The Lord of the Rings

Rating:
Summary: AN EPIC MUSIC MATERPIECE
Review: The first effort to bring "The Lord of the Rings" to the big screen was an animated film, as J.R.R. Tolkien himself originally intended as far back as the 1950's (legendary fan Forrest J. Ackerman wrote a treatment back then that Tolkien loathed; fortunately for all concerned, Ackerman's version was never filmed). Director Ralph Bakshi had intended to follow up this effort with a sequel which would finish the story, but the second film was never made. His 1979 version covered all of "The Fellowship of the Ring" and roughly half of "The Two Towers," and the decision to cram a thousand-page novel into roughly four hours of animation had significant deleterious effects on the only movie that was actually drawn and filmed.

With that said, the adaptation of the books, written by Tolkien acolyte Peter S. Beagle and Chris Conking, includes a perfectly workable abridgement of "The Fellowship of the Ring," even while the treatment of "The Two Towers" is jagged and rushed, but mostly loyal to the original work. There are no armies of elves riding to save Helm's Deep, Frodo never runs Sam off or offers the One Ring to a Nazgul, and, thank Illuvitar, Arwen Evenstar is never called upon to draw a sword (of course, that's partly because Arwen doesn't appear in the film, but every little bit helps.) To do a really authentic version of LOTR would require at least half a dozen hours per volume, and even then you'd have to leave stuff out. For this film--clocking it at two hours and thirteen minutes, an extraordinarily long running time for an animated feature--the cuts and minor alterations mostly make sense. For instance, substituting Legolas for Glorfindel early in the story is perfectly reasonable

So what's good about it, other than the source material and the script? The voice cast, led by John "I Have A Belly-Ache" Hurt as Aragorn, is top-notch. Much of the character design, particularly the hobbits, Gimli and Gandalf, is excellent, although there are plenty of knucleheaded decisions as well--Boromir the Viking being the most obvious example. Hobbiton is picture-perfect. The Paul Kont/Leonard Rosenman musical score is fine, with the exception of a famous, poorly-chosen cue at the very end of the film. When I saw this movie in the theater as a kid, all my buddies who hadn't read the book thought that the orcs had made friends with Theoden and Aragorn, thanks to the ill-selected music.

And speaking of the orcs... this is as good a time as any to address the movie's problems. "The Lord of the Rings" was billed as a huge advance in animation, an example of "painted armies" marching into a spectacular battle. The reality was somewhat less spectacular. Prior to beginning animation, Bakshi took the extraordinary step of filming the entire script with live actors. The animated movie was then drawn to match the motion of the live footage, sometimes literally traced on top of that footage. The result is a wildly uneven finished product. While the fully animated main characters do move with a lifelike grace, the battle scenes are a ragged rotoscoped mess, backed with really bad live-action lighting effects that probably looked cool if you were a stoned viewer in 1979. Today, they just look cheesy and out of place.

What's worse, Bakshi never made full use of the wide-open opportunities allowed by animation. It's painfully obviously that he didn't have enough budget for armor, either for the Riders of Rohan or Saruman's orcs, during the live-action filming. So the stuntmen-orcs shared three or four masks, and were dressed in shapeless robes instead of armor. And that would have been fine--after all you're going to draw everything later, and you can just draw cool orc-faces and armor in, right?

Apparently not, because the animated orcs are dressed in shapeless robes, and about the only armor on the screen is on Theoden's horse. The lack of real animation on the orcs is all the more galling when we finally get a look at Gollum, one of the very few characters in the film that was completely animated without a live-action model. He looks and moves perfectly. Smeagol is one of the real treats of this movie... which makes me all the sadder in considering the missed opportunities in the rest of the film.

(Parenthetically, how remarkable is it that Gollum is the one character that's always the closest to Tolkien's vision, in every adaptation of his work? Even in the Rankin-Bass cartoons, when Gollum is stupidly drawn as a frog-monster, his lines and actions are still dead-on. A real tribute to Tolkien for creating such a singularly distinct and memorable character. But I digress.)

Much of the background art looks rushed and incomplete, like production drawings that were slapped down behind the cels when the money ran out. Orthanc in particular is not even close to Tolkein's description, and Moria looks cramped and visually uninteresting, as does the Golden Hall of Edoras. The final battle scenes are a sad mish-mash, as is pretty much everything in the movie after "The King of the Golden Hall." And hey, Bakshi--Aragorn and Boromir are the heirs to the throne and stewarship of Gondor. Why the heck don't they wear PANTS??

At any rate, the disk is cheap, the video transfer is very good, and the sound has been dramatically cleaned up from the muddy VHS releases. As for supplemental materials on the DVD, fuhgeddaboutit. There's no trailer (contrary to the packaging), and the "background information" is scanty and absolutely no news to anyone remotely familiar with either Tolkien or Bakshi's work. If you're going to buy this disc, it's (a) because you recall it with some fondness from your childhood, or (b) because it has Tolkien's name on it. Otherwise, I'd say skip it.