Bakshi Lord of the Rings

Cafe Society
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We rented a bunch of movies this weekend/Christmas and one was the Bakshi LOTR from, I believe, 1978.

Now, back in 1978 I saw this and found it to be utterly baffling. Unlike most geeks, I didn’t read LOTR until a few years ago, and then only because I felt like I should. So the couple of times I watched this movie, I really didn’t have a good handle on the plot. The fact that its “sequel” (unofficially, since it’s a different company altogether) doesn’t pick up where it left off, and it’s tempting to write the whole thing off as a mess and a waste of time.

But after seeing the Jackson movies, I was intrigued and wanted to see what choices Bakshi had made, so I re-watched it, this time, with a better appreciation for the characters and plot.

It’s a really interesting contrast. The most important thing to note is that it stops, after two hours, at the exact same point Jackson stops after six. We know Jackson’s 2/3 of the way through, but I’m curious as to what Bakshi had in mind for his second movie. I’m assuming, if it was to be two hours as well, that we’d get the Scouring of the Shire.

Because it’s so incredibly compact, it’s no surprise that someone unfamiliar with the plot would be lost. Important details are mentioned once and if you don’t catch them then, they’re gone. It does hit a lot of the expected high points - Bree, Weathertop, Rivendell, Moria, etc. I was reminded a bit of the first Harry POtter movie, which isn’t concerned with the plot so much as connecting the dots between scenes from the book - here’s some Quidditch, here’s Snape’s class, here’s Hagrid’s Hut, and so forth - so that at the end I got the feeling more of having seen a movie about Harry Potter than a movie of Harry Potter, if that makes sense.

There was interesting pacing. Although Jackson’s six hours are crammed into two, I don’t really remember much in the Bakshi film feeling rushed. Quite the contrary - in the scenes with the Nazgul, the film seems to inexplicably grind to a halt. It seems to take forever for Frodo to start riding towards the river of Elrond.

Naturally what’s lost from the Jackson version is the depth of character. Bakshi’s characters aren’t nearly as developed as Jackson’s, though the expected ones make out okay: Sam, Frodo, Aragorn. Gandalf, not so much.

Ultimately I think that the Bakshi film suffers when compared to the Jackson ones, but of course it can’t help but do so. Still, remove them from the equation and I’m not sure why it was almost universally detested. It’s not fantastic, to be sure - it doesn’t stand apart from the books very well, and it doesn’t leave you with the sense of having visited a real place like the Jackson movies or the books do, but I’m not certain it was as awful as it’s been made out to be. If it’s possible to give it a fair shake after the Jackson movies, see what you think.

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For me, it’s because I hate that style of animation. It is distracting to the story for me. All I can think about is how stupid the animation is. The story was OK, but I abhor the movie.

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Yet it is interesting that Jackson thought enough of Bakshi’s film to copy a few of the shots verbatim: the Nazgul on the hill from below, the Nazgul sniffing over the tree trunk, the Nazgul in Bree come to mind. Very distinctive shots. And if I am not mistaken, the theatrical releases are 3.5 hours for FOTR and 3 hours for TTT.

4

The film is just plain ugly.

Character design is absurd. Boromir has horns. Gimli and Legolas are about the same height in some scenes. Saruman/Aruman the White wears red. Aragorn has no pants.

Fully animated characters and hand-drawn backgrounds alternate with live-action footage. This could have been interesting if used for deliberate effect, but it happens erratically, as if they just ran out of time to draw certain things.

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The whole set of animated films was visually distracting.

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I actually quite like the Rankin-Bass “The Hobbit”.

I’ve been looking for a page or article that goes into details about Bakshi’s plans for the second part, but have been unable to find anything. Does anyone know what they were?

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No, the theatrical versions for both were almost exactly three hours. FotR now has an extended version on DVD that’s 3.5 hours. I have heard of an extended TTT probably coming out the same time of the year that the extended FotR did, but I don’t know how much time will be added.

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Yep, both roughly three hours, but FWIW, we’re not really two-thirds of the way through the book either. There’s about four or five chapters of The Two Towers chopped off for Return of the King so we’re just a little more than half way there.

And I have to agree that the quality of animation in the Bakshi version is a good place to start with how awful it is. Between the muddy palette and horrendous use of rotoscoping (the technique isn’t evil but when it’s this poorly done it seems that way) the movie is barely watchable. It was like Bakshi had no clue how to direct real people or film them but by god he chose rotoscoping as his method for it and he was going to do it no matter how mangled the result was.

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But you have to remember that ROTK is the shortest book, if you don’t count the appendices, so even if the end of TTT is tacked on to the beginning of ROTK you are still 2/3 of the way through.

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One should keep in mind Bakshi’s career track.

Bakshi hit it big in television animation… in which Product takes precedence over quality. Get the product out there FAST, NOW and UNDER BUDGET. He did kid’s cartoons in the late sixties, including the famous Spider-Man cartoons (in which he began one of his bad habits – reusing footage over and over and over…)

He then hit it big again with “adult cartoons” … notably Fritz The Cat, which was billed as the first X rated animated film. It’s also worth noting that Fritz’s creator, R. Crumb, hated the movie, and to this day has little good to say about Bakshi.

Bakshi continued to produce “adult cartoons”, and along the way made an interesting discovery – animated films are much cheaper and faster to make when you make liberal use of ordinary film footage in them. See his films “Heavy Traffic” and “Streetfight” to see what I mean.

With “Wizards”, he made an interesting discovery – you can take ordinary film footage and “rotoscope” it by simply painting over the frames. You don’t need an animator to do this. Any moron can. Admittedly, it looks muddy and weird and bizarre and remarkably unartistic, but what the hey, right? It’s quick, and it’s cheap. Bakshi used this technique on old World War II newsreel footage in “Wizards”, and it worked… because it was supposed to be illusions cast by the evil wizard to inspire his troops, after he’d found an ancient cache of old Nazi news footage.

Unfortunately, he decided to use the same technique in his adaptation of “Lord Of The Rings”.

When you have a professional animator, working from a character notebook, rotoscope live-action footage, you get animated characters that move like real people. Frodo, Sam, and the main characters were done this way.

When you have trained apes simply paint over stock footage from other movies, you get some remarkably sloppy rotoscope footage. This technique was used for the Balrog in the Mines of Moria, and was utterly beaten to death at the end of the movie, with footage from “Zulu” being reused and repainted to show hordes of Orcs attacking Gondor, for potato’s sake! Hordes of berserk Zulus with red glowing eyes and horns painted on!

Yurch.

Ultimately, us fanboys didn’t like it because it was a high-speed, stripped-down, scaled-down, soulless adaptation of something we loved. Why didn’t Aragorn have any pants? What the hell was Boromir doing dressed up like a Monty Python Spam Viking? Why were all the Elves overexposed by at least two F-stops? We saw Bakshi’s vision… and frankly, it stunk.

And, as the cherry on top of the cake, Bakshi announced that he would release the first movie, and use the profits to finance the second one.

We must therefore presume the movie has yet to break even, since Bakshi never so much as began preproduction work on the second film. A year or two later, Rankin-Bass did a TV adaptation of “Return Of The King” that tied up the loose ends and provided us with some pathetic sense of closure.

Bakshi did a couple more animated features, most notably “Fire And Ice” with Frank Frazetta… and then, finally, drifted back into an area more in line with his artistic sensibilities and general level of competence. He’s still doing television cartoons, these days, from what I hear.

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I was kind of startled by the “rotoscoping” technique. It seems to be intercut at random and is the “acting” style of the participants is pretty appalling…the song-and-dance number at The Tavern being especially atrocious. The crowd looks like a bunch of mentally-ill winos.

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He made the abominable movie Cool World to cash in on Who Framed Roger Rabbit?'s success, and the IMO obscenely overrated Mighty Mouse series. I’ve really never understood Bakshi’s considerable “cult” reputation; I’m guessing it’s just because people are desparate to see non-Disney animation in the US.

Anyway, I haven’t seen his version of Lord of the Rings since it was first released. All that I really remember from it is that Frodo and Sam were unquestionably the main characters (unlike the book), the rotoscoping was horrible, and the “Where There’s a Whip, There’s a Way” song the Orcs sing. I also remember reading the book several years later and finally realizing just how different the movie was from the book. I kept getting confused and distracted because I expected the story to get back to Frodo when the book insisted on talking about this Aragorn guy.

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Sol, you’re thinking of the Rankin/Bass version of Return of the King. Bakshi’s LotR didn’t have any singing IIRC.

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As for “Return Of The King”, is that worth watching? I’ve been curious to rent the DVD, but have heard nothing but horrible things about it.

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Not me. I hated that the morons in charge reversed the entire message of the book. Inasmuch as The Hobbit had a message, it was about how it was good that Bilbo learned about beauty and poetry and became a bit of a dreamer from the stodgy hobbit he was. The Rankin-Bass reverses that…even in the theme song “The Greatest Adventure” where it’s warbled “The man who’s a dreamer/And never (takes?) heed/Who thinks of a world/that is just make-believe/Will never know passion/Will never know pain/Who sits by the window/will one day see rain” which is exactly the opposite of the entire point of Tolkien’s book. Tolkien clearly thinks it’s good that Bilbo grew.

Plus, I wasn’t really excited that they reduced the complex and multi-faceted Battle of Five Armies into the vapid message: “War! HUH! What is it good for? Absolutely Nuthin’ (sing it again)”. :rolleyes:

Not to mention that the King of the Woodelves (Legolas’s dad, mind you) was a sort of insect-looking creature.

Keith: Rankin-Bass’s “Return of the King” is the worst of the three. It’s utterly dreadful beyond words. The psychotic dream sequence where Sam and some Orcs frolic in the daisies in love-fest slow-mo is only one of the low points. The jolly tune put to the “Where there’s a whip! There’s a way!” sequence. Merry and Pippin looking like Mr. Potato-head dolls. The “bard of Gondor” Gah.

**

Regarding Bakshi’s “Lord of the Rings”, to me the worst part (far worse than his nudist Aragorn or Horn-Headed Boromir) was his treatment of Sam, who seemed to be retarded or brain-damaged or something. Whasshisname, from the Peter Jackson films is striking the perfect balance for Sam. Bakshi? Not so much.

Fenris

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Und Cherman too. What was up with that?

This version also has it hardwired into my girlfriends head that elves and Woodelves are two completely different races in Middle Earth.

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You’ll love Orson Bean as the voice of Frodo!

<<shudder>>

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Yup, that’s right – Bakshi did Cool World, forgot about that one. And you’ll notice that in the trailers, it gives a firm impression that this is an ANIMATED FEATURE, but more than half the film is perfectly ordinary non-animated footage.

And even THEN, he STILL manages to make it kind of suck. Watching The Nine Lives Of Fritz The Cat, in particular, gives the impression that Bakshi subscribes to the Keyring Theory Of Movies – that you can just stick someone famous up on stage and let him play with his keyring, and people will sit there openmouthed and fascinated and watch it… it’s got motion, it’s got someone famous, it’s got noise, and it’s got something shiny, so people will naturally be entertained by it…

I’m inclined to be kinder to the Rankin-Bass animated stuff. It was, for one thing, intended for children, and I rather liked the character and set design – it was considerably more artistic than Bakshi’s crap. True, it was far from perfect – hell, it was made for television in the seventies, folks. Think about that…

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I have a soft spot in my heart for the “Return of the King”, and this as someone who has read the Lord of the Rings over a dozen times. I am apparently unique in this regard.

I think Gandalf’s voice is perfect. Whenever I hear John Huston in another performance, I think “Hey, that’s Gandalf!”

I like the focus on Sam and Frodo, since Sam is my favorite character.

The confrontation between Eowyn and the Lord of the Nazgul is always how I visualized it.

The singing is a bit over the top, but it does reflect the fact that in the books people keep breaking out into songs. (“Where there’s a whip” is incongruous, but it cracks me up. “Frodo of the nine fingers” is more consistent with the book.)

Admittedly, some of the affection may be due to seeing it first when I was ten and had only read the books once.

So, cast me out of the fraternity of nerds if you will, but if it came on TV again, I would watch it.

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Indeed, you’re not alone, keeper0. I absolutely cannot read the books without hearing the voice of John Huston as the narrator. Yes, Sir Ian is wonderful, but even during the entire first viewing of Fellowship, I kept expecting to hear that voice any time Gandalph opened his mouth. Even as an animated voiceover, the man’s got presence.

I also still see Gollum as a little froggie looking critter, though that may change after a couple more viewings of TTT. Despite all my other misgivings about the second flick, that was a hell of an opening.

I’m not all that down on R&B’s The Hobbit, either. I think I’ve got the same nostalgia as you (seeing them as a youngish lad for the first time, a whole lotta moons back.)