THE LORD OF THE RINGS 1978
50%
Directed by Ralph Bakshi
Written by Chris Conkling and Peter S. Beagle
Starring John Hurt, Anthony Daniels
Synopsis
In the Third Age of Middle-earth, a party of Hobbits, Men, Dwarves, and Elves sets out to destroy a ring of power sought by its creator, the Dark Lord Sauron, and end a generations-long conflict.
Why We Love It
While outclassed in every way by Peter Jackson’s twenty-first-century The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Ralph Bakshi’s ambitious adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien epic offers key storytelling choices for future filmmakers—and a lesson in how easily fantasy films can go wrong.
Convinced he could deliver high-quality animation for an adult audience, Bakshi decided to make the film via the rotoscoping technique—that is, shoot the film in live action with minimal sets and costumes so the animators could use the motion of the actors in the finalized footage. The process offers lifelike animation when done correctly. The Lord of the Rings pulls it off infrequently, with overly caricatured movement dominating the performances. Additionally, the characters rarely look part of the world realized by the background paintings, and the voice-acting suggests an uninterested ensemble rushed into the recording booth. Bakshi himself boldly claimed he was uninterested in the details—Tolkien fans would fill in the gaps, he said—leading to an astonishing lack of consistency from sequence to sequence; there are whole scenes in which the live-action reference footage is tinted with the animated cell colors and inserted into the final film to save time and money.
The result is a production that is fascinating to watch for all its miscalculations.
Its more legitimate significance in the post-Jackson era may come from several choices that Bakshi and writers Chris Conkling and Peter S. Beagle made at the scripting stage. Like Jackson’s first film, this one removes much of Frodo’s journey from Hobbiton to Bree, getting the Fellowship of the Ring on their quest as quickly as possible. That brevity may not pay off once the film shifts to material from The Two Towers, but it indicated the best way to start The Lord of the Rings as a cinematic adventure.
Watching The Lord of the Rings now is much more an academic pursuit than it was in 1978, but it reveals the difficulty filmmakers face when attempting to adapt beloved fantasy epics. It also offers a curious contrast to the modern conception of Middle-earth.