I also have to say that RB’s Hobbit has the single worst voice-actor in the history of animation.
Bar none.
The guy who played Gollum had a blast with it. Orson Bean was annoying but semi-competent as Bilbo but the guy who plays Bard(?) of Lake-Town :: shudders ::
He. Reads. Each. Seperate. Word. With. No. Inflection.
“Go. Black. Arrow. Fly. To. The. Dragon. For. Freedom. And. Justice.”
:: barfs ::
Fenris
You’re correct; the Rankin/Bass version is on Pay-per-view tonight and I just saw it for the first time since it originally came out. The years have made me combine the two into a barely coherent whole – it’s all “Frodo of the Nine Fingers” and bad rotoscoping.
By the way, I don’t think that this webpage has been mentioned yet. It’s one person’s critique of the Bakshi movie, and it’s pretty darn funny.
From SolGrundy’s link:
BWAHAHAHAA!
I laugh because I had this same thought myself when I watched the Bakshi version again recently.
The first shot of Strider/Aragorn in Bree and the master shot of The Fellowship at the West Gate of Moria as well.
In the extended edition director commentary, Jackson (to his credit) says the shot of the Nazgul over the hobbits in the hollow was indeed an homage to Bakshi’s film.
I had also noticed those other shots when I first saw ‘Fellowship.’ As you said, they are distinctive.
Bakshi basically ran out of money and had to leave parts like that (including most of the Battle of Helm’s Deep as-is - or rather half-arsed rotoscoped).
Of course that doesn’t quite let him off for the horned “Naz who say Ni” - but I didn’t see any PJ-esque monkey orcs climbing up columns in Moria. And Frodo left in his 50’s - after nearly 20 years of being a Ring-bearer, not six months after Bilbo and two minutes after opening up the envelope with the ring (so there! :b)
No one has yet mentioned that Saul Zaentz was the big-money producer/liasion for both films.
Sorry for the multiple postings, but I just found this interview with Ralph Bakshi, conducted before the first Peter Jackson movie was released. In it, Bakshi just comes across as an opportunistic jackass, bitter that he didn’t get enough credit for making a movie that just wasn’t very good.
Granted, he has the humility to admit that Tolkien’s work is epic (although it’s somewhat backhanded, since he seems to blame the failure of his movie on that). And I do acknowledge that his making the movie exposed a lot of people, myself included, to the book for the first time. But on the whole, that interview just seems to confirm the impression I’ve always had of the guy – he’s gained his reputation just by being different, not by making anything good on its own merits.
I guess my question is why it “can’t help but suffer” when compared to the new movies. If Jackson et.al can make great movies from the material, why can’t everyone else be expected to live up to that standard? If it’s just a question of budget, then why make the movie at all if you can’t afford to do it right or to make the complete version? Even if you remove the new movies from the equation, don’t you still have to compare Bakshi’s movie to the book itself?
I’d bet that that’s why it’s almost universally detested. On its own, it might not be horrifically bad, especially when you consider the state of feature animation at the time. But it’s got a built-in comparison to the book, so it’s got to do a spectacular job. A bad adaptation fails everybody; fans of the source are upset when details are wrong or are left out, and people unfamiliar with the source just can’t tell what the hell is going on. (I think Disney made some of the same mistakes with The Black Cauldron, another not-very-good movie.)
I’ll have to say I thought the Hobbit was the best of the pre-Peter Jackson stuff, and I liked the animation as I felt it went with the whole fantasy feel quite well. The singing actually worked pretty well, considering the fact it was made for childern. Though that damn bard started to really get on my nerves by the time they reached the moutain. That and the battle scenes leave a hell of a lot to be desired. I realize they cut some plot points and it kinda bugs me since it is only an hour and a half, but I’m willing to forgive it.
The whole wood elf thing bugged me the most, since there really was no reason at all to make them speak german and look all weird.
Bakashi's version was pretty bad, for a myrid of reasons that have already been gone over before in here, mostly the fact I couldn't see much of anything relating to the orcs, and I felt they should have been playing "In da garden da vita" everytime frodo put on the ring.
Return of the King was pretty bad as well, and the really sad thing is, the most memorable thing I can remember from that is that horrible "Where there's a whip, there's a way" song. It's bad, but it's horribly catchy. But pretty much everything about it was wrong. Particulary that stupid "Is there hobbit in you?" statment at the end.My kid is addicted to Scooby-Doo cartoons, so I noticed immediately that almost all the voices in RB’s RoTK use the same voice actors as Scooby Doo!.
A Nazgul even makes a longish speech using the same voice (high-pitched ranting) as every villian/monster in the SD cartoons.
One of the hobbits had Shaggy’s voice.
Very surreal.
squeegee they may have been trying to sound like the voice talent for Scooby Doo but SD had professional voice actors. The voice of Shaggy was none other than Casey Kasem.
Oh goddamnit. Casey Kasem was one of the Hobbits :smack:
Heh heh…that other was a uhhh joke. Yea, that’s it, a joke!
Zoinks!
And I see Don Messick, the voice of Scooby Doo, was also in RoTK, and John Stephenson, the voice of all the SD villains and half the extras (Kasem did the other half) was also on hand.
Jinkies, Gandalf!
Whenever I’ve read Lord of the Rings I’ve always had the impression that Sam had Down Syndrome or something. Slow witted and dim.
Say what you want about the Bakshi production, but at least he didn’t take as many liberties with the plot as the new FotR and TTT movies do.
Unless you count the stuff he just skipped over leaving the audience completely lost. That’s much better than changing things so that people can follow it.
I am here to confess something that will no doubt make me a loathed minority in this thread: I like the Ralph Bakshi version. Of course, it was the first version of LOTR that I was ever exposed to, about four years before I ever read the books. I was eight or so when I saw the movie, and today I own a copy. Sure, the animation is cheesy, but I never had trouble following the plot.
I did, and still do, find the lurching, ruined Ringwraiths from the Bakshi version the scariest Wraiths yet put to film.
I don’t know that the Jackson version took many liberties with the plot. Sure, there are details which differ, but then, there are a hell of a lot of details Bakshi screwed up (whether intentionally or not), as well. And poor ol’ Glorfindel gets the shaft in both versions…
This thread convinced me that I didn’t remember the Bakshi version as well as I thought I had, so I rented it over Netflix and finally got a chance to watch it tonight.
O Elbereth! Gilthoniel! What a steaming pile of crap! I obviously had blocked out all memories of it and replaced them with the Rankin/Bass versions. Some observations:
I remembered the rotoscoping, but not so much the entire scenes of live-action footage that was just painted over. I realize that the budget was relatively tight, but…
…the animation couldn’t have been that expensive since it’s so uniformly awful! It’s like watching a first-year film student’s final animation reel. Everything moves constantly until it becomes deathly still, and the faces contort wildly as they move through a scene, never staying on model…
…which, granted, may have been a form of passive resistance since the character models range from bland and dull to genuinely offensive and unappealing. The hobbits all look like dumpy middle-aged women. The wizards are just generic wizard drawings like you’d find in the back of some 14-year-old’s Trapper Keeper. Everybody mentions Aragorn’s lack of pants; I found myself more preoccupied trying to figure out if he was supposed to be Native American or an Innuit. Boromir is indistinguishable from Gimli except for his goofy hat (even though the movie is “animated,” they did a worse job of maintaining relative character heights than the live-action ones). Galadriel looks like a Don Bluth drawing of Cheryl Tiegs. Legolas looks like a cross between Leif Garrett and Madame Medusa from The Rescuers. And Sam looks like a brain-damaged Billy Barty.
It’s not just that the film draws over or just paints over live actors. It’s that the actors they chose are the rejects from the local community theater and Renaissance Faires. Everyone gesticulates wildly, always swinging their arms around and pointing off into space like bad actors trying to parody someone else overacting. The silhouette prologue is painful to watch. Worst of all are the Ringwraiths – excuse me, the Light Brown Xeroxed Riders – who all move like a high school drama club production of Richard III.
“The Balrog.” Words fail me. Never has a more laughably idiotic character design appeared on screen. It’s as if they got Sid & Marty Krofft to design a character, then gave a six-year-old some magic markers and asked her to animate. Direction: “Make it real scary!”
The Orcs. For an animated movie about orcs, you’d think somebody would’ve taken the time to actually draw an orc. Instead, they just dressed some guys up in whatever scraps and horns they could find, filmed it and Xeroxed the hell out of it, then drew red eyes in. They look like Jonny Quest villains.
I’ve gone on long enough already. SolGrundy’s grade: F-.
The only good points: 1) No Glenn Yarborough songs, and 2) Frodo’s got a lot more stones in the movie than he does in the books, and definitely more than in the new movies. But the Bakshi version compensates by making Aragorn look like a total pantsless wussy boy.
True, that. Apart from the “Am I Aruman or Saruman?” business. And the general transformation of Frodo from peace-loving halfling forced to bear the weight of the entire world, to sword-swinging ass-kicker forced to bear the weight of an unfortunate Dorothy Hamill haircut. Apart from that, it’s remarkably faithful to the book.
It does that by taking key scenes and distilling them down, removing them from context, and overlaying them with narration. So it’s got all the details but none of the weight, none of the drama, and none of the feeling of the book. There’s no point in doing an adaptation of a work unless you bring something to it that the audience can’t get from the original – Bakshi’s version doesn’t convey the weight and character that the story has, and it definitely doesn’t provide the spectacle that the story deserves.
If adding Liv Tyler on horseback helps to turn Aragorn into a real three-dimensional character and show how the elves are more than just sparkly tall blonde people in spandex, I’m all for it.
I rented Bakshi with a Tolkienite animator friend of mine a few weeks ago. Being somewhat of an animation nerd myself, I suggested it as something that would be good for a hoot. And, oh, we enjoyed it so much. We’d never seen it, because until the last year or so it wasn’t available for rental, and we were born long after it came out in the theatre. We had such a good time laughing at the rotoscoping and the horrible concepts and the inconsistencies. But I must say, it was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.
I have no cite on this, but I believe I heard at some point that Peter Jackson saw Bakshi’s LOTR without having read the books, and read them because of the movie. Does this ring a bell with anyone else? It sounds preposterous, but I’d like to know if I remember this at all correctly.
crinklebat, you heard right on this. During the FOTR:EE director’s commentary, PJ states this. A couple of scenes of FOTR were staged in such a way as to pay “homage” to the Bakshi film, including the scene of the ringwraiths/tree roots/four hobbits.
My memories of Bakshi’s LOTR are too dim to be useful, except for the the “Where There’s a Whip” song, which I thought fit in well, and is based on a quote from ROTK where Frodo and Sam are forced to march in an Orc army. (This was in the movie, btw, since I’ve never seen the TV version of ROTK.)
The animated TV version of Hobbit from around 1978 was a pile of drek, even by my much less critical standards in my younger days. I was glad enough to see Hobbit on any sort of film that all it had to do to satisfy me was to be somewhat tolerable, and it failed miserably at that. I remember especially Bilbo at the Battle of the Five Armies, saying “Now there are three armies!” then later “Now there are four armies!” etcetera.
Thank goodness it wasn’t the battle of the Nine armies. :rolleyes: