An Exhaustive History of Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings
Folding Ideas
0:00 Well, everyone, it’s happening,
0:01 we’re coming up on the 20th anniversary of Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J.
0:04 R.
0:04 R.
0:05 Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which means it’s the season
0:08 for comprehensive retrospectives on all things Tolkien.
0:11 Jackson’s adaptation is an undeniable triumph: both a lushly realized,
0:15 cohesive vision of the text, and a masterpiece of savvy fandom marketing.
0:20 Jackson made extremely effective use of the internet during production,
0:24 curating an official fan club that lent
0:27 the production a sense of authority and consensus.
0:30 Whatever disagreements over adaptational decisions,
0:32 the boxed set Extended Edition DVDs still stand
0:35 as a masterpiece of filmmaking and an undeniable set of bonafides,
0:39 the display of a passion project wrought
0:42 on a scale that comes along once in a lifetime,
0:45 with dozens of hours of documentary combing over every minute detail
0:49 of the process and effort that went into lovingly rendering the world.
0:54 But, before we all get swept away in that fervor, like Nazgul in the river,
0:59 I wanted to turn some attention towards Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 adaptation.
1:07 [Swelling Music] Now,
1:13 I’m not setting out here to pit these adaptations against each other,
1:19 but comparison is unavoidable.
1:21 The Jackson trilogy looms large in culture, monolithic even.
1:25 Not only is it the first version
1:27 of the story an entire generation was exposed to, it
1:31 has effectively mediated an agreed-upon interpretation of the text
1:34 by virtue of its success as an adaptation,
1:37 by virtue of looking and feeling “right” to the audience’s eye,
1:42 whatever that nebulous word means in this context.
1:45 Bakshi’s version is undeniably far more fraught.
1:49 It is less cohesive,
1:50 more reliant on an existing familiarity with the source material,
1:54 frustratingly paced, and ultimately incomplete.
1:56 It is often more accurate, more strictly faithful to the text,
2:01 but just as often more hollow, with details that are true to the literal words
2:06 on the page while missing the underlying point of those words.
2:10 But it’s not without its merits.
2:12 Many of the adaptation decisions are
2:14 interesting or excellent in their own right,
2:17 presenting an interpretation of the text that is wildly different,
2:20 but just as compelling as Jackson’s.
2:22 It is technologically decades ahead of itself,
2:25 biting off far more than it can chew
2:27 in pursuit of technological solutions that are now standard practice.
2:32 This is a source of a lot of the film’s inconsistency,
2:35 but it’s definitely a fascinating inconsistency.
2:38 There is, all-in-all a lot more to it than
2:41 just being a weird early crack at a fantasy epic,
2:43 and I think that’s worth talking about.
2:46 So let me tell you the story of a coked-out pervert
2:48 from Brooklyn and the movie he so desperately wanted to make.
2:59 [Bombastic orchestral music] First of all, The Lord of the Rings,
3:08 the book, was not a runaway hit in the United States.
3:11 While the component novels were published in the US
3:13 within six months of their respective UK releases,
3:16 the publisher, Houghton Mifflin, under-estimated how popular the books would be.
3:21 The Hobbit had been successful,
3:22 but that was a children’s book released almost twenty years earlier.
3:26 A lot had changed in America since 1937,
3:29 and so the initial print run of Fellowship was only 1500 copies.
3:34 Now, if you only print 1500 copies it’s hard to sell more than 1500 copies.
3:40 So even though that print run did sell out
3:43 it’s not a clear indicator of the actual audience
3:45 for the book and doesn’t really give you
3:48 a good idea of how many you should have printed.
3:51 Consequently it took years for sales to ramp up as Houghton Mifflin opted
3:55 to trickle import copies from the UK instead of issuing new print runs.
3:59 Somewhere in the early 1960s this triggered a protectionist
4:02 policy in US copyright law that, at the time,
4:06 mandated a domestic manufacturing quota.
4:09 Failing to meet the quota,
4:10 The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings fell into the public domain in the United
4:13 States where they sat until a law was passed in 1994 to restore the copyright
4:17 to a number of similarly odd cases
4:20 where otherwise still-copyrighted foreign works had fallen
4:22 into public domain in the US as a consequence
4:26 of noncompliance with formalities like manufacturing requirements.
4:30 But, point is, even though sales of the books
4:32 had picked up dramatically over the course of the 60s,
4:35 particularly gaining traction with the counterculture
4:38 crowd who identified with Tolkien’s pastoral environmentalism,
4:42 many of these publications,
4:44 like the 150,000 copy Ace Books paperback printing in 1965,
4:49 weren’t licensed and paid no royalties back to Tolkien.
4:53 This sparked a publicity battle over the issue,
4:55 with Tolkien working with Ballantine books
4:57 to produce an authoritative authorized paperback edition,
5:02 but is also when the books finally surge in popularity,
5:05 a decade after their initial publication.
5:08 By the 1970s the Tolkien estate was actively courting adaptations of JRR’s work,
5:13 since a licensed adaptation would actually pay royalties,
5:17 and interest was finally there.
5:19 In 1969 United Artists purchased the international
5:22 film rights to Lord of the Rings directly from Tolkien and they started trying
5:26 to get a viable script and interested director.
5:29 The idea of a film version of Lord
5:31 of the Rings had already been floating around for years,
5:33 with various speculative projects dating back to the 50s,
5:37 but while the counterculture crowd that had latched on to the books
5:41 was increasingly proving to be a viable economic bloc,
5:43 it was still not quite mainstream popular,
5:46 which limited the possible budget of any project.
5:49 United Artists didn’t have much luck,
5:51 their attempts to get a full Lord of the Rings project rolling largely fell
5:55 apart as the books developed a reputation
5:58 of being “unfilmable,” not because it was impossible,
6:01 but because the budget would never be there to do
6:04 justice to the book’s many grand locations and fanciful sets.
6:08 The story was simply too long to realistically compress into a single film,
6:13 but setting out to make multiple films without assured success was folly,
6:18 and surely audiences would revolt over an incomplete story.
6:22 Any attempt at the time would be too compromised to satisfy the book’s fans,
6:25 and too cheap looking to satisfy anyone else.
6:28 Then along comes an animator named Ralph Bakshi.
6:31 Born in Palestine, but raised in Brooklyn,
6:33 Ralph Bakshi is, ya know, a bit of a character.
6:37 Everyone else is behind.
6:38 I’m not ahead.
6:39 I’m doing what’s right for an artist who’s doing what he believes in.
6:43 I'm not ahead of my times.
6:45 What I am is honest.
6:46 What they are is dishonest.
6:48 He cut his teeth as an animator in the 1950s and 60s
6:51 at Terrytoons and Paramount working on television shows like Mighty Mouse,
6:55 Deputy Dawg, and Spider-Man before pivoting to feature films in the 1970s.
6:59 The Lord of the Rings was Bakshi’s fifth feature film as a director
7:02 and it is notable as both a culmination
7:05 of his technical interests as an animator,
7:07 utilizing mixed media as both a cost saving and aesthetic tool,
7:11 and the ways in which it deviates from Bakshi’s normal narrative style.
7:15 Bakshi was raised in the densely urban Brooklyn neighbourhood of Brownsville,
7:18 a historically poor neighbourhood that while
7:21 originally dominated by Jewish factory workers
7:24 saw a heavy influx of Black residents through the 40s, 50s, and 60s.
7:29 This multiracial urban milieu forms the foundation of his early theatrical work,
7:33 his first three films are all considered part of the urban street film genre,
7:37 but, before that, alright,
7:39 to put this career in context we need to back up to the sixties again.
7:43 The sixties were not kind to theatrical animation in America.
7:46 Owing to shifts in the way that movies were exhibited,
7:49 starting in the 50s, shorts became less financially viable,
7:52 and so most of the money for animation
7:55 shifted to the rapidly expanding market of television,
7:58 which Hanna-Barbera and Warner Brothers dominated.
8:01 Theatrical animation was largely the domain of Walt Disney,
8:05 both the company and the man.
8:07 Walt had been an absolutely titanic figure in the medium for decades,
8:11 but on that front things were not great: his health was declining,
8:16 and the output of the studio dropped
8:18 precipitously leading up to his death in 1966.
8:21 While the studio had managed to put out a new animated feature approximately
8:25 every fifteen months on average over the course of the 40s and 50s,
8:28 they only managed to complete three films in the 60s:
8:32 One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Sword in the Stone, and The Jungle Book,
8:36 the animation studio relying mostly on reissues
8:39 of their back catalogue for the decade.
8:41 While these films performed commercially well,
8:43 The Jungle Book in particular being a huge
8:46 hit releasing in 1967 as Walt Disney’s final film,
8:49 they were not particularly challenging.
8:51 These were interwoven with re-issues of Bambi,
8:55 Pinocchio, Cinderella, Snow White, Fantasia, and Peter Pan.
8:58 And the follow up, the first feature after Walt’s death,
9:02 is 1970’s The Artistocats, which is just the absolute pinnacle
9:06 of Disney’s historical reputation for anodyne garbage.
9:10 So this is what feature animation looks
9:11 like if you’re a twenty-something in 1970, this is what you’ve grown up with.
9:15 There’s other stuff, of course, there’s always something on the periphery,
9:19 but overwhelmingly the legacy of theatrical animation is safe,
9:23 bright, unscary, trapped decades in the past, and slowly dying.
9:28 In 1968 Ralph Bakshi,
9:30 moving into his 30s and frustrated with the stagnant status quo of the industry,
9:35 broke away and formed his own animation studio in Brooklyn.
9:38 Initially the studio found work on shows like Rocket Robin Hood and Spider-Man,
9:42 but Bakshi had ambitions to move into feature films.
9:45 He had a number of projects already in mind,
9:48 including The Lord of the Rings which he had fallen
9:50 in love with after the books really broke out in the 60s.
9:53 While he would spend years working on a half dozen projects in parallel,
9:57 particularly trying to get in good graces with United Artists
10:00 who held the film rights for Lord of the Rings,
10:02 the first film he was able to secure full funding for was
10:06 an adaptation of comic artist Robert Crumb’s underground hit Fritz the Cat.
10:11 Released in 1972 with an X rating the film was perverted,
10:15 juvenile, rambling, gratuitously violent, unfocused,
10:17 aggressively political, and a huge success.
10:21 Despite the rating limiting distribution options,
10:23 the spectacle of a cartoon that was the opposite
10:26 of all things Disney drew in a worldwide
10:29 audience to the tune of $90 million dollars against
10:31 a budget of somewhere between $700,000 and $1.3 million.
10:36 Following the success of Fritz the Cat Bakshi
10:38 was able to fund and distribute the animated quasi-autobiography,
10:41 pseudo-crime film Heavy Traffic, released in 1973.
10:46 While not the astronomic success of Fritz,
10:48 Heavy Traffic made decent money against its comparably
10:50 slim budget and is considered a box office success.
10:54 Both of these films did well with critics and remain artistically relevant.
10:58 Personally I think Heavy Traffic is the better of the two,
11:01 and certainly Bakshi’s best film from the era,
11:04 though it does encapsulate Bakshi’s overall sensibilities as a creative.
11:08 There is a fixation on Black culture,
11:11 the complicated racial identity of being Jewish in America,
11:14 a deep and total distrust of police,
11:17 disillusionment with the results of the counterculture movement,
11:20 and a keen sense of the ways the structure
11:22 of society is arranged to maintain an underclass.
11:27 Artistically there is a fascination with the idea of capturing reality.
11:31 Photographs of real locations are used
11:33 as trace references for backgrounds in Fritz,
11:36 and many backgrounds in Heavy Traffic are just stylized photographs.
11:40 Both films use some documentary recording for secondary dialogue,
11:44 captured by Bakshi while walking around Harlem and Brooklyn
11:47 or interviewing people he met on the streets or in bars.
11:50 Man 1: Look, I’m paying my taxes.
11:52 Woman: The money is what’s happening.
11:53 Man 1: Hey!
11:53 Woman: See what I mean?
11:53 See what I mean?
11:53 Man 1: No, what I’m talking about
11:54 Woman: It all counts, that is what’s happening,
11:55 I’m talking about as far as, like,
11:58 if you wanna be revolutionary you get some bread first,
12:02 and then you can talk trash.
12:04 Man 2: Whitey blind us with religion.
12:07 There’s also a pervasive horniness as it’s rare to go an entire
12:11 scene with a woman without a breast popping out for no reason,
12:14 the slapstick humour of Terrytoons is often extended into bloody hyperviolence,
12:18 and there is a complicated relationship with queer characters.
12:22 While Bakshi’s eye as a director is certainly sympathetic to drag queens,
12:27 trans women, and gay men, they clearly form an integral part of the real spaces
12:32 and communities that he tries to simulate in his art,
12:36 narratively they tend to be present just long enough
12:39 to be physically brutalized as a condemnation of police and bigots.
12:44 While these two films demonstrated that adult-oriented
12:47 animation could be financially and critically successful,
12:49 not much really changed in the wider perception of animation.
12:53 These films were still essentially novelties.
12:56 While there was some attempt by others to capitalize
12:58 on the success of Bakshi’s films in America,
13:01 this mostly took the form of distributors quickly repackaging
13:04 English dubs of adult animation from Japan and Europe.
13:08 Bakshi would follow this up with his most controversial film, Coonskin,
13:12 an adaptation of the Uncle Remus stories transplanting them
13:15 from the rural American South into a gangster story in Harlem.
13:19 While this movie occupies something of a place
13:23 alongside contemporary blaxploitation films
13:25 like Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Dolemite, and Shaft,
13:29 and has been praised for the depth of the references in its adaptation,
13:33 such as including details from the African myths that predate Uncle Remus,
13:38 it also heavily utilizes historical racist caricature and minstrel imagery.
13:43 There’s a lot of debate about the artistic intent behind the film,
13:47 whether or not the use of this imagery is intended to shock
13:51 and shame the white institutions that created the imagery in the first place,
13:55 how effective it is at that, and whether
13:57 or not protests of the film in 1975 were justified,
14:02 but reflecting on it 45 years later the main thing
14:04 that stands out to me is a sort of fixation at play,
14:08 like Bakshi just wanted to also make a blaxploitation film,
14:12 a genre that sprang out of the kinds of neighbourhoods that he grew up
14:17 in, and out of a community that he saw himself as a part of.
14:21 And reception was far from universal.
14:23 The Congress of Racial Equality protested it,
14:27 the NAACP supported it as a “difficult satire”,
14:30 and according to Bakshi the Wu Tang Clan love it.
14:33 It’s a very complicated intersection
14:35 of politics and influences that ultimately hinge
14:38 on the question of whether or not this was Bakshi’s story to tell.
14:43 Modern commentators have compared it favorably to Childish Gambino’s
14:46 “This is America” And I guess at the end
14:49 of the day the meat of the film is that the cops and the Mafia suck.
14:53 [Indistinct Italian Noises] Coonskin was not successful,
14:59 and did slow the momentum on Bakshi’s career,
15:02 but it was still a relatively inexpensive film and the failure
15:05 was not a fatal blow to his career as a director.
15:09 During post-production on Coonskin Bakshi came up
15:11 with the concept for Hey Good Lookin’, another street film,
15:14 this time set in the fifties,
15:16 but one in which animated and live-action characters would interact.
15:20 Warner Brothers agreed to finance the film in 1973,
15:23 and the live action footage was shot, largely improvisationally, in early 74.
15:29 However the film would never be completed as originally conceived,
15:32 as the process of having live action and animated characters interact proved
15:36 to be too labour intensive to complete on the film’s budget of 1.5 million.
15:41 A rotoscoping rig was built at Bakshi’s Brooklyn
15:43 studio to try and speed up the animation process,
15:46 but a series of conflicts between Bakshi and Warner Brothers led
15:49 to the film’s release date being pushed
15:51 back several times before being shelved indefinitely.
15:54 While Hey Good Lookin’ was trapped in post-production hell,
15:57 Bakshi would release his first “family friendly” feature,
16:00 Wizards, which is also a departure from his urban-life
16:03 focused films into an explicit genre film.
16:06 “Family friendly” is a bit of a weird misnomer here, though,
16:08 as the film is still deliberately aimed at adults rather than an all-ages crowd,
16:13 but it’s also a lot tamer with less sex, gore, and profanity.
16:18 The film was moderately successful,
16:19 enough to keep it from being considered a flop,
16:21 which is somewhat impressive given that the movie is quite bad.
16:25 Aside from some notable iconography and some compelling backgrounds the flow
16:29 of the film suffers from all
16:31 the disjointed scene composition of Bakshi’s earlier films.
16:34 While that works for Heavy Traffic, a film about powerless characters trying
16:38 to find their way in a disjointed world,
16:41 it really works against a film that’s so plot-heavy there’s an entire
16:45 movie's worth of story dumped on the audience in the prologue.
16:50 Illuminating history bearing on the everlasting
16:52 struggle for world supremacy The first
16:55 blast was set off by five terrorists It was a big day
17:00 in Montegar Delia felt a pull from the sky The older fairy
17:04 knew instantly that these were not ordinary twins The day will come,
17:08 my brother, where I will return and make
17:11 this a planet where mutants rule Politically the film is bizarre.
17:16 It is clearly working through a lot of opinions about the anti-war movement,
17:20 the protagonists are mostly twee fairies from a literal
17:23 fantasy land of mushrooms and rainbows who are mowed down
17:26 by machine gun wielding mutants hopped up on Nazi propaganda
17:29 until the bearded wizard ends the war by shooting skeleton Hitler,
17:33 but those opinions haven’t been worked
17:36 enough to make them coherent or interesting,
17:39 and the end result flips rapidly between unbearably treacle and deeply cynical.
17:45 It’s not cohesive in style,
17:47 the characters look like they’re from completely different films,
17:51 it’s horny in a way that’s leering and uncomfortable rather than sexy,
17:56 and it’s pretty boring.
17:58 The most notable elements of the film are all historical trivia.
18:01 The film was being financed by Fox,
18:03 and Bakshi found himself in budget meetings with George Lucas,
18:05 who was working on Star Wars at the time,
18:08 and the two became professional acquaintances.
18:10 George asked Ralph to change the working title
18:13 of War Wizards to avoid conflict with Star Wars,
18:16 and Ralph agreed because George let Mark Hamil take time
18:19 off from Star Wars to record a part in Wizards.
18:21 I’m Shaun, leader of the Knights of Stardust and protectors of Dolan,
18:26 king of the mountain fairies.
18:28 It’s also the first film where Bakshi really
18:30 experimented with mixing in stylized live action footage,
18:33 utilizing various rotoscoping and xerox techniques,
18:36 to save budget on animating large battle scenes.
18:39 The film was moderately successful,
18:40 but Ralph’s goodwill towards George Lucas came to an end when Star Wars,
18:44 released three weeks after Wizards, largely replaced it in theatres.
18:49 Parallel to the production of most of these films Bakshi pesters United Artists,
18:52 who have been stalling out on all their attempts
18:55 at getting a Lord of the Rings film rolling.
18:57 Bakshi says he pitched UA on an animated Lord of the Rings in 72 and 73,
19:02 but they didn’t bite.
19:03 Then in 75 he convinces Mike Medavoy to give him a chance,
19:07 and Medavoy agrees, loosely,
19:08 to two or three films plus something Hobbit related.
19:12 Problem was United Artists already had a script
19:16 written in 1970 by then-tv-writer John Boorman,
19:19 who at this point in 1975 had just written and directed Zardoz.
19:24 The gun is good There was some conflict over the script,
19:29 because, [coughing] well,
19:31 it is absolutely buckwild with a Galadriel/Frodo sex scene,
19:36 Aragorn and Boromir kissing passionately with Arwen’s blood on their lips,
19:41 the history of the ring presented as a rock opera at the Council of Elrons,
19:46 and Gimli is rebirthed in mud to recall the ancient ancestral password to Moria.
19:54 Bakshi convinced Dan Melnyk at MGM to buy out the project so
19:57 that they could throw the script out and start over, which they do.
20:02 So Bakshi starts over on the script with novice screenwriter Chris Conkling,
20:05 but when Dan Melnick gets ousted from MGM in 1976 the new producer,
20:11 Dick Shepherd, doesn’t seem to know or care about the project at all,
20:14 so Bakshi gets in touch with Saul Zaentz,
20:17 who had helped him finance Fritz back in 71,
20:20 and convinces him to buy out the project from MGM,
20:23 thus landing the thing back at United Artists.
20:26 Incidentally Zaentz goes beyond this, buying out the entirety of Tolkien’s film,
20:30 stage, and merchandising rights,
20:32 which starts a chain reaction that would eventually lead,
20:35 decades later, to the troubled production that resulted in The Hobbit:
20:38 Battle of Five Armies Why does it hurt so much?
20:43 Unsatisfied with Conkling’s work Bakshi and Zaentz
20:45 sideline him and hire Peter S.
20:47 Beagle, author of The Last Unicorn, to do a rewrite,
20:50 which Bakshi and Zaentz are mostly happy with, and finally
20:54 in 1976 a theatrical Lord of the Rings film is full-steam-ahead.
20:59 Before the movie even hits theatres, though, it has two complications.
21:03 The first is obviously Bakshi’s reputation and style.
21:06 Is Gandalf going to whip his dick out and piss off the bridge of Khazad-Dum?
21:10 Will pipe-weed be some dank bud?
21:12 Who knows.
21:13 The second is Rankin/Bass, an American production company that mostly made
21:18 seasonal television specials by outsourcing animation to Japan.
21:22 Rankin/Bass had been working on an adaptation
21:24 of The Hobbit as a TV special since 72, and it was looking to broadcast by 77.
21:30 Additionally they had already storyboarded a sequel to their Hobbit
21:34 film utilizing large chunks of The Return of the King.
21:37 Both of these would conflict with any
21:39 Lord of the Rings film United Artists produced,
21:41 particularly once Bakshi convinced them the film
21:43 could be done justice if it were animated,
21:46 since audiences would assume they were all related.
21:48 But, since the books were still public domain,
21:51 Rankin/Bass could do whatever they wanted, at least within the US,
21:55 and a lawsuit to intervene succeeded only
21:57 in securing a broadcast agreement in Canada.
22:00 Mm, my precious, will it taste delicious?
22:05 Bakshi’s production, even after settling down at United Artists, was tumultuous,
22:11 but mostly in a way that’s probably better described as indecisive.
22:15 The script was overhauled several times,
22:17 mostly because of arguments about how much of the books
22:20 should or could be adapted into a single movie.
22:23 Bakshi and Beagle ultimately pushed for two movies,
22:26 the first encompassing Fellowship and Two Towers,
22:28 and intended for this film to be subtitled Part 1,
22:32 but United Artists waffled on committing to a second film.
22:35 They didn’t outright say no,
22:36 in a way that would have pushed the production to commit everything to one film,
22:40 or make it more conclusive,
22:42 but they also left the fate of Part 2 in the hazy realm
22:46 of “let’s wait and see what happens.”
22:48 Of course as history has already borne out, the sequel was never produced,
22:52 and the film ends with a disorientingly
22:54 quick resolution where Gandalf implies that the Battle
22:57 of Helm’s Deep is in fact the deciding moment of victory, end of story.
23:02 Released in 1978, reaction was lukewarm,
23:05 but broadly positive and not terribly harsh.
23:08 Most of Bakshi’s idiosyncrasies as a director
23:10 are either absent or under control.
23:12 Sort of.
23:13 It’s certainly the least juvenile, no one whips their dick out,
23:18 everyone’s tits stay inside their shirts,
23:20 there’s no random comedy skits inserted haphazardly to pad runtime,
23:24 and the adaptation is certainly faithful in the sense that the vast
23:29 majority of the dialogue is copied directly from the books.
23:32 But, and this is probably its greatest flaw,
23:35 it still exhibits Bakshi’s inability to focus on the story at hand.
23:40 Jackson’s films, especially Fellowship, are an illustrative comparison here.
23:44 Jackson’s films are focused and cohesive.
23:46 It’s an adventure story about big events and big emotions,
23:50 the unbreakable bond of friendship forged in adversity,
23:53 the pain of loss, and swelling moments of triumph.
23:56 You bow to no one.
24:06 Jackson gets how the characters and plot interweave,
24:09 that it’s explicitly a story about
24:11 how this big adventure changes the characters,
24:14 and if you don’t have both then you don’t have the whole.
24:19 So here’s the problem: Bakshi just isn’t very good at plot or pacing.
24:25 He learned his craft working on slapstick cartoons,
24:27 and his first three films are effectively just a series of vignettes.
24:31 Heavy Traffic is an urban slice-of-life film and Fritz
24:35 the Cat and Coonskin are both adapted from explicitly episodic material.
24:39 This is not strictly a criticism,
24:41 it works in Heavy Traffic, it’s not a bad style,
24:45 there’s nothing wrong with vignette storytelling,
24:48 it just needs the right material.
24:50 But then you get Wizards,
24:52 which is supposed to be this really plot-driven adventure story,
24:56 heavy on worldbuilding, and it’s just a meandering mess.
25:00 Unimportant skits drag for minutes,
25:02 action scenes repeat stock battle clips endlessly,
25:06 and important moments resolve in seconds.
25:09 While less extreme than Wizards,
25:11 this is unfortunately the main failing of Lord of the Rings.
25:15 Bakshi was, for most of the 70s, both extremely busy,
25:20 juggling multiple productions simultaneously,
25:22 and also allegedly on a lot of drugs.
25:24 It’s just not a state of mind that’s really conducive to making a film
25:29 that maintains a tight focus for two and a half hours, and it shows.
25:35 The film has a lot of content to try and fit into its runtime,
25:38 and yet the flight at the ford is an interminably
25:42 long prog rock jam session of Frodo falling off a horse.
25:46 The story is presented very literally, lifted straight from the novels,
25:50 but with little weight for how it all connects together.
25:53 This creates a notable problem when
25:55 the film transitions from Fellowship into Two Towers,
25:58 because the adaptation is so faithful to the books
26:00 that it feels like you’re at the end of the movie, but it just keeps going.
26:06 Also the second half of the film is pretty weak.
26:10 The sequences get really muddled, a lot of threads are dropped,
26:13 presumably to have been picked up in part 2,
26:16 and there are more and more animation shortcuts
26:19 taken as the production ran up against budget constraints.
26:22 On one hand, the sheer volume of roto done
26:25 on the battle of Helm’s Deep is already immense,
26:28 but on the other hand there’s a lot of shots like this where
26:31 you can just outright see that it’s a guy wearing rubber orc gloves.
26:36 While otherwise the backgrounds in the film range
26:39 from gorgeously stylized paintings to evocative abstract non-landscapes,
26:42 for most of the Battle of Helm’s Deep any background or distance
26:47 is filled with stock footage of clouds regardless of camera angle.
26:52 On top of the shortcuts, Bakshi is just generally not very good at keeping
26:56 track of the action and geography of his fight scenes,
27:00 making them really hard to follow,
27:02 and the muddy, high contrast artwork doesn’t help.
27:06 Then at the end Gandalf rides
27:08 in and the narrator implies that this battle defeated Sauron,
27:11 but also maybe stay tuned for part two?
27:15 The forces of darkness were driven forever by the valiant friends of Frodo.
27:22 As their valiant battle ended,
27:24 so too ends the first great tale of The Lord of the Rings.
27:30 It’s not a strong ending.
27:33 The film mixes animation styles in a way
27:36 that reads like Bakshi was constantly experimenting on-the-fly
27:39 and how a scene ends up looking is dictated
27:42 by what seemed like a cool idea that week,
27:45 and while this mixed media style is interesting in its own way,
27:50 the inconsistency of it contributes to a sense
27:53 that there wasn’t a committed idea everyone was working towards,
27:58 that the ultimate creative vision was driven mostly by momentary fascinations.
28:03 For The Lord of the Rings Bakshi utilized
28:06 a hodgepodge of animation formats predominantly based on rotoscoping,
28:09 modifying live action footage to various degrees.
28:13 Some of this involves using the live action footage as a trace-reference,
28:16 the final product being a complete replacement, sometimes it’s a paint-over,
28:21 effectively just augmenting the original footage
28:23 with details like eyes or fangs,
28:26 and sometimes it’s effectively just a colourization
28:28 of a xerox of the original footage.
28:31 And, no, that’s not being snide,
28:33 an actual process that was in use in the 60s, 70s,
28:36 and 80s involved photocopying line work done on paper onto
28:40 cellophane allowing rougher pencil lines to be used without inking.
28:44 Earlier versions of this technique is what gives
28:46 One Hundred and One Dalmatians its distinctly ragged look.
28:50 If used on a photograph, however, it crushes most of the greyscale tones,
28:54 flattening the image to solid blacks and whites.
28:57 The second major technique used is solarization,
28:59 which was recommended to him by the film’s cinematographer Timothy Galfas.
29:04 Solarization, more accurately pseudo-solarization,
29:08 is a tricky process where the black and white film is partially developed,
29:11 then instead of being sent through a process called fixing,
29:14 the part of development that stabilizes the film so it can be handled,
29:18 the image is re-exposed to light,
29:20 and sent through the entire development process a second time.
29:24 This technique, applied to photochemical film,
29:26 is extremely difficult to control,
29:28 largely relying on trial and error to get desirable results,
29:32 but the successful end product is a partially inverted image,
29:36 with a common artefact being a strong border across high contrast boundaries,
29:41 which can look kinda like an inked outline.
29:44 Bakshi felt this stylization process was
29:46 sufficiently animation-like that it would fit
29:49 within the movie and allow them to use footage of large scale battles,
29:53 which were ultimately faster and cheaper to stage
29:56 with actors in costumes than to hand-draw frame-by-frame, even from a reference.
30:02 All of these different techniques are combined
30:03 to various degrees over the course of the movie.
30:06 Sometimes solarized footage is painted over, sometimes it’s merely colourized,
30:10 sometimes it’s just played as-is over a coloured background.
30:14 The extensive amount of rotoscoping and re-purposed footage ultimately required
30:18 the production to shoot basically the entire film as live action first,
30:22 with reference performers, stunt performers, and the extensive battle scenes,
30:26 so the two year production involved essentially making the entire movie twice,
30:33 first in the live action shoot in Madrid, and second in the animation.
30:37 There’s a somewhat apocryphal story in all this.
30:40 In shooting the footage they didn’t really bother
30:42 to clear backgrounds of things like telephone wires, cars,
30:45 airplanes, bicycles, and other obviously out-of-place elements,
30:49 because it didn’t really matter, it wasn’t the finished film anyway.
30:54 According to Bakshi the Spanish developers who
30:56 were handling the camera negatives didn’t understand
30:58 that the footage was a reference that would
31:00 be animated over top of, thought that this was,
31:03 instead, incredibly sloppy filmmaking,
31:05 feared that it would give Madrid a bad name, and attempted to destroy the film.
31:10 I’m repeating the story because it’s kinda cute,
31:13 but also it’s a bit too weird and sensational,
31:17 and the only source is Bakshi himself,
31:19 who is, let’s just say, prone to exaggeration.
31:24 Like he’ll say they had six hundred animators working on Lord
31:26 of the Rings when in reality it was more like fifty.
31:29 I was over in Spain shooting major live action footage,
31:33 got three thousand people in the studio back in New York animating,
31:36 I’m fielding five hundred calls a day from the problems at the studio,
31:40 I’m shooting an entire live action movie,
31:42 and I’m trying to eat dinner with Zaentz at night who wants to be talked to.
31:47 Or this bit from a 2006 interview with Underground Online.
31:51 “I had the X rating on my films and that should have been enough to protect me.
31:54 It was all a misunderstanding of me being too far ahead of the curve.
31:58 Now they do as much on The Simpsons as I
32:00 got an X rating for Fritz the Cat.” And, like… no?
32:03 No Ralph.
32:04 No they don’t.
32:05 What… What do you think happens on The Simpsons?
32:09 I am very curious what Ralph Bakshi thinks happens on The Simpsons.
32:14 On the whole the film is a mixed bag, there’s a lot of jank, but what works?
32:17 What does it get right?
32:19 A lot, actually.
32:20 Whoah, Sam Gamgee, your legs are too
32:23 short so use your head The vocal performances,
32:27 in particular, are generally good, often great.
32:30 The voice actors do well with Tolkien’s words,
32:32 with an interpretation that is both distinct and appropriate.
32:36 One thing that’s often cited as a stand out, though,
32:38 is John Hurt’s performance as Aragorn, and for good reason, it’s fantastic.
32:43 “It matters.
32:44 We still have a long road and much to do.” “Why?
32:46 We have no hope without Gandalf,
32:48 you know that Aragorn.” “Then we must do without hope!
32:51 There is always vengeance!” Gruff, yet warm,
32:54 there’s a lot to love about this performance.
32:57 John Hurt was a great actor and he
32:59 absolutely has a world-weary charisma that really works here.
33:03 It’s fantastic.
33:03 I love it.
33:04 And it meshes well with Bakshi’s naturalistic filmmaking sensibilities,
33:08 this version of the characters that are not
33:11 so much the protagonists of a fantasy epic,
33:13 but just some dudes trying to solve a problem.
33:17 “We have no choice, Aragorn!” “We might go by way of the gap
33:19 of Rohan” “That would take the ring too close to Isengard and Aruman,
33:23 we dare not risk it.” “And yet you would risk
33:26 the mines of Moria” While Bakshi is bad at pacing and action,
33:29 he’s got a good sense for the interplay between characters,
33:32 and the film’s best moments come in snippets from these interactions,
33:36 the dynamics of conflict in dialogue,
33:38 and the small physical actions that punctuate those moments.
33:43 Scenes like Boromir’s death hold sufficient dramatic weight,
33:46 the reference acting, animation,
33:47 and vocal performances all come together and really work,
33:51 in a way that shows off the film at its strongest.
33:54 Just the clink and clank of equipment, the subtle atmospheric wind,
33:59 and a mature tenderness as the three pay respect to a fallen comrade.
34:04 And there’s little moments, just great touches of detail,
34:07 like Sam and Frodo paddling in opposite directions
34:10 as they debate the next course of action where
34:13 the rhythm of it is spot on, a fantastic
34:16 little flare that communicates the emotion that underlies the dialogue.
34:20 It’s a keen physical detail that a lazier production would miss.
34:24 The twitchy, feral movements of the black riders is a weird creative decision,
34:29 but I think it works.
34:31 It’s unsettling and menacing in an unusual way,
34:34 though it does get a little odd when the Nazgul
34:36 simply stop behaving like this after the Prancing Pony.
34:41 Again, consistency is a problem.
34:43 There’s also small adaptational decisions.
34:45 Lord of the Rings is so big and sprawling that basically any cinematic
34:50 adaptation will have to pick and choose what it includes and what it doesn’t.
34:54 For as comprehensive as the Jackson films are
34:57 there’s a lot they had to leave behind.
35:00 Like this little moment, after Gandalf opens the door to Moria.
35:03 “so all you had to do was say ‘friend’ and enter”
35:10 “Those were happier times” It’s a great little touch to include,
35:13 because the whole joke of the door to Moria,
35:16 for the reader, is that they’re over-thinking the problem,
35:20 that the troubles facing the Fellowship,
35:21 the rise of Sauron in the East, has created a culture of fear,
35:26 a culture of security and paranoia,
35:28 that leads Gandalf to assume the answer is more complicated than it really is.
35:34 It’s a melancholic point about how the people
35:37 of Middle Earth have grown apart, distrustful,
35:39 and isolated, to the point that even being
35:42 asked to say “friend” feels like a trick.
35:45 It’s a good detail to include.
35:48 Bakshi’s film is basically the only adaptation to include
35:51 Frodo’s defiance of the Ring Wraiths at the ford.
35:54 “By all the Shire, you shall have neither the ring,
35:58 nor me!” I also really like the introduction, presented as a shadow play.
36:03 It’s cheap and poorly acted and looks like community theatre,
36:06 but that’s what I find endearing about it,
36:09 like it could just as well be an in-universe performance of myth.
36:13 You’ve got actors who are clearly trying
36:15 to avoid hurting each other with their prop swords,
36:18 and miming slow-motion instead of actually shooting the footage in slow motion,
36:23 and it’s clearly taking place on a stage,
36:26 but the fact that it’s so evidently low-budget, I dunno, I find it charming.
36:31 Now, unfortunately, for all the things that I do enjoy about this movie,
36:34 all the things that I think work,
36:36 or are at least admirable for their ambition, there’s a lot that doesn’t,
36:40 either failing entirely or just not quite coming together into a cohesive whole.
36:46 Like, for example, the Balrog.
36:48 Alright, so, a bit of a side-track with the Balrog here.
36:52 One of the biggest running arguments
36:54 in Tolkien scholarship is this: does the Balrog
36:56 actually have wings or does it merely have a form that is evocative of wings?
37:02 Or does it have neither wings nor a form evocative of wings,
37:06 but an incorporeal aura of darkness
37:08 that projects the impression of wings without
37:10 being a component part of the substance or form of the Balrog’s essential self?
37:15 The relevant passages from the book are in The Fellowship of the Ring,
37:18 where first Tolkien writes about the Balrog“...
37:20 the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings...”
37:23 and a couple paragraphs later “It stepped forward onto the bridge,
37:27 and suddenly it drew itself up to a great height,
37:30 and its wings were spread from wall to wall;”
37:33 This apparent conflict between a stylistic description and a literal
37:36 description has formed the foundation of a half-century long
37:40 debate over the intended physical properties of a mythological demon.
37:44 As of June 2021 the Tolkien Society FAQ still has,
37:47 as the top entry, “Do Balrogs have Wings?
37:49 Can they Fly?” which they summarize with “that’s
37:52 up to each individual reader to decide.” Quora,
37:55 the spiritual successor to Yahoo Answers, has multiple threads on the subject.
37:59 Bakshi, perhaps unknowingly,
38:00 stepped right in this when he gave the Balrog big old bat wings,
38:04 with a Balrog that’s definitely reminiscent of the Hildebrandt
38:08 brothers’ Balrog from the 1977 Tolkien art calendar.
38:12 The 1987 calendar featured a wingless
38:14 Balrog painted by Tolkien scholar Ted Nasmith.
38:16 John Howe’s 1996 painting “Gandalf Falls
38:19 With the Balrog” features a distinctly bat-winged demon.
38:22 Peter Jackson threaded the needle with a Balrog that is
38:25 as much a smoke monster as it is physical, though it still definitely has wings.
38:29 Video games also alternate between wings and no wings.
38:34 Tolkien hack David Day’s “A Tolkien Bestiary” indicates no wings,
38:37 while Robert Foster’s authoritative “The Complete Guide
38:39 to Middle Earth” is mum on the subject.
38:40 The online Encyclopedia of Arda, dating back to 1997,
38:43 spends four fifths of its word count for the entry
38:47 on Balrogs summarizing both the pro- and anti- wing arguments,
38:50 though ultimately errs on the side
38:51 of no wings without taking a definitive stance.
38:53 The start of this argument, naturally, just spurs further arguments.
38:57 The Balrog were created with intent by Melkor,
38:59 therefore vestigial wings would be illogical,
39:01 and if the Balrog has wings then surely
39:03 it wouldn’t just plummet when the bridge collapses,
39:06 which leads to arguments about the nature of wings themselves, since, after all,
39:08 even if it has wings it’s not a helicopter or a hummingbird,
39:11 and probably couldn’t just hover.
39:13 Penguins, chickens, and emu all have wings, but they would plummet.
39:16 Even flighted birds like condor,
39:18 and albatross can’t just take off from a standstill.
39:20 But this argument also neglects to consider that both
39:23 Melkor and the Balrog were created with intent
39:25 by one honourable mister Sir Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien
39:28 and wings are both rad and badass, functional or not.
39:31 And anyway if Balrog have wings why couldn’t they just fly the ring into Mordor?
39:36 Now, the wings are not something that particularly bothers me.
39:40 The Hildebrandt painting is actually my earliest memory of Tolkien, period,
39:43 as it’s the cover of the book Art of the Brothers Hildebrandt,
39:46 and we had a copy kicking around the house when I was a kid,
39:49 so this is already a formative vision of the scene for me.
39:53 Clearly the actual fact of wings is
39:55 secondary to the narrative functionality of the evocative
39:58 image of Gandalf as a point
40:00 of light standing off against an enveloping darkness.
40:03 The actual problems with the Balrog here in Bakshi’s version aren’t wings,
40:08 in and of themselves,
40:09 but that the design just doesn’t come together and, most importantly,
40:15 is really poorly animated.
40:17 Bakshi, as an animator, is not particularly good at momentum.
40:24 Motion and momentum are core elements of animation,
40:26 and it’s something that Bakshi has always struggled with.
40:28 Part of his experimentation with rotoscoping was tied to this.
40:32 It’s a cost-saving measure,
40:33 but also it means the momentum problem solves itself.
40:36 You have real footage to work from, the momentum is already real,
40:42 it’s done for you, boom.
40:44 Of course animated momentum and real momentum aren’t the same thing,
40:48 and your rotoscope is only going to look as good as your source footage,
40:52 which is going to be really hard to get right if you
40:55 don’t have a twelve foot tall Balrog to shoot some reference footage of.
40:58 This is a moment where the realism of rotoscoping
41:01 is absolutely undermining the final product because we are, unfortunately,
41:05 seeing through to the underlying reality of man in a costume
41:09 trying to mime being really big by just moving slowly.
41:14 It’s not dynamic, it’s not threatening, and it comes off as unfortunately goofy.
41:20 This is a running thing through the film,
41:22 most of the action scenes lack a sense of weight to their movement.
41:25 The actors are just lightly swinging their prop swords at each other,
41:29 pulling their punches because, you know, it’s just a reference.
41:33 But since the reference is being traced frame-by-frame
41:36 that performance carries through to the final animation.
41:39 Sometimes the rotoscope inherits a really effective sense of weight
41:43 and sometimes it ends up looking cheap and fake.
41:46 This also leaves behind a number of strange artefacts in how shots are framed.
41:51 They’re few and far between,
41:52 but there’s the occasional shot where the framing is oddly tight,
41:56 where characters drift out of frame
41:58 in a way that’s highly unusual for animation,
42:01 where the positioning of characters is normally extremely deliberate.
42:05 The pitfall of a rotoscoped film is
42:08 that the final results depend heavily on your references.
42:11 The reference performers aren’t simply providing something
42:13 to help the animators get the right idea,
42:16 their performance is the performance, and there’s a definite inconsistency here.
42:23 And that’s really the word of the day, isn’t it?
42:26 The biggest failings of Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings are matters of inconsistency.
42:31 Sometimes the reference actors are giving it their all,
42:33 and sometimes they’re just loosely miming the actions.
42:35 Sometimes footage is shot in slow motion and other
42:38 times the actors just swing their swords slowly.
42:41 Scenes change style and grain and texture on the fly,
42:44 and characters are animated in multiple different
42:46 styles across the film as a whole.
42:49 Heck, sometimes characters switch techniques multiple times
42:51 within the span of a few seconds, as with Aragorn running down this hallway.
42:56 There’s also a thing that happens a few times
42:58 where the scenes were too complicated to fully animate,
43:01 like Merry and Pippin fighting the orcs before their capture,
43:05 but the underlying footage is in really bad shape: super high contrast,
43:11 super under-exposed, super grainy,
43:13 and the whole image just turns into an indecipherable blob.
43:17 A much-commented on quirk of the movie is
43:19 that a lot of characters wave their hands around really aimlessly.
43:22 This is going to come down to a direction issue,
43:26 as it’s a very community theatre kind of quirk of acting,
43:30 with untrained actors over-using their hands.
43:33 The Nazgul and orcs being mostly paint-over work,
43:36 with much of the actual costumes still visible, works,
43:40 but is undercut by the fact that the fellowship, too,
43:43 are often animated as paint-overs,
43:45 with their live action counterparts being extremely visible.
43:49 Even the full replacement trace-overs aren’t without their own oddities,
43:52 as the style is so chaotic, with linework that squiggles a lot between frames,
43:57 that it’s extremely intrusive when characters stop moving entirely,
44:01 becoming unnaturally still for a few frames, between actions.
44:05 That’s a limitation of budget, yes,
44:08 and I don’t begrudge the animators for saving those frames,
44:11 but the style very much accentuates the effect and calls attention to it.
44:17 Treebeard is pretty much the only character
44:19 in the film that’s entirely animated from scratch,
44:21 which places him out-of-place at the other extreme end of the spectrum,
44:26 being very fluid and morphy, traditionally cartoonish,
44:29 looking more like an outcast from an Atkinson production like the Racoons
44:33 than the comparably heavy animation of the rest of the film.
44:37 And while that heavier animation generally looks really neat,
44:41 the increased fidelity will, again,
44:43 work against the film, as any time the lip sync is off it feels really off.
44:49 “Whereout I to start?” There’s also an issue with the dialogue that, well,
44:55 descriptively the dialogue in a lot of places is stilted,
45:00 and the recording is thin.
45:02 The micro-pacing of dialogue that makes it feel natural,
45:05 that makes it flow, it’s not always there,
45:08 and a lot of unspoken vocalizations are missing,
45:11 which can make conversations drag and feel unnatural.
45:14 “I’ll give it to you Gandalf!
45:17 You’re wise and powerful.
45:20 Will you not” “No!
45:22 Do not tempt me!” This is a result of the production process.
45:27 There’s two factors here: for I guess budgetary reasons they
45:30 apparently didn’t have a multi-track recorder,
45:32 and also the voice actors are ultimately having their performance
45:36 superimposed on the performance of the live action actors,
45:40 which is substantially different from other methods
45:43 of animation where either the animators work
45:46 from the actor’s performance or the actor
45:48 matches the performance created by the animators.
45:50 And so while the production opted to do
45:52 the recording sessions with the cast as a group,
45:55 according to Anthony Daniels the actors were
45:58 required to leave a long two-second pause between
46:01 each other’s lines so that the editors
46:04 could try and line the two performances up.
46:06 I mean, I can see the logic there.
46:09 Like you assume you’ve got this process that affords you a lot of freedom,
46:12 you don’t need to wait for one part to be
46:15 done so that the other half can match it,
46:17 you can just do both halves whenever it’s convenient and then merge them later,
46:23 but, you know, it’s the details that get lost in that process.
46:28 On the whole the film’s pacing is just really off.
46:32 Some sequences, like the flight to the ford
46:34 mentioned before go on at seemingly an interminable length,
46:37 while the entire second half of the film is incredibly rushed.
46:40 Even odd one-off moments will end up bizarrely truncated,
46:44 like the smoke trailing out of Moria behind the Fellowship,
46:47 which flashes on screen so briefly I wasn’t sure
46:50 if I had bumped the remote and skipped a scene.
46:53 Merry and Pippin vanish from the film entirely after meeting Treebeard,
46:56 a casualty of the unproduced sequel,
46:58 but regardless of the intent their exit is undeniably sudden.
47:02 Likewise Sam and Frodo meet Gollum, set off towards the Dead Marshes,
47:07 and are never seen or mentioned again.
47:09 One particular oddity is that Saruman
47:11 is alternately called either Saruman or Aruman.
47:14 “I must go south now,
47:15 to consult with the wizard Aruman” “I have come for your aid, Saruman the White,
47:20 in troubled times” This bizarre inconsistency is the result
47:24 of Saul Zaentz’ insistence that the names of the antagonists,
47:28 Saron and Saruman, sounded too alike,
47:31 which is fair enough as an adaptation change,
47:35 but then during fairly routine rewrites mid-production
47:39 Beagle began swapping the names back to Saruman.
47:43 “Saruman of Many Colours!” If there is something you can say
47:48 is missing from Bakshi’s Middle Earth it would be Middle Earth itself.
47:51 This is, perhaps, where the comparison
47:53 between Bakshi and Jackson is the starkest.
47:56 While much of this is an argument of adaptational preference,
47:59 which lines and details were included,
48:01 which phrases and character traits were stressed,
48:04 one area where the older film is undeniably
48:07 weaker is in the presence of the world.
48:10 And this is a meaningful absence.
48:12 Place is critical to the story of Lord
48:15 of the Rings because Lord of the Rings is as much
48:18 a story about violence against the land itself as it
48:21 is about violence against the people who live on it.
48:25 And while Bakshi’s artists are able to visualize many iconic locations,
48:29 both the fantastic and the quaint,
48:31 just as often the background dissolves away into an abstraction,
48:35 into nowhere in particular.
48:38 Though there is an isolated artistry to these compositions,
48:41 as a storytelling mechanism, as an expression of the text,
48:45 they just don’t compete with Jackson’s camera
48:47 turned towards the beauty of New Zealand.
48:51 This gaze, importantly, retains the essence of the message: the world is good,
48:56 the world is beautiful, the world is worth saving,
49:00 and not just the so-called “important” parts.
49:03 Tolkien’s notoriously florid descriptions are just as reverent of grassland
49:08 and marsh as they are of forest and mountain.
49:12 This is the biggest missed step of the old adaptation,
49:15 the vision of Middle Earth not just as a land
49:18 under assault from a malevolent spirit seeking power,
49:20 but a land besieged by the smog
49:23 and consumption and poisonous runoff of industry.
49:27 Ultimately the biggest flaw of the film is that it’s kinda boring.
49:31 Not uninteresting, but all these issues add up to long
49:34 stretches of the film that just aren’t particularly noteworthy.
49:37 There is, at least in my opinion,
49:40 very little after the death of Boromir that’s really worth it,
49:44 and given that his funeral is eighty-five minutes into the movie,
49:47 not only is it a clear demarcation point between two parts of the story,
49:52 it’s already a decent feature length,
49:54 so if you kinda check out there I don’t really blame you.
49:59 There’s also a deeper issue that kinda cuts two ways,
50:02 and it’s that the film relies a lot on an understanding of the source material.
50:06 Now, I don’t think this is a conscious reliance,
50:08 I do think that Bakshi and Conkling and Beagle
50:11 tried to create a telling of the story that’s self-contained,
50:15 but there’s enough holes, enough things that are breezed past,
50:19 that there’s definitely the sense that things are missing,
50:22 the keen awareness that this is an abridgement of a much larger book,
50:26 and so bits are included for the sake of being comprehensive rather
50:29 than because they make the best version of the story for the medium.
50:34 I said this cuts two ways and that’s because while
50:36 this can make for an unsatisfying viewing on its own,
50:39 it can also, potentially, make for a satisfying companion to the novel,
50:43 where the viewer’s own knowledge of the text is able to fill the gaps
50:47 and their imagination is able to do the heavy lifting of fleshing it all out,
50:51 using the movie as an aide in their own
50:54 internal visualization and realization of the story.
50:58 Part of the trouble in researching the film
51:00 is that based on Bakshi’s own recollections
51:01 of the film it’s not even entirely clear when they decided to animate the film,
51:06 or if the whole film was meant to be conventionally animated with only
51:10 a bit of rotoscoping but then they decided to rotoscope nearly the entire thing,
51:15 or if at one point they were even considering
51:17 cutting the animation entirely and just making a live-action film.
51:20 These were, apparently,
51:21 decisions that were made more or less on the fly in 1976,
51:26 a reflection of the problems plaguing the still-unfinished Hey Good Lookin’.
51:31 I don’t want to say that this is a film made by filmmakers who didn’t care,
51:35 who didn’t get the source material.
51:37 It is a film that’s lovingly made, it is a film made by creatives who cared,
51:43 the script is clearly intimately familiar with the source material,
51:47 but it also seems like a film
51:49 that was made by creatives who were very distracted,
51:52 who didn’t have a strong vision,
51:54 and were focused principally on working quickly and making
51:59 whatever compromises were needed just to get things done.
52:02 And, to be clear, that’s not a moral failing,
52:05 it’s not a sin to be more concerned with getting the film done,
52:09 getting it in front of audiences, than picking fights with the studio.
52:13 They turned around a two and a half hour animated film in two years.
52:19 That’s insane.
52:20 It’s amazing that the whole thing didn’t entirely self-destruct,
52:24 that the final result is not only reasonably watchable,
52:28 but often interesting and occasionally brilliant.
52:32 That’s impressive.
52:33 So, the movie comes out with the title The Lord of the Rings,
52:37 no “part 1” subtitle.
52:38 United Artists felt that no one would want to pay to see half a story.
52:42 Of course that seems ridiculous today,
52:44 what with film being so thoroughly dominated by serial franchises,
52:47 but in 1978 the concern was still sensible.
52:52 The two part film didn’t really exist yet, and even franchises were sparse,
52:56 and more along the lines of James Bond, a loosely connected episodic rather than
53:00 a single cohesive story with meaningful continuity.
53:04 But, still, a “to be continued” would not have seriously shocked audiences.
53:09 While Bakshi had done some press where he was able to talk about
53:12 how they’ll hopefully get to make the rest of the story with part 2,
53:15 the media landscape is entirely different in 1978.
53:19 There isn’t a massive ecosystem of entertainment news,
53:22 there’s no widespread internet,
53:24 there’s no fan blogs hanging off every detail of production,
53:27 so the general audience impression going in is that this is the whole thing.
53:32 Fans of the book are, of course, caught off guard by the ending,
53:35 the story just stopping after the Battle of Helm’s Deep,
53:38 and they’re not super happy about that, but on the whole
53:41 audiences are pretty receptive and the film does well.
53:45 Critics are lukewarm but consensus is ultimately positive.
53:48 Roger Ebert’s bottom line summary is, I think, right on the money.
53:52 “In sum, Bakshi has succeeded better
53:54 at bringing Tolkien's characters to life than
53:57 at bringing his story to fruition.” And that’s kinda where things have stayed.
54:01 Critical reevaluation hasn’t really changed over the decades since.
54:05 It’s flawed, mostly boring, but not entirely devoid of charm.
54:09 It’s quieter and stiffer than Jackson’s high-intensity action/adventure,
54:13 but that’s not wholly inappropriate as Tolkien’s books are,
54:18 themselves, so very often quiet and stiff.
54:21 The film was successful, it turned a reasonable profit,
54:24 but it wasn’t a runaway success.
54:26 Bakshi was feeling burnt out on working on someone else’s story,
54:29 and leadership changes at United Artists in 1978
54:32 proved to be enough of an interruption
54:34 to the momentum of the project that attempts
54:37 to get Part 2 moving just fizzled out.
54:39 Bakshi would continue to use rotoscoped animation
54:42 for three of his next four films,
54:44 though audience interest waned as the style grew
54:47 increasingly dated compared to the lush and intricate
54:50 animation of its big budget contemporaries and as Bakshi
54:53 seemingly ran out of energy and ideas.
54:56 Hey Good Lookin’ was eventually released in 1982 in a totally overhauled format,
55:02 the film having been essentially re-made as a totally
55:05 animated feature over the course of seven years,
55:07 financed by Bakshi himself, though little of the rotoscoping remained.
55:11 It is, for the most part, just a worse version of Heavy Traffic,
55:16 lacking the incendiary politics and righteous
55:18 anger that gives that film its bite.
55:20 I dunno, maybe it was just Bakshi getting older,
55:24 maybe you just couldn’t sell an anti-cop movie in Reagan’s America.
55:28 He eventually retired from feature films after the flop of Cool World in 1992,
55:33 a film that was, ironically, not nearly as crass as audiences had hoped.
55:39 But as a pure quirk of coincidence the animated
55:41 legacy of The Lord of the Rings isn’t entirely incomplete,
55:44 because Rankin/Bass, leveraging the public domain status of the books,
55:48 aired the sequel to their Hobbit adaptation in 1980,
55:50 and it just so happens to more or less pick up shortly after Bakshi’s film ends.
55:55 The specifics here are disputed,
55:57 since the Rankin/Bass Return of the King had been storyboarded years earlier,
56:02 but it also didn’t really start serious production until 78.
56:07 So while the film wasn’t intended to capitalize
56:10 on the cancellation of Bakshi’s second film, it still did.
56:14 Mostly bad in an annoying way and very cheaply made,
56:17 this TV movie is largely unmemorable save
56:19 for the absolute banger “Where There’s a Whip
56:21 There’s a Way” “where there’s a whip [whipcrack] there’s a way” Of course then,
56:27 a little over twenty years later, Peter Jackson,
56:29 that guy who makes perverted puppet movies,
56:31 would finally get to make a no-holds-barred adaptation
56:34 of The Lord of the Rings and it’s really good.
56:39 “Come on Mister Frodo, I can’t carry it for you,
56:43 but I can carry you!” Ultimately the legacy of Bakshi’s film is in technology.
56:49 Techniques that were odd and unique are, today, routine.
56:51 He didn’t invent any of them, strictly speaking,
56:55 the underpinning technology was already decades old,
56:58 but the haphazard, experimental, ambitious way that they’re applied,
57:02 the mix of success and failure, is ahead of its time,
57:05 presaging the ways that filmmaking was changing and would continue to change.
57:09 This isn’t to say that Bakshi and his animators changed the arc of history,
57:13 but rather they saw what was inevitable about
57:16 the way that these technologies would be applied,
57:19 and bit off far more than they could
57:21 chew decades before the tech was actually ready.
57:24 Bakshi understood that the greatest limitation of realizing
57:27 the world of Tolkien was the world itself,
57:29 and he solved this problem by cutting out photographs of actors,
57:33 maybe painting on them a little, and placing them into animated environments,
57:38 and that right there describes basically every Marvel movie.
57:42 For twenty years now it’s been routine for actors
57:45 to work against worlds that they can’t see,
57:47 that are created out of whole cloth by animators.
57:51 The modern look of films is defined by actors
57:54 on set wearing some combination of costume that’s limiting
57:58 or suggestive of the final look before artists go
58:02 in and paint the rest of the costume on.
58:06 Taking a physical performance and duplicating it with an animated simulacrum,
58:10 once the odd fixation of a few weirdos from Brooklyn, is now ordinary.
58:16 In a weird way Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings
58:19 is a twenty-first century blockbuster made with 1970s technology.
58:23 And, in the end, he would ultimately be vindicated.
58:26 The argument that animation could be more mature,
58:29 could be dramatic, could be adult,
58:31 could be a perfect medium for a story like The Lord of the Rings,
58:37 was absolutely true,
58:38 and Bakshi’s work wouldn’t be relegated to mere novelty status.
58:41 Despite the waning attendance to his own films,
58:44 his work in the 70s more or less set the tone for feature animation in the 80s,
58:49 which was dominated by the dark, often sombre films of Don Bluth.
58:53 Because everything is connected,
58:54 Rankin/Bass worked with Peter Beagle and turned his book
58:57 The Last Unicorn into a haunting and mature film in 1982.
59:02 Even Disney, on the verge of bankruptcy,
59:04 would try to play to the trend with their own adaptation
59:07 of a midcentury fantasy epic with the notorious flop The Black Cauldron.
59:11 Then, of course, The Simpsons would begin airing in 1989,
59:15 in 1993 MTV began a late night block of adult
59:18 animation that ran the whole gamut from crass to cerebral,
59:22 and over the course of the 80s and 90s anime would go
59:26 from being a niche import to a staple pillar of modern animation.
59:30 So, that’s the story of Bakshi and the Ring.
59:33 I think what I find compelling about his Lord of the Rings is a summary
59:36 of what I find compelling about the man himself and his career as a whole,
59:40 one that is deeply flawed but undeniably bold and occasionally brilliant.