Link, Please.
Sorry, missed the edit window.
He was replying to an email I sent him right after I joined this very board.
The thing is, Bakshi is very much an auteur with a unique vision that permeates his work. If you don’t like his stylistic choices or think his style is “ugly”, that’s your taste reacting against his–it’s not a sign that his LOTR is “a failure of filmmaking” in some objective sense.
It’s less a question of “ugly” and more a question of “bad filmmaking” overall.
Terms like “bad filmmaking” recall those Red Letter Media videos that make claims about intrinsic rules of cinema. There are no rules. There a guidelines–“these things tend to work, these rarely do”–but at the end of the day, good filmmaking is a process that results in a film that speaks to people on some level for whatever reason.
If I make a film that has no clear protagonist, lacks a third act climax, doesn’t answer a key question, etc., etc. (let’s say Koyaanisqatsi) yet people walk out feeling moved somehow, what kind of sorcery has taken place? Have I made a bad film that people magically liked or have I in fact made a good film that reveals that art transcends formulae?
I like Bakshi’s film, as does BMalion, apparently. It speaks to me. It divides the critics evenly according to Rotten Tomatoes. I can’t take seriously any claim that Bakshi’s film is such an obvious of “bad filmmaking” when a good chunk of people genuinely enjoy it.
At worst, it is like any cult film: loved by some, impenetrable to others. All that means is that it’s finely tuned to its audience.
A work of art can be analyzed objectively. There are entire classes of study devoted to the examination of film from a visual, auditory, and narrative point of view. Now, I don’t hold a degree in the field of film study, but I am still able to look at Bakshi’s work and determine that he fails at all three.
One could, I suppose, argue that they like the drab appearance of Middle Earth in Bakshi’s LOTR. Okay. I don’t know why they would, but fair enough. But, from a place of film analysis, the look of Bakshi’s films fail at lighting, use of color, and integration of the characters into their background.
One could argue that they like the character design. Fair enough - the hobbits of Bakshi’s world look a little more…hobbity, and a little less like shrunken actors in wigs. And, hey, not every character is gorgeous (or even kinda attractive), and some people like that in their movies. But his animators did not give their drawings “the illusion of life” as Disney puts it. They move way too much, and the facial expressions are all kinds of wrong. They don’t act like anything real.
Finally, and I can’t stress this enough, one could argue that they prefer Bakshi’s story, except that they can’t because there isn’t a complete story to like! Not bothering with an ending of any kind is a narrative failure on such a massive scale, I cannot believe there are people who still hold this movie up as the definitive adaptation.
ETA: Reading the post above, which you posted while I was writing this - movie making definitely has rules. Those rules have to be mastered before they can be broken to achieve a greater end. Now, you might disagree with me, but I don’t think Bakshi’s LORT was a masterpiece which broke the rules of cinema to achieve a greater end.
Yes, I know. I’ve undertaken some film studies. I’m not clueless on the matter.
Lighting, character design, story, etc. can all be objectively analysed, but again, good lighting, for example, is lighting that is effective for whatever reason. The analysis of the lighting may elucidate why it is effective, but the analysis itself cannot tell you if it is good or bad.
On top of that, a film is greater than the sum of its parts. Lighting that may ordinarily be “bad” may in fact work in a film when combined with other elements. Interestingly, the lighting used in film noir was in part chosen at times to help hide cheap sets and save on electrical budgets, and yet it also worked to create a mood that suited thematically.
Then there’s the French New Wave, where conventions were played with experimentally. If conventional wisdom determines how “good” a film is, they’re all terrible films. And yet many people like them.
Subjective response is the ultimate arbiter of a film’s worth. Objective analysis in the service of evaluating a film merely tells the story of why you didn’t like it.
I don’t think it’s a “masterpiece”, either. There is a middleground between “bad filmmaking” and masterpieces.
But Bakshi isn’t an idiot or a hack, and his place in the history of animation in particular means you can’t just assume the guy didn’t actually know what he was doing. More likely, he made conscious choices when another filmmaker might have chosen differently.
I was telling “the story of why I didn’t like it.” I also stated that I couldn’t understand how anyone could prefer it to Jackson’s films, which in my opinion, are obviously superior. I dislike using qualifiers like, “in my opinion…” or “I think that…” or “I believe that…” because I was taught that qualifiers weaken arguments. But that’s what it was. An opinion. Clearly you have a different perspective on the subject.
I don’t “prefer” Bakshi’s film, I like them both.
In a slight digression - is Bakshi a common american name? Because it IS a common Indian name, and I’d assumed that Ralph Bakshi was Indian. He doesn’t appear to be though, nor does wikipedia suggest that he is.
And he probably made those decisions because, for some reason, he was making this film on a total budget of $4.75. 
Or at least, that’s certainly how he manages to make it look. It’s a fairly well known “fact” that budgetary constraints contributed to the film in some way, so odds are it’s probably not even the movie Mr. Bakshi would have chosen to make if had really had his way.
But there are certain things about the film that are just bad. There’s not really any excuse for the ludicrously overdramatic gesturing, nor the complete incoherence of the story even as far as it goes. Watch the Council of Elrond again, closely and observe that they never actually tell us WHY they are sending the Ring to Mount Doom. There’s also Samwise the Never Explained, who pops out of a bush and just starts tagging along.
Even if Mr. Bakshi made a good film, he needs to fire his editor.
Thanks !
I just watched bakshi for the first time. The rendering of the two films couldn’t be more different (and i dont like bakshi’s). But it really struck me how similar the composition was in a lot of the scenes. Jackson claims that the “proudfeet” joke was an homage to bakshi, but in truth, the entire birthday scene could have been an elaborate version of bakshi’s story boards. Watch both versions of the black rider sniffing around while the hobbits hide under a tree root - it’s the same scene, except Jackson’s is longer and scarrier, and just all around better. But the parallels run throughout. Strider smoking a pipe in the corner (the same corner) of the dancing pony. The bridge at khazad dum. Even the prologue in some ways. So many of these scenes are composed the same way. This is more than an homage. He borrowed substantially from bakshi’s vision, even though the product is very different. I’m surprised to read on Wikipedia that he originally denied having seen bakshi first. Does anyone know of this is true? It’s obvious to me now that he not only saw it, but was influenced by it. I now see his films as more of a remake than an original vision. He wanted to finish the job of course, and fix the mistakes (and there were many). But without bakshi, there’s no jackson, that’s for sure.
How about the little issue that they were working off the same BOOK that was written way back in the dark ages if the midcentury so they had to hit the same sort of things … like the Proudfeet joke at the speech, the whole Dark Rider snuffling after them as they hid in tree roots, Strider smoking his pipe in the corner of the Prancing Pony … if you tried to make the movies without the actual scenes from the books that everybody has spent the last 50+ years reading, they would bitch you out and refuse to pay to see/buy/rent the movie …:rolleyes:
Jackson actually imitated John Howe’s original illustration that he had done years before he was hired to work on the movies. The problem was that Howe had (perhaps unconsciously) imitated Bakshi’s film.
I would have to go back and watch Jackson’s extended edition documentary again, but I would swear there was a bit where PJ said the hobbits hiding from the black rider in a tree root was an homage to Bakshi. Possibly the other bits you mentioned are also.