What do you think of the Bakshi cartoon?

[TheOrcWithNoName]

I first saw this film back in 1982 I think, either on video or terrestrial TV.

Back then, before the age of home computers, video games, sfx & cgi, I thought it was pretty good for what it was. Okay so the finished product was pretty poor compared to today's slick offerings, and the story wandered from the straight & narrow on more than just one occasion. Plus the visual interpretation of some of the characters were so at odds with how my own imagination had "seen" then from the books.

But for all those failings I still enjoyed it. Although having said that the last time I watched it was 15 years ago and I think I was a little more scathing back then. But it was still a pleasure to listen to some of the actors such as John Hurt as Aragorn, Michael Graham Cox as Boromir, Anthony Daniels' Legolas & the remarkable Peter Woodthorpe as Gollum (both Cox & Woodthorpe reprised their roles for the BBC radio adaption, and Woodthorpe's interpretation of radio Gollum was exceptional)

If I remember, I'll have to watch it again soon, if only to rather unfairingly compare it to Jackson's multimillion dollar extravaganza and hopefully watch it all the way through without either becoming bored or riddled with mirth

[Morsul the Dark]

I got "the Hobbit" from the dollar store, I think that was quite good despite gollum's appearence as a toad. I watch it every now and again. now LOTR

that's a different animal, it varies vastly, the ringwraiths I thought were well done... okay so that's about it. Now it wasn't because of bad effects (I love Godzilla effects aren't overly important) but I mean Boromir is a viking? Gimli is literally a garden gnome... an Aragorn looks like a native american(although that one seems fine to me seeing as he is a ranger still though.)The troll in moria belly bumps people. And most annoying Gollum;s speech is far too articulate.

I mean the orcs look cool and some of the styles are nice


OH! how could I forget what's up with Saruman the "red??" and his wacky LSD tower?

I mean I hate to say it but... I saw Fellowship of the ring and I wanted to read the book.

Had I saw this I would have avoided the book.

and someone mentioned Sam My friend and I watched the whole movie Just to laugh at him.

[Pitchwife]

I'm just watching the Bakshi film for the first time in about ten years or so (thanks to YouTube) and noticed a little detail I'd like to share.
During the scene of Gandalf's visit in Isengard, right before Gandalf and (S)Aruman have their light-show duel that ends with Gandalf being mysteriously teleported to the top of Orthanc, a vague figure steps in from the background to hand Saruman his staff. We don't get to see that figure clearly, as Saruman is obscuring our view of him, but we get a fleeting glimpse of somebody rather short in a dark, hooded cloak, the hood shadowing a pale, bloated face. I probably only recognized him because I've seen the whole film several times before, but with hindsight it's clear that this is Wormtongue.
Now I've been wondering for a while how Gandalf actually found out that Gríma was in Saruman's pay, and surmised he may have seen him in Isengard while he was imprisoned there, so I was quite delighted by this find. Shows that all the shortcomings of the film (which I won't deny) notwithstanding, Bakshi Beagle & Co. did give some thought to what they were doing, and I think it was rather nice of them to care about such a tiny detail as this.

[PrinceOfTheHalflings]

Originally Posted by TheOrcWithNoName

I first saw this film back in 1982 I think, either on video or terrestrial TV.

Back then, before the age of home computers, video games, sfx & cgi, I thought it was pretty good for what it was. Okay so the finished product was pretty poor compared to today's slick offerings,

Not to pick on you personally, but I've seen this kind of comment over and over again on this thread. The reality is that even in 1978 the consensus was that the Bakshi film was terrible. Nobody (over the age of about 12) thought that animation was any good back then either!

There were better animated films made in the 1930s! Check out "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" - 1937 - for an example of something done well 40 years before Bakshi's dire attempt.

In fact, it has only been in recent years that CGI has come to play a part in animated movies. For example, "The Lion King" - 1994 - is all "traditional" animation. CGI didn't become popular in animation until after "Toy Story" - 1995 - and of course that film is all CGI.

CGI in itself is not always that great ... I've seen shockingly bad CGI cartoons that were made for television just a few years ago.

Anyway, compare Bakshi's film to "The Lion King" ... both made using old school animation techniques. TLK looks fantastic and Bakshi's film looks like a mess. Even the early parts of Bakshi's film, the best looking parts, still have bad moments.

Frankly, Bakshi was just a lazy filmmaker. He had made two full-length animated movies before "The Lord of the Rings" - "Fritz the Cat" (which uses a kind of rotoscope technique since almost all the backgrounds are drawn over real footage of New York) and "Wizards" which is probably his best film.

"Wizards" is a fantasy/allegory set in a future world where old Nazi propaganda films fall into the hands of an evil wizard and he brings them to life with the power of magic. The climactic battle scene between the forces of good and evil was done with rotoscoping, in much the same way as "The Lord of the Rings", due to Bakshi running out of money. He commented "I thought that if we dropped all the detail, it would look very artistic, and very beautiful, and I felt, why bother animating all of this? I'm looking for a way to get realism into my film and get real emotion."

Unfortunately Bakshi is full of it. The rotoscoped animation in his films looks terrible ... and we thought it looked terrible in 1978. It was only done because of budget limitations and because Bakshi essentially couldn't be bothered animating his action sequences properly. It's really nothing to do with the "state of the art" of animation in the 1970s because these were low budget movies. As far as "The Return of the King" and "The Hobbit" go - they were low budget "made for television" movies aimed at children, not even "real" movies. At least the songs in "The Return of the King" are sort of amusing in a camp way if you don't take your Tolkien too seriously!

There are a few moments in Bakshi's "The Lord of the Rings" that are quite good. Some of the moments with The Black Riders, the famous shot of the Ring bouncing, the voice acting of the guy who portrays Gollum ... but they hardly make up for the awfulness of the rest of the film. As for Bakshi's film being "more faithful" to the books - well, it uses more actual dialogue from the books but it's hardly more faithful in any tangible way. Besides, it only goes to show how you can quote plenty of lines from a book and still make a terrible adaptation!

Lastly, John Hurt is a great actor but he is completely miscast as Aragorn.

Jackson's films have some shortcomings as adaptions - going to Osgiliath, dumbing down Saruman, using Gimli as comic-relief, trying to turn Aragorn into a main character and therefore saddling him with a stupid "arc", not developing Merry and Pippin properly, not understanding the point of the Scouring (and thus leaving it out) - but at least they are not badly made films. You can't point to CGI as some kind of saviour either, because there isn't that much CGI in the films. Most of the film uses real locations ... real sets (not green screen) ... detailed miniatures ... forced perspective to make the "hobbit actors" look smaller, thousands of extras. Gollum is the obvious exception, of course!

Naturally there are CGI elements inserted into various shots ... but compared to most modern films of this kind, not that many. It's one of the reasons why the film works well - even Gollum is played by a real actor, even if he has been painted out and replaced by a CGI character.

My main complaints about Jackson's films (other than the ones I listed earlier)?

1. Too much action and not enough suspense - the Black Riders are wonderfully ominous early on but once Aragorn waves some burning sticks at them they are not longer scary and the "action film" style kicks in.

2. Mordor should be scary as hell (literally) but instead is terribly anticlimactic once Frodo and Sam get there. It's just grey and boring. The film seems to have run out of steam by this point. This is partly down to the problem generated by the "too much action and not enough suspense" style of Jackson's direction. It's hard to believe that this is the same guy who directed the chilling "Heavenly Creatures"!

3. In the amount of time Jackson spends saying "goodbye" to the characters he could have given us a quick "Scouring". The Scouring of the Shire is essential for the character development of Merry and Pippin and would also have given a satisfactory sendoff to Saruman.

[Pitchwife]

I can't claim to be an expert on animation, so I won't go into the technical questions that POTH has commented on quite competently, as far as I can tell. From my point of view, the rotoscoping works best on such scenes as the early confrontations with the Black Riders, the fight with the Orcs in Moria and to some degree the tide of evil in the final battle at Helm's Deep, to which it lends a somewhat surreal, 'otherworldly' quality which I quite like; but I agree it gets rather weird in the second half of the film.
(Which reminds me - when I first saw the film in cinema back in the winter of 1978/79, I was on the eve of coming down with the flu and got rather feverish during the viewing, so I actually wondered how much of the weird visuals in the later half might be due to my rising temperature. A rather psychedelic experience!)
And Leonard Rosenman did a great job on the score, as far as I'm concerned. The main theme is touching and unforgettable, as are the dirge for Gandalf in Lothlórien and the choir in the final battle scenes (if you listen closely, you'll notice that for want of better lyrics, he had them chanting his own name backwards - 'Namnesor Dranoel'; quaint, but it works!).
As for Bakshi vs Jackson, I'll be the first to admit that PJ handled a number of things much better - such as presenting Boromir as a likeable character who just temporarily succumbed to a temptation to strong for him, and Sam as the hero he is rather than a comic potato. (Even the Rankin/Bass ROTK, abominable as it is in many aspects, brought out the heroic side of Sam better than Bakshi - but then again, we don't really get that much of that side of Sam in the parts of the book Bakshi covers.) I guess the root of all my qualms with PJ is that he came so damn close to getting it right in so many ways that it hurts all the more when he messes up and gets off on some completely gratuitous nonsensical tangent.
Which finally brings me to another point in favour of the animated versions (even the R/B ones, I'm afraid). All adaptations of a work of literature in a visual medium - whether mere illustration, animation or live action - influence and limit our own imagination of the characters and events to some degree; and just as illustrations are, in this respect, less 'harmful' than movies, animation is, in my subjective view, one step further removed from pretending to be 'the real thing' than live action, as we're more conscious of looking at everything through someone else's artistic filter.
Looking at it from a slightly different angle: Michael Moorcock, in his rather blasphemous essay on Tolkien 'Epic Pooh', claimed that Tolkien was so successful because we, the readers, are actually much better writers than the Professor himself was and make up for his literary shortcomings by the use of our own imaginations. This is not the thread to debate his statement as far as the books are concerned, but I think it applies to the films in a way: in our minds, we're all better film-makers than Bakshi, so we can flesh out the gaps and smooth out his mistakes while we're watching and still enjoy the show. With a live action movie like PJ's, we don't have that much leeway to exercise our own imagination, we depend more on the film-maker to get it right for us, and are more disappointed if he doesn't. Or that's how it seems to me.

[PrinceOfTheHalflings]

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

I guess the root of all my qualms with PJ is that he came so damn close to getting it right in so many ways that it hurts all the more when he messes up and gets off on some completely gratuitous nonsensical tangent.

Yes, I couldn't have said it better myself, Pitchwife! That is exactly my feeling.

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

...in our minds, we're all better film-makers than Bakshi, so we can flesh out the gaps and smooth out his mistakes while we're watching and still enjoy the show. With a live action movie like PJ's, we don't have that much leeway to exercise our own imagination, we depend more on the film-maker to get it right for us, and are more disappointed if he doesn't. Or that's how it seems to me.

I think some of that is "animation vs. live action" ... but some of it is just "bad film maker vs. good film maker". There is no doubt that PJ is really good at making films, but he is a bit like Steven Spielberg in that his films look fantastic, but they sometimes lack a certain something. The lights are on but nobody is at home, so to speak. The appearance is there, but the substance is lacking, or wrong. PJ knows how to make films, that's for sure, but does he know how to make LOTR?

The problem is that because PJ is a good film maker, we are not left with much room to imagine our own version. He's already overloaded us with memorable visuals ...

[Mugwump]

Originally Posted by Fool-of-a-Took

What do you think of the Bakshi cartoon?

I saw it when I was much younger. Technically it was interesting for its "cartoon drawn by tracing over live action film" method, which at the time was considered novel and quite innovative.

My main problem with the film was that, not having read the novel, the cartoon-film was confusing -- I couldn't follow who all the characters were and what they were doing, or why. But mostly what I hated about it was that it was a lie. It was entitled Lord of the Rings but it covered only about the first half of the novel.

Originally Posted by Diamond18

... the Elves were worse than I'd remembered. They weren't actually green, more like bluish-gray. Their bodies were squat but their legs were long. Their eyes were nothing short of evil and surly. They were balding, and the hair they had was wispy and stringly. Their hangs and feet were amphibian. They were butt-ugly. In short, they were the exact opposite of what Elves should look like. ... I'm wondering...does anyone know of a motivation for depicting the Elves this way? I mean, did the animators ever explain why the Elves were so unlike "real" Elves? Or were they, as others have suggested, just high?

It will be hard for most people today to understand, but our vision of elves today is largely formed by Lord of the Rings, in which Tolkien restored the original ideas of how the "elves of faerie" were portrayed in myth. What's hard to realize is how strongly the popular conception of elves had been shaped by hundreds of years of bad fairy tale and folklore caricature. Until Tolkien the popular conception of elves was more like the "Keebler elves" or "Santa's elves" -- leprechauns or wee Victorian pixie-fairies.

As a result, early artistic renderings of Tolkien's elves were often quite "off" from what we understand them to be today. An example was the first recording I had of The Lord of the Rings, a dramatic reading that was published in the 1970's by Jabberwocky Audio on cassette tape. It was very well produced, and a worthy effort... except for one thing: all the elves spoke with very high-pitched, falsetto "pixie" voices, more squeaky even than Minnie Mouse's.

Which was really too bad. The author of the script, who had done a very good job (for a BBC radio performance in 1954, I believe), must have had a fit if and when he heard the way these American actors portrayed his elves 20 years later. It was very funny, in a sad way.

This version was rereleased in 2001 on CD and is still available (photo below), unfortunately with the same squeaky elf voices.

[Pitchwife]

Originally Posted by Mugwump

but our vision of elves today is largely formed by Lord of the Rings, in which Tolkien restored the original ideas of how the "elves of faerie" were portrayed in myth.

Or so he claimed. For an interesting discussion of the differences between Tolkien's Elves and the elves/fairies of traditional folk mythology, see this thread (one of my personal all-times favourites).
Horrible as the Rankin/Bass elves are as depictions of Tolkien's Quendi, their look somehow suggests a glimpse of the dark and malicious side (if not the dangerous beauty) of traditional fairies.

[Nerwen]

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

This is not the thread to debate his statement as far as the books are concerned, but I think it applies to the films in a way: in our minds, we're all better film-makers than Bakshi, so we can flesh out the gaps and smooth out his mistakes while we're watching and still enjoy the show. With a live action movie like PJ's, we don't have that much leeway to exercise our own imagination, we depend more on the film-maker to get it right for us, and are more disappointed if he doesn't. Or that's how it seems to me.

Originally Posted by PrinceOfTheHalflings

The problem is that because PJ is a good film maker, we are not left with much room to imagine our own version. He's already overloaded us with memorable visuals ...

Hardly fair as a criticism, though, is it? I've heard this argument before, and it strikes me as a little, well, perverse almost. However, I'd agree that it probably explains why people spend more time nitpicking the live-action films.

[Mugwump]

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

Or so he claimed. ... Horrible as the Rankin/Bass elves are as depictions of Tolkien's Quendi, their look somehow suggests a glimpse of the dark and malicious side (if not the dangerous beauty) of traditional fairies.

Yes, the earlier view of faeries did portray "the other" according to the worst instincts of xenophobic racial hatred that came largely from the infusions of Germanic myth into English culture that occurred during the Saxon invasions.

But I was talking of physical characteristics of elves, Tolkien's reversal of the infantilizing of their appearance that occurred during the Victorian era. Before that they at least looked mostly human in size, stature and form.