaptation, by virtue of looking and feeling “right”
to the audience’s eye, whatever that nebulous word means in this
context. Bakshi’s version is undeniably far more
fraught. It is less cohesive, more reliant on an existing
familiarity with the source material, frustratingly paced, and ultimately incomplete.
It is often more accurate, more strictly faithful to the text,
but just as often more hollow, with details that are true to the literal
words on the page while missing the underlying point of those words.
But it’s not without its merits. Many of the adaptation decisions are interesting
or excellent in their own right, presenting an interpretation of the text that
is wildly different, but just as compelling as Jackson’s. It is technologically decades ahead of itself,
biting off far more than it can chew in pursuit of technological solutions that are now standard
practice. This is a source of a lot of the film’s
inconsistency, but it’s definitely a fascinating inconsistency. There is, all-in-all a lot more to it than
just being a weird early crack at a fantasy epic,
and I think that’s worth talking about. So let me tell you the story of a coked-out
pervert from Brooklyn and the movie he so desperately wanted to make.
[Bombastic orchestral music] First of all, The Lord of the Rings, the book,
was not a runaway hit in the United States. While the component novels were published
in the US within six months of their respective UK releases,
the publisher, Houghton Mifflin, under-estimated how popular the books would be.
The Hobbit had been successful, but that was a children’s book released almost twenty
years earlier. A lot had changed in America since 1937,
and so the initial print run of Fellowship was only 1500 copies. Now, if you only print 1500 copies it’s
hard to sell more than 1500 copies. So even though that print run did sell out
it’s not a clear indicator of the actual audience for the book
and doesn’t really give you a good idea of how many you should have printed.
Consequently it took years for sales to ramp up as Houghton Mifflin opted to trickle import
copies from the UK instead of issuing new print runs. Somewhere in the early 1960s this triggered
a protectionist policy in US copyright law that, at the time,
mandated a domestic manufacturing quota. Failing to meet the quota, The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings fell into the public domain in the United States
where they sat until a law was passed in 1994 to restore the copyright to a number of similarly
odd cases where otherwise still-copyrighted foreign
works had fallen into public domain in the US
as a consequence of noncompliance with formalities like manufacturing requirements. But, point is, even though sales of the books
had picked up dramatically over the course of the 60s,
particularly gaining traction with the counterculture crowd who identified with Tolkien’s pastoral
environmentalism, many of these publications, like the 150,000
copy Ace Books paperback printing in 1965, weren’t licensed and paid no royalties back
to Tolkien. This sparked a publicity battle over the issue,
with Tolkien working with Ballantine books to produce an authoritative authorized paperback
edition, but is also when the books finally surge in
popularity, a decade after their initial publication. By the 1970s the Tolkien estate was actively
courting adaptations of JRR’s work, since a licensed adaptation would actually
pay royalties, and interest was finally there.
In 1969 United Artists purchased the international film rights to Lord of the Rings directly
from Tolkien and they started trying to get a viable script
and interested director. The idea of a film version of Lord of the
Rings had already been floating around for years,
with various speculative projects dating back to the 50s,
but while the counterculture crowd that had latched on to the books was increasingly proving
to be a viable economic bloc, it was still not quite mainstream popular,
which limited the possible budget of any project. United Artists didn’t have much luck,
their attempts to get a full Lord of the Rings project rolling largely fell apart as the
books developed a reputation of being “unfilmable,” not because it was impossible,
but because the budget would never be there to do justice to the book’s many grand locations
and fanciful sets. The story was simply too long to realistically
compress into a single film, but setting out to make multiple films without
assured success was folly, and surely audiences would revolt over an
incomplete story. Any attempt at the time would be too compromised
to satisfy the book’s fans, and too cheap looking to satisfy anyone else. Then along comes an animator named Ralph Bakshi. Born in Palestine, but raised in Brooklyn,
Ralph Bakshi is, ya know, a bit of a character. Everyone else is behind. I’m not ahead.
I’m doing what’s right for an artist who’s doing what he believes in. I'm not ahead of
my times. What I am is honest. What they are is dishonest. He cut his teeth as an animator in the 1950s
and 60s at Terrytoons and Paramount working on television shows like Mighty Mouse, Deputy
Dawg, and Spider-Man before pivoting to feature films in the 1970s. The Lord of the Rings was Bakshi’s fifth
feature film as a director and it is notable as both a culmination of his technical interests
as an animator, utilizing mixed media as both a cost saving
and aesthetic tool, and the ways in which it deviates from Bakshi’s
normal narrative style. Bakshi was raised in the densely urban Brooklyn
neighbourhood of Brownsville, a historically poor neighbourhood that while
originally dominated by Jewish factory workers saw a heavy influx of Black residents through
the 40s, 50s, and 60s. This multiracial urban milieu forms the foundation
of his early theatrical work, his first three films are all considered part
of the urban street film genre, but, before that,
alright, to put this career in context we need to back up to the sixties again. The sixties were not kind to theatrical animation
in America. Owing to shifts in the way that movies were
exhibited, starting in the 50s, shorts became less financially viable, and
so most of the money for animation shifted to the rapidly expanding market of television,
which Hanna-Barbera and Warner Brothers dominated. Theatrical animation was largely the domain
of Walt Disney, both the company and the man. Walt had been an absolutely titanic figure
in the medium for decades, but on that front things were not great: his
health was declining, and the output of the studio dropped precipitously
leading up to his death in 1966. While the studio had managed to put out a
new animated feature approximately every fifteen months on average over the course of the 40s
and 50s, they only managed to complete three films
in the 60s: One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Sword
in the Stone, and The Jungle Book, the animation studio relying mostly on reissues
of their back catalogue for the decade. While these films performed commercially well,
The Jungle Book in particular being a huge hit releasing in 1967 as Walt Disney’s final
film, they were not particularly challenging.
These were interwoven with re-issues of Bambi, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Snow White, Fantasia,
and Peter Pan. And the follow up, the first feature after
Walt’s death, is 1970’s The Artistocats, which is just the absolute pinnacle of Disney’s
historical reputation for anodyne garbage. So this is what feature animation looks like
if you’re a twenty-something in 1970, this is what you’ve grown up with.
There’s other stuff, of course, there’s always something on the periphery,
but overwhelmingly the legacy of theatrical animation is safe, bright, unscary, trapped
decades in the past, and slowly dying. In 1968 Ralph Bakshi, moving into his 30s
and frustrated with the stagnant status quo of the industry,
broke away and formed his own animation studio in Brooklyn.
Initially the studio found work on shows like Rocket Robin Hood and Spider-Man,
but Bakshi had ambitions to move into feature films.
He had a number of projects already in mind, including The Lord of the Rings which he had
fallen in love with after the books really broke out in the 60s.
While he would spend years working on a half dozen projects in parallel,
particularly trying to get in good graces with United Artists who held the film rights
for Lord of the Rings, the first film he was able to secure full
funding for was an adaptation of comic artist Robert Crumb’s underground hit Fritz the
Cat. Released in 1972 with an X rating the film
was perverted, juvenile, rambling, gratuitously violent, unfocused, aggressively political,
and a huge success. Despite the rating limiting distribution options,
the spectacle of a cartoon that was the opposite of all things Disney drew in a worldwide audience
to the tune of $90 million dollars against a budget of somewhere between $700,000 and
$1.3 million. Following the success of Fritz the Cat Bakshi
was able to fund and distribute the animated quasi-autobiography, pseudo-crime film Heavy
Traffic, released in 1973. While not the astronomic success of Fritz,
Heavy Traffic made decent money against its comparably slim budget and is considered a
box office success. Both of these films did well with critics
and remain artistically relevant. Personally I think Heavy Traffic is the better
of the two, and certainly Bakshi’s best film from the era,
though it does encapsulate Bakshi’s overall sensibilities as a creative. There is a fixation on Black culture, the
complicated racial identity of being Jewish in America,
a deep and total distrust of police, disillusionment with the results of the counterculture movement,
and a keen sense of the ways the structure of society is arranged to maintain an underclass. Artistically there is a fascination with the
idea of capturing reality. Photographs of real locations are used as
trace references for backgrounds in Fritz, and many backgrounds in Heavy Traffic are
just stylized photographs. Both films use some documentary recording
for secondary dialogue, captured by Bakshi while walking around Harlem
and Brooklyn or interviewing people he met on the streets or in bars. >> Man 1: Look, I’m paying my taxes.
>> Woman: The money is what’s happening. >> Man 1: Hey!
>> Woman: See what I mean? See what I mean? >> Man 1: No, what I’m talking about
>> Woman: It all counts, that is what’s happening, I’m talking about as far as,
like, if you wanna be revolutionary you get some bread first, and then you can talk trash.
>> Man 2: Whitey blind us with religion. There’s also a pervasive horniness as it’s
rare to go an entire scene with a woman without a breast popping out for no reason,
the slapstick humour of Terrytoons is often extended into bloody hyperviolence,
and there is a complicated relationship with queer characters.
While Bakshi’s eye as a director is certainly sympathetic to drag queens, trans women, and
gay men, they clearly form an integral part of the
real spaces and communities that he tries to simulate in his art,
narratively they tend to be present just long enough to be physically brutalized as a condemnation
of police and bigots. While these two films demonstrated that adult-oriented
animation could be financially and critically successful,
not much really changed in the wider perception of animation.
These films were still essentially novelties. While there was some attempt by others to
capitalize on the success of Bakshi’s films in America,
this mostly took the form of distributors quickly repackaging English dubs of adult
animation from Japan and Europe. Bakshi would follow this up with his most
controversial film, Coonskin, an adaptation of the Uncle Remus stories transplanting
them from the rural American South into a gangster story in Harlem.
While this movie occupies something of a place alongside contemporary blaxploitation films
like Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Dolemite,
and Shaft, and has been praised for the depth of the
references in its adaptation, such as including details from the African
myths that predate Uncle Remus, it also heavily utilizes historical racist
caricature and minstrel imagery. There’s a lot of debate about the artistic
intent behind the film, whether or not the use of this imagery is
intended to shock and shame the white institutions that created the imagery in the first place,
how effective it is at that, and whether or not protests of the film in
1975 were justified, but reflecting on it 45 years later the main
thing that stands out to me is a sort of fixation at play,
like Bakshi just wanted to also make a blaxploitation film,
a genre that sprang out of the kinds of neighbourhoods that he grew up in,
and out of a community that he saw himself as a part of. And reception was far from universal.
The Congress of Racial Equality protested it,
the NAACP supported it as a “difficult satire”, and according to Bakshi the Wu Tang Clan love
it. It’s a very complicated intersection of
politics and influences that ultimately hinge on the question of whether or not this was
Bakshi’s story to tell. Modern commentators have compared it favorably
to Childish Gambino’s “This is America” And I guess at the end of the day the meat
of the film is that the cops and the Mafia suck. [Indistinct Italian Noises] Coonskin was not successful, and did slow
the momentum on Bakshi’s career, but it was still a relatively inexpensive
film and the failure was not a fatal blow to his career as a director. During post-production on Coonskin Bakshi
came up with the concept for Hey Good Lookin’, another street film, this time set in the
fifties, but one in which animated and live-action
characters would interact. Warner Brothers agreed to finance the film
in 1973, and the live action footage was shot, largely
improvisationally, in early 74. However the film would never be completed
as originally conceived, as the process of having live action and animated
characters interact proved to be too labour intensive to complete on the film’s budget
of 1.5 million. A rotoscoping rig was built at Bakshi’s
Brooklyn studio to try and speed up the animation process,
but a series of conflicts between Bakshi and Warner Brothers led to the film’s release
date being pushed back several times before being shelved indefinitely. While Hey Good Lookin’ was trapped in post-production
hell, Bakshi would release his first “family friendly” feature, Wizards,
which is also a departure from his urban-life focused films into an explicit genre film. “Family friendly” is a bit of a weird
misnomer here, though, as the film is still deliberately aimed at adults rather than an
all-ages crowd, but it’s also a lot tamer with less sex,
gore, and profanity. The film was moderately successful, enough
to keep it from being considered a flop, which is somewhat impressive given that the
movie is quite bad. Aside from some notable iconography and some
compelling backgrounds the flow of the film suffers from all the disjointed scene composition
of Bakshi’s earlier films. While that works for Heavy Traffic, a film
about powerless characters trying to find their way in a disjointed world,
it really works against a film that’s so plot-heavy there’s an entire movie's worth
of story dumped on the audience in the prologue. Illuminating history bearing on the everlasting
struggle for world supremacy The first blast was set off by five terrorists
It was a big day in Montegar Delia felt a pull from the sky
The older fairy knew instantly that these were not ordinary twins
The day will come, my brother, where I will return and make this a planet where mutants
rule Politically the film is bizarre.
It is clearly working through a lot of opinions about the anti-war movement,
the protagonists are mostly twee fairies from a literal fantasy land of mushrooms and rainbows
who are mowed down by machine gun wielding mutants hopped up on Nazi propaganda
until the bearded wizard ends the war by shooting skeleton Hitler,
but those opinions haven’t been worked enough to make them coherent or interesting,
and the end result flips rapidly between unbearably treacle and deeply cynical. It’s not cohesive in style, the characters
look like they’re from completely different films,
it’s horny in a way that’s leering and uncomfortable rather than sexy, and it’s
pretty boring. The most notable elements of the film are
all historical trivia. The film was being financed by Fox, and Bakshi
found himself in budget meetings with George Lucas,
who was working on Star Wars at the time, and the two became professional acquaintances.
George asked Ralph to change the working title of War Wizards to avoid conflict with Star
Wars, and Ralph agreed because George let Mark Hamil take time off from Star Wars to
record a part in Wizards. I’m Shaun, leader of the Knights of Stardust
and protectors of Dolan, king of the mountain fairies. It’s also the first film where Bakshi really
experimented with mixing in stylized live action footage,
utilizing various rotoscoping and xerox techniques, to save budget on animating large battle scenes. The film was moderately successful, but Ralph’s
goodwill towards George Lucas came to an end when Star Wars,
released three weeks after Wizards, largely replaced it in theatres. Parallel to the production of most of these
films Bakshi pesters United Artists, who have been stalling out on all their attempts
at getting a Lord of the Rings film rolling. Bakshi says he pitched UA on an animated Lord
of the Rings in 72 and 73, but they didn’t bite.
Then in 75 he convinces Mike Medavoy to give him a chance,
and Medavoy agrees, loosely, to two or three films plus something Hobbit related.
Problem was United Artists already had a script written in 1970 by then-tv-writer John Boorman,
who at this point in 1975 had just written and directed Zardoz. The gun is good There was some conflict over the script, because,
[coughing] well, it is absolutely buckwild with a Galadriel/Frodo
sex scene, Aragorn and Boromir kissing passionately with
Arwen’s blood on their lips, the history of the ring presented as a rock
opera at the Council of Elrons, and Gimli is rebirthed in mud to recall the
ancient ancestral password to Moria. Bakshi convinced Dan Melnyk at MGM to buy
out the project so that they could throw the script out and start over, which they do. So Bakshi starts over on the script with novice
screenwriter Chris Conkling, but when Dan Melnick gets ousted from MGM
in 1976 the new producer, Dick Shepherd, doesn’t seem to know or care about the project at
all, so Bakshi gets in touch with Saul Zaentz,
who had helped him finance Fritz back in 71, and convinces him to buy out the project from
MGM, thus landing the thing back at United Artists. Incidentally Zaentz goes beyond this,
buying out the entirety of Tolkien’s film, stage, and merchandising rights,
which starts a chain reaction that would eventually lead, decades later,
to the troubled production that resulted in The Hobbit: Battle of Five Armies Why does it hurt so much? Unsatisfied with Conkling’s work Bakshi
and Zaentz sideline him and hire Peter S. Beagle,
author of The Last Unicorn, to do a rewrite, which Bakshi and Zaentz are mostly happy with,
and finally in 1976 a theatrical Lord of the Rings film is full-steam-ahead. Before the movie even hits theatres, though,
it has two complications. The first is obviously Bakshi’s reputation
and style. Is Gandalf going to whip his dick out and
piss off the bridge of Khazad-Dum? Will pipe-weed be some dank bud?
Who knows. The second is Rankin/Bass, an American production
company that mostly made seasonal television specials by outsourcing animation to Japan. Rankin/Bass had been working on an adaptation
of The Hobbit as a TV special since 72, and it was looking to broadcast by 77.
Additionally they had already storyboarded a sequel to their Hobbit film utilizing large
chunks of The Return of the King. Both of these would conflict with any Lord
of the Rings film United Artists produced, particularly once Bakshi convinced them the
film could be done justice if it were animated, since audiences would assume they were all
related. But, since the books were still public domain,
Rankin/Bass could do whatever they wanted, at least within the US,
and a lawsuit to intervene succeeded only in securing a broadcast agreement in Canada. Mm, my precious, will it taste delicious? Bakshi’s production, even after settling
down at United Artists, was tumultuous, but mostly in a way that’s probably better
described as indecisive. The script was overhauled several times,
mostly because of arguments about how much of the books should or could be adapted into
a single movie. Bakshi and Beagle ultimately pushed for two
movies, the first encompassing Fellowship and Two
Towers, and intended for this film to be subtitled
Part 1, but United Artists waffled on committing to
a second film. They didn’t outright say no, in a way that
would have pushed the production to commit everything to one film,
or make it more conclusive, but they also left the fate of Part 2 in the
hazy realm of “let’s wait and see what happens.” Of course as history has already borne out,
the sequel was never produced, and the film ends with a disorientingly quick
resolution where Gandalf implies that the Battle of Helm’s Deep is in fact the deciding
moment of victory, end of story. Released in 1978, reaction was lukewarm, but
broadly positive and not terribly harsh. Most of Bakshi’s idiosyncrasies as a director
are either absent or under control. Sort of.
It’s certainly the least juvenile, no one whips their dick out, everyone’s tits stay
inside their shirts, there’s no random comedy skits inserted haphazardly to pad runtime,
and the adaptation is certainly faithful in the sense that the vast majority of the dialogue
is copied directly from the books. But, and this is probably its greatest flaw,
it still exhibits Bakshi’s inability to focus on the story at hand. Jackson’s films, especially Fellowship,
are an illustrative comparison here. Jackson’s films are focused and cohesive.
It’s an adventure story about big events and big emotions, the unbreakable bond of
friendship forged in adversity, the pain of loss, and swelling moments of triumph. You bow to no one. Jackson gets how the characters and plot interweave,
that it’s explicitly a story about how this big adventure changes the characters,
and if you don’t have both then you don’t have the whole. So here’s the problem: Bakshi just isn’t
very good at plot or pacing. He learned his craft working on slapstick
cartoons, and his first three films are effectively just a series of vignettes.
Heavy Traffic is an urban slice-of-life film and Fritz the Cat and Coonskin are both adapted
from explicitly episodic material. This is not strictly a criticism, it works
in Heavy Traffic, it’s not a bad style, there’s nothing
wrong with vignette storytelling, it just needs the right material. But then you get Wizards, which is supposed
to be this really plot-driven adventure story, heavy on worldbuilding,
and it’s just a meandering mess. Unimportant skits drag for minutes,
action scenes repeat stock battle clips endlessly, and important moments resolve in seconds. While less extreme than Wizards, this is unfortunately
the main failing of Lord of the Rings. Bakshi was, for most of the 70s, both extremely
busy, juggling multiple productions simultaneously, and also allegedly on a lot of drugs.
It’s just not a state of mind that’s really conducive to making a film that maintains
a tight focus for two and a half hours, and it shows. The film has a lot of content to try and fit
into its runtime, and yet the flight at the ford is an interminably
long prog rock jam session of Frodo falling off a horse. The story is presented very literally, lifted
straight from the novels, but with little weight for how it all connects
together. This creates a notable problem when the film
transitions from Fellowship into Two Towers, because the adaptation is so faithful to the
books that it feels like you’re at the end of the movie, but it just keeps going. Also the second half of the film is pretty
weak. The sequences get really muddled, a lot of
threads are dropped, presumably to have been picked up in part
2, and there are more and more animation shortcuts
taken as the production ran up against budget constraints. On one hand, the sheer volume of roto done
on the battle of Helm’s Deep is already immense,
but on the other hand there’s a lot of shots like this where you can just outright see
that it’s a guy wearing rubber orc gloves. While otherwise the backgrounds in the film
range from gorgeously stylized paintings to evocative abstract non-landscapes,
for most of the Battle of Helm’s Deep any background or distance is filled with stock
footage of clouds regardless of camera angle. On top of the shortcuts, Bakshi is just generally
not very good at keeping track of the action and geography of his fight scenes,
making them really hard to follow, and the muddy, high contrast artwork doesn’t
help. Then at the end Gandalf rides in and the narrator
implies that this battle defeated Sauron, but also maybe stay tuned for part two? The forces of darkness were driven forever
by the valiant friends of Frodo. As their valiant battle ended, so too ends the first
great tale of The Lord of the Rings. It’s not a strong ending. The film mixes animation styles in a way that
reads like Bakshi was constantly experimenting on-the-fly and how a scene ends up looking
is dictated by what seemed like a cool idea that week,
and while this mixed media style is interesting in its own way,
the inconsistency of it contributes to a sense that there wasn’t a committed idea everyone
was working towards, that the ultimate creative vision was driven
mostly by momentary fascinations. For The Lord of the Rings Bakshi utilized
a hodgepodge of animation formats predominantly based on rotoscoping,
modifying live action footage to various degrees. Some of this involves using the live action
footage as a trace-reference, the final product being a complete replacement,
sometimes it’s a paint-over, effectively just augmenting the original footage
with details like eyes or fangs, and sometimes it’s effectively just a colourization
of a xerox of the original footage. And, no, that’s not being snide, an actual
process that was in use in the 60s, 70s, and 80s involved photocopying line work done on
paper onto cellophane allowing rougher pencil lines to be used without inking.
Earlier versions of this technique is what gives One Hundred and One Dalmatians its distinctly
ragged look. If used on a photograph, however, it crushes
most of the greyscale tones, flattening the image to solid blacks and whites. The second major technique used is solarization,
which was recommended to him by the film’s cinematographer Timothy Galfas.
Solarization, more accurately pseudo-solarization, is a tricky process where the black and white
film is partially developed, then instead of being sent through a process
called fixing, the part of development that stabilizes the
film so it can be handled, the image is re-exposed to light, and sent
through the entire development process a second time. This technique, applied to photochemical film,
is extremely difficult to control, largely relying on trial and error to get
desirable results, but the successful end product is a partially
inverted image, with a common artefact being a strong border
across high contrast boundaries, which can look kinda like an inked outline. Bakshi felt this stylization process was sufficiently
animation-like that it would fit within the movie and allow them to use footage of large
scale battles, which were ultimately faster and cheaper to
stage with actors in costumes than to hand-draw frame-by-frame, even from a reference. All of these different techniques are combined
to various degrees over the course of the movie.
Sometimes solarized footage is painted over, sometimes it’s merely colourized,
sometimes it’s just played as-is over a coloured background. The extensive amount of rotoscoping and re-purposed
footage ultimately required the production to shoot basically the entire film as live
action first, with reference performers, stunt performers,
and the extensive battle scenes, so the two year production involved essentially
making the entire movie twice, first in the live action shoot in Madrid,
and second in the animation. There’s a somewhat apocryphal story in all
this. In shooting the footage they didn’t really
bother to clear backgrounds of things like telephone wires, cars, airplanes, bicycles,
and other obviously out-of-place elements, because it didn’t really matter, it wasn’t
the finished film anyway. According to Bakshi the Spanish developers
who were handling the camera negatives didn’t understand that the footage was a reference
that would be animated over top of, thought that this was, instead, incredibly
sloppy filmmaking, feared that it would give Madrid a bad name,
and attempted to destroy the film. I’m repeating the story because it’s kinda
cute, but also it’s a bit too weird and sensational,
and the only source is Bakshi himself, who is, let’s just say, prone to exaggeration. Like he’ll say they had six hundred animators
working on Lord of the Rings when in reality it was more like fifty. I was over in Spain shooting major live action
footage, got three thousand people in the studio back in New York animating, I’m fielding
five hundred calls a day from the problems at the studio, I’m shooting an entire live
action movie, and I’m trying to eat dinner with Zaentz at night who wants to be talked
to. Or this bit from a 2006 interview with Underground
Online. “I had the X rating on my films and that
should have been enough to protect me. It was all a misunderstanding of me being too
far ahead of the curve. Now they do as much on The Simpsons as I got an X rating for Fritz
the Cat.” And, like… no? No Ralph. No they don’t.
What… What do you think happens on The Simpsons? I am very curious what Ralph Bakshi thinks
happens on The Simpsons. On the whole the film is a mixed bag, there’s
a lot of jank, but what works? What does it get right? A lot, actually. Whoah, Sam Gamgee, your legs are too short
so use your head The vocal performances, in particular, are
generally good, often great. The voice actors do well with Tolkien’s
words, with an interpretation that is both distinct and appropriate. One thing that’s often cited as a stand
out, though, is John Hurt’s performance as Aragorn, and for good reason, it’s fantastic. “It matters. We still have a long road and
much to do.” “Why? We have no hope without Gandalf, you
know that Aragorn.” “Then we must do without hope! There is
always vengeance!” Gruff, yet warm, there’s a lot to love about
this performance. John Hurt was a great actor and he absolutely
has a world-weary charisma that really works here.
It’s fantastic. I love it. And it meshes well with Bakshi’s naturalistic
filmmaking sensibilities, this version of the characters that are not so much the protagonists
of a fantasy epic, but just some dudes trying to solve a problem. “We have no choice, Aragorn!”
“We might go by way of the gap of Rohan” “That would take the ring too close to Isengard
and Aruman, we dare not risk it.” “And yet you would risk the mines of Moria” While Bakshi is bad at pacing and action,
he’s got a good sense for the interplay between characters,
and the film’s best moments come in snippets from these interactions,
the dynamics of conflict in dialogue, and the small physical actions that punctuate
those moments. Scenes like Boromir’s death hold sufficient
dramatic weight, the reference acting, animation, and vocal
performances all come together and really work,
in a way that shows off the film at its strongest. Just the clink and clank of equipment, the
subtle atmospheric wind, and a mature tenderness as the three pay respect
to a fallen comrade. And there’s little moments, just great touches
of detail, like Sam and Frodo paddling in opposite directions
as they debate the next course of action where the rhythm of it is spot on,
a fantastic little flare that communicates the emotion that underlies the dialogue.
It’s a keen physical detail that a lazier production would miss. The twitchy, feral movements of the black
riders is a weird creative decision, but I think it works.
It’s unsettling and menacing in an unusual way,
though it does get a little odd when the Nazgul simply stop behaving like this after the Prancing
Pony. Again, consistency is a problem. There’s also small adaptational decisions.
Lord of the Rings is so big and sprawling that basically any cinematic adaptation will
have to pick and choose what it includes and what it doesn’t.
For as comprehensive as the Jackson films are there’s a lot they had to leave behind. Like this little moment, after Gandalf opens
the door to Moria. “so all you had to do was say ‘friend’
and enter” “Those were happier times” It’s a great little touch to include, because
the whole joke of the door to Moria, for the reader, is that they’re over-thinking the
problem, that the troubles facing the Fellowship, the
rise of Sauron in the East, has created a culture of fear, a culture of security and
paranoia, that leads Gandalf to assume the answer is
more complicated than it really is. It’s a melancholic point about how the people
of Middle Earth have grown apart, distrustful, and isolated,
to the point that even being asked to say “friend” feels like a trick.
It’s a good detail to include. Bakshi’s film is basically the only adaptation
to include Frodo’s defiance of the Ring Wraiths at the ford. “By all the Shire, you shall have neither
the ring, nor me!” I also really like the introduction, presented
as a shadow play. It’s cheap and poorly acted and looks like community theatre, but
that’s what I find endearing about it, like it could just as well be an in-universe
performance of myth. You’ve got actors who are clearly trying
to avoid hurting each other with their prop swords,
and miming slow-motion instead of actually shooting the footage in slow motion,
and it’s clearly taking place on a stage, but the fact that it’s so evidently low-budget,
I dunno, I find it charming. Now, unfortunately, for all the things that
I do enjoy about this movie, all the things that I think work,
or are at least admirable for their ambition, there’s a lot that doesn’t,
either failing entirely or just not quite coming together into a cohesive whole. Like, for example, the Balrog. Alright, so, a bit of a side-track with the
Balrog here. One of the biggest running arguments in Tolkien
scholarship is this: does the Balrog actually have wings or does it merely have a form that
is evocative of wings? Or does it have neither wings nor a form evocative
of wings, but an incorporeal aura of darkness that projects
the impression of wings without being a component part of the substance or form of the Balrog’s
essential self? The relevant passages from the book are in
The Fellowship of the Ring, where first Tolkien writes about the Balrog
“... the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings...”
and a couple paragraphs later “It stepped forward onto the bridge, and
suddenly it drew itself up to a great height, and its wings were spread from wall to wall;” This apparent conflict between a stylistic
description and a literal description has formed the foundation of a half-century long
debate over the intended physical properties of a mythological demon. As of June 2021 the Tolkien Society FAQ still
has, as the top entry, “Do Balrogs have Wings? Can they Fly?”
which they summarize with “that’s up to each individual reader to decide.” Quora, the spiritual successor to Yahoo Answers,
has multiple threads on the subject. Bakshi, perhaps unknowingly, stepped right
in this when he gave the Balrog big old bat wings,
with a Balrog that’s definitely reminiscent of the Hildebrandt brothers’ Balrog from
the 1977 Tolkien art calendar. The 1987 calendar featured a wingless Balrog
painted by Tolkien scholar Ted Nasmith. John Howe’s 1996 painting “Gandalf Falls
With the Balrog” features a distinctly bat-winged demon. Peter Jackson threaded the needle with a Balrog
that is as much a smoke monster as it is physical, though it still definitely has wings. Video games also alternate between wings and
no wings. Tolkien hack David Day’s “A Tolkien Bestiary”
indicates no wings, while Robert Foster’s authoritative “The Complete Guide to Middle
Earth” is mum on the subject. The online Encyclopedia of Arda, dating back
to 1997, spends four fifths of its word count for the entry on Balrogs summarizing both
the pro- and anti- wing arguments, though ultimately errs on the side of no wings
without taking a definitive stance. The start of this argument, naturally, just
spurs further arguments. The Balrog were created with intent by Melkor,
therefore vestigial wings would be illogical, and if the Balrog has wings then surely it
wouldn’t just plummet when the bridge collapses, which leads to arguments about the nature
of wings themselves, since, after all, even if it has wings it’s
not a helicopter or a hummingbird, and probably couldn’t just hover.
Penguins, chickens, and emu all have wings, but they would plummet.
Even flighted birds like condor, and albatross can’t just take off from a standstill. But this argument also neglects to consider
that both Melkor and the Balrog were created with intent by one
honourable mister Sir Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien and wings are both rad and badass,
functional or not. And anyway if Balrog have wings why couldn’t
they just fly the ring into Mordor? Now, the wings are not something that particularly
bothers me. The Hildebrandt painting is actually my earliest
memory of Tolkien, period, as it’s the cover of the book Art of the Brothers Hildebrandt,
and we had a copy kicking around the house when I was a kid, so this is already a formative
vision of the scene for me. Clearly the actual fact of wings is secondary
to the narrative functionality of the evocative image of Gandalf as a point of light standing
off against an enveloping darkness. The actual problems with the Balrog here in
Bakshi’s version aren’t wings, in and of themselves,
but that the design just doesn’t come together and, most importantly, is really poorly animated.
Bakshi, as an animator, is not particularly good at momentum. Motion and momentum are core elements of animation,
and it’s something that Bakshi has always struggled with.
Part of his experimentation with rotoscoping was tied to this.
It’s a cost-saving measure, but also it means the momentum problem solves itself.
You have real footage to work from, the momentum is already real, it’s done for you, boom. Of course animated momentum and real momentum
aren’t the same thing, and your rotoscope is only going to look as
good as your source footage, which is going to be really hard to get right
if you don’t have a twelve foot tall Balrog to shoot some reference footage of. This is a moment where the realism of rotoscoping
is absolutely undermining the final product because we are, unfortunately, seeing through
to the underlying reality of man in a costume trying to mime being really big by just moving
slowly. It’s not dynamic, it’s not threatening,
and it comes off as unfortunately goofy. This is a running thing through the film,
most of the action scenes lack a sense of weight to their movement.
The actors are just lightly swinging their prop swords at each other, pulling their punches
because, you know, it’s just a reference. But since the reference is being traced frame-by-frame
that performance carries through to the final animation.
Sometimes the rotoscope inherits a really effective sense of weight and sometimes it
ends up looking cheap and fake. This also leaves behind a number of strange
artefacts in how shots are framed. They’re few and far between, but there’s
the occasional shot where the framing is oddly tight, where characters drift out of frame
in a way that’s highly unusual for animation, where the positioning of characters is normally
extremely deliberate. The pitfall of a rotoscoped film is that the
final results depend heavily on your references. The reference performers aren’t simply providing
something to help the animators get the right idea, their performance is the performance,
and there’s a definite inconsistency here. And that’s really the word of the day, isn’t
it? The biggest failings of Bakshi’s Lord of
the Rings are matters of inconsistency. Sometimes the reference actors are giving
it their all, and sometimes they’re just loosely miming the actions.
Sometimes footage is shot in slow motion and other times the actors just swing their swords
slowly. Scenes change style and grain and texture
on the fly, and characters are animated in multiple different styles across the film
as a whole. Heck, sometimes characters switch techniques
multiple times within the span of a few seconds, as with Aragorn running down this hallway. There’s also a thing that happens a few
times where the scenes were too complicated to fully animate,
like Merry and Pippin fighting the orcs before their capture,
but the underlying footage is in really bad shape:
super high contrast, super under-exposed, super grainy, and the whole image just turns
into an indecipherable blob. A much-commented on quirk of the movie is
that a lot of characters wave their hands around really aimlessly.
This is going to come down to a direction issue, as it’s a very community theatre
kind of quirk of acting, with untrained actors over-using their hands. The Nazgul and orcs being mostly paint-over
work, with much of the actual costumes still visible,
works, but is undercut by the fact that the fellowship,
too, are often animated as paint-overs, with their live action counterparts being extremely
visible. Even the full replacement trace-overs aren’t
without their own oddities, as the style is so chaotic, with linework that squiggles a
lot between frames, that it’s extremely intrusive when characters stop moving entirely,
becoming unnaturally still for a few frames, between actions.
That’s a limitation of budget, yes, and I don’t begrudge the animators for saving
those frames, but the style very much accentuates the effect
and calls attention to it. Treebeard is pretty much the only character
in the film that’s entirely animated from scratch,
which places him out-of-place at the other extreme end of the spectrum,
being very fluid and morphy, traditionally cartoonish,
looking more like an outcast from an Atkinson production like the Racoons than the comparably
heavy animation of the rest of the film. And while that heavier animation generally
looks really neat, the increased fidelity will, again, work against
the film, as any time the lip sync is off it feels really
off. “Whereout I to start?” There’s also an issue with the dialogue
that, well, descriptively the dialogue in a lot of places is stilted, and the recording
is thin. The micro-pacing of dialogue that makes it
feel natural, that makes it flow, it’s not always there,
and a lot of unspoken vocalizations are missing, which can make conversations drag and feel
unnatural. “I’ll give it to you Gandalf! You’re
wise and powerful. Will you not” “No! Do not tempt me!” This is a result of the production process.
There’s two factors here: for I guess budgetary reasons they apparently didn’t have a multi-track
recorder, and also the voice actors are ultimately having their performance superimposed on the
performance of the live action actors, which is substantially different from other
methods of animation where either the animators work from the actor’s performance
or the actor matches the performance created by the animators.
And so while the production opted to do the recording sessions with the cast as a group,
according to Anthony Daniels the actors were required to leave a long two-second pause
between each other’s lines so that the editors could try and line the two performances up. I mean, I can see the logic there.
Like you assume you’ve got this process that affords you a lot of freedom,
you don’t need to wait for one part to be done so that the other half can match it,
you can just do both halves whenever it’s convenient and then merge them later,
but, you know, it’s the details that get lost in that process. On the whole the film’s pacing is just really
off. Some sequences, like the flight to the ford
mentioned before go on at seemingly an interminable length,
while the entire second half of the film is incredibly rushed.
Even odd one-off moments will end up bizarrely truncated,
like the smoke trailing out of Moria behind the Fellowship,
which flashes on screen so briefly I wasn’t sure if I had bumped the remote and skipped
a scene. Merry and Pippin vanish from the film entirely
after meeting Treebeard, a casualty of the unproduced sequel,
but regardless of the intent their exit is undeniably sudden.
Likewise Sam and Frodo meet Gollum, set off towards the Dead Marshes, and are never seen
or mentioned again. One particular oddity is that Saruman is alternately
called either Saruman or Aruman. “I must go south now, to consult with the
wizard Aruman” “I have come for your aid, Saruman the White,
in troubled times” This bizarre inconsistency is the result of
Saul Zaentz’ insistence that the names of the antagonists, Saron and Saruman, sounded
too alike, which is fair enough as an adaptation change,
but then during fairly routine rewrites mid-production Beagle began swapping the names back to Saruman. “Saruman of Many Colours!” If there is something you can say is missing
from Bakshi’s Middle Earth it would be Middle Earth itself.
This is, perhaps, where the comparison between Bakshi and Jackson is the starkest.
While much of this is an argument of adaptational preference, which lines and details were included,
which phrases and character traits were stressed, one area where the older film is undeniably
weaker is in the presence of the world. And this is a meaningful absence.
Place is critical to the story of Lord of the Rings because Lord of the Rings is as
much a story about violence against the land itself as it is about violence against the
people who live on it. And while Bakshi’s artists are able to visualize
many iconic locations, both the fantastic and the quaint, just as
often the background dissolves away into an abstraction, into nowhere in particular. Though there is an isolated artistry to these
compositions, as a storytelling mechanism, as an expression of the text,
they just don’t compete with Jackson’s camera turned towards the beauty of New Zealand.
This gaze, importantly, retains the essence of the message:
the world is good, the world is beautiful, the world is worth saving, and not just the
so-called “important” parts. Tolkien’s notoriously florid descriptions
are just as reverent of grassland and marsh as they are of forest and mountain. This is the biggest missed step of the old
adaptation, the vision of Middle Earth not just as a land
under assault from a malevolent spirit seeking power,
but a land besieged by the smog and consumption and poisonous runoff of industry. Ultimately the biggest flaw of the film is
that it’s kinda boring. Not uninteresting, but all these issues add
up to long stretches of the film that just aren’t particularly noteworthy.
There is, at least in my opinion, very little after the death of Boromir that’s really
worth it, and given that his funeral is eighty-five
minutes into the movie, not only is it a clear demarcation point between two parts of the
story, it’s already a decent feature length, so
if you kinda check out there I don’t really blame you. There’s also a deeper issue that kinda cuts
two ways, and it’s that the film relies a lot on an
understanding of the source material. Now, I don’t think this is a conscious reliance,
I do think that Bakshi and Conkling and Beagle tried to create a telling of the story that’s
self-contained, but there’s enough holes, enough things
that are breezed past, that there’s definitely the sense that things
are missing, the keen awareness that this is an abridgement
of a much larger book, and so bits are included for the sake of being
comprehensive rather than because they make the best version of the story for the medium. I said this cuts two ways and that’s because
while this can make for an unsatisfying viewing on its own,
it can also, potentially, make for a satisfying companion to the novel,
where the viewer’s own knowledge of the text is able to fill the gaps and their imagination
is able to do the heavy lifting of fleshing it all out,
using the movie as an aide in their own internal visualization and realization of the story. Part of the trouble in researching the film
is that based on Bakshi’s own recollections of the film it’s not even entirely clear
when they decided to animate the film, or if the whole film was meant to be conventionally
animated with only a bit of rotoscoping but then they decided to rotoscope nearly the
entire thing, or if at one point they were even considering
cutting the animation entirely and just making a live-action film.
These were, apparently, decisions that were made more or less on the fly in 1976, a reflection
of the problems plaguing the still-unfinished Hey Good Lookin’. I don’t want to say that this is a film
made by filmmakers who didn’t care, who didn’t get the source material.
It is a film that’s lovingly made, it is a film made by creatives who cared,
the script is clearly intimately familiar with the source material,
but it also seems like a film that was made by creatives who were very distracted,
who didn’t have a strong vision, and were focused principally on working quickly and
making whatever compromises were needed just to get things done. And, to be clear, that’s not a moral failing,
it’s not a sin to be more concerned with getting the film done,
getting it in front of audiences, than picking fights with the studio.
They turned around a two and a half hour animated film in two years.
That’s insane. It’s amazing that the whole thing didn’t
entirely self-destruct, that the final result is not only reasonably
watchable, but often interesting and occasionally brilliant.
That’s impressive. So, the movie comes out with the title The
Lord of the Rings, no “part 1” subtitle. United Artists felt that no one would want
to pay to see half a story. Of course that seems ridiculous today, what
with film being so thoroughly dominated by serial franchises,
but in 1978 the concern was still sensible. The two part film didn’t really exist yet,
and even franchises were sparse, and more along the lines of James Bond,
a loosely connected episodic rather than a single cohesive story with meaningful continuity. But, still, a “to be continued” would
not have seriously shocked audiences. While Bakshi had done some press where he
was able to talk about how they’ll hopefully get to make the rest of the story with part
2, the media landscape is entirely different
in 1978. There isn’t a massive ecosystem of entertainment
news, there’s no widespread internet, there’s no fan blogs hanging off every detail
of production, so the general audience impression going in
is that this is the whole thing. Fans of the book are, of course, caught off
guard by the ending, the story just stopping after the Battle of Helm’s Deep,
and they’re not super happy about that, but on the whole audiences are pretty receptive
and the film does well. Critics are lukewarm but consensus is ultimately
positive. Roger Ebert’s bottom line summary is, I
think, right on the money. “In sum, Bakshi has succeeded better at
bringing Tolkien's characters to life than at bringing his story to fruition.” And that’s kinda where things have stayed.
Critical reevaluation hasn’t really changed over the decades since.
It’s flawed, mostly boring, but not entirely devoid of charm.
It’s quieter and stiffer than Jackson’s high-intensity action/adventure,
but that’s not wholly inappropriate as Tolkien’s books are, themselves, so very often quiet
and stiff. The film was successful, it turned a reasonable
profit, but it wasn’t a runaway success. Bakshi was feeling burnt out on working on
someone else’s story, and leadership changes at United Artists in
1978 proved to be enough of an interruption to the momentum of the project that attempts
to get Part 2 moving just fizzled out. Bakshi would continue to use rotoscoped animation
for three of his next four films, though audience interest waned as the style
grew increasingly dated compared to the lush and intricate animation of its big budget
contemporaries and as Bakshi seemingly ran out of energy
and ideas. Hey Good Lookin’ was eventually released
in 1982 in a totally overhauled format, the film having been essentially re-made as
a totally animated feature over the course of seven years,
financed by Bakshi himself, though little of the rotoscoping remained.
It is, for the most part, just a worse version of Heavy Traffic,
lacking the incendiary politics and righteous anger that gives that film its bite. I dunno, maybe it was just Bakshi getting
older, maybe you just couldn’t sell an anti-cop
movie in Reagan’s America. He eventually retired from feature films after
the flop of Cool World in 1992, a film that was, ironically, not nearly as
crass as audiences had hoped. But as a pure quirk of coincidence the animated
legacy of The Lord of the Rings isn’t entirely incomplete,
because Rankin/Bass, leveraging the public domain status of the books,
aired the sequel to their Hobbit adaptation in 1980,
and it just so happens to more or less pick up shortly after Bakshi’s film ends.
The specifics here are disputed, since the Rankin/Bass Return of the King had been storyboarded
years earlier, but it also didn’t really start serious
production until 78. So while the film wasn’t intended to capitalize
on the cancellation of Bakshi’s second film, it still did. Mostly bad in an annoying way and very cheaply
made, this TV movie is largely unmemorable save
for the absolute banger “Where There’s a Whip There’s a Way” “where there’s a whip [whipcrack] there’s
a way” Of course then, a little over twenty years
later, Peter Jackson, that guy who makes perverted puppet movies,
would finally get to make a no-holds-barred adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and it’s
really good. “Come on Mister Frodo, I can’t carry it
for you, but I can carry you!” Ultimately the legacy of Bakshi’s film is
in technology. Techniques that were odd and unique are, today,
routine. He didn’t invent any of them, strictly speaking,
the underpinning technology was already decades old,
but the haphazard, experimental, ambitious way that they’re applied,
the mix of success and failure, is ahead of its time,
presaging the ways that filmmaking was changing and would continue to change.
This isn’t to say that Bakshi and his animators changed the arc of history,
but rather they saw what was inevitable about the way that these technologies would be applied,
and bit off far more than they could chew decades before the tech was actually ready. Bakshi understood that the greatest limitation
of realizing the world of Tolkien was the world itself,
and he solved this problem by cutting out photographs of actors, maybe painting on them
a little, and placing them into animated environments,
and that right there describes basically every Marvel movie. For twenty years now it’s been routine for
actors to work against worlds that they can’t see, that are created out of whole cloth by
animators. The modern look of films is defined by actors
on set wearing some combination of costume that’s limiting or suggestive of the final
look before artists go in and paint the rest of
the costume on. Taking a physical performance and duplicating
it with an animated simulacrum, once the odd fixation of a few weirdos from
Brooklyn, is now ordinary. In a weird way Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings
is a twenty-first century blockbuster made with 1970s technology. And, in the end, he would ultimately be vindicated.
The argument that animation could be more mature, could be dramatic, could be adult,
could be a perfect medium for a story like The Lord of the Rings,
was absolutely true, and Bakshi’s work wouldn’t be relegated to mere novelty status.
Despite the waning attendance to his own films, his work in the 70s more or less set the tone
for feature animation in the 80s, which was dominated by the dark, often sombre
films of Don Bluth. Because everything is connected, Rankin/Bass
worked with Peter Beagle and turned his book The Last Unicorn into a haunting and mature
film in 1982. Even Disney, on the verge of bankruptcy, would
try to play to the trend with their own adaptation of a midcentury fantasy epic with the notorious
flop The Black Cauldron. Then, of course, The Simpsons would begin
airing in 1989, in 1993 MTV began a late night block of adult
animation that ran the whole gamut from crass to cerebral,
and over the course of the 80s and 90s anime would go from being a niche import to a staple
pillar of modern animation. So, that’s the story of Bakshi and the Ring.
I think what I find compelling about his Lord of the Rings is a summary of what I find compelling
about the man himself and his career as a whole,
one that is deeply flawed but undeniably bold and occasionally brilliant.
