This Week in Anime

Middle Earth, Circa 1978

Steve
Lucas, we have an unusual TWIA in store today, so I'd like to begin with an unusual proposal. No matter what point we try to make or what joke we try to construct, I'd like us to post nothing but copies of the below image. That way, Lynzee will have no choice but to use it as this article's thumbnail, and we can help put Hobbits' feet where they belong: on ANN's homepage.

True, I suppose the average still from this film has a sufficiently high probability of fuzzy feet to render my proposal unnecessary. Fair enough. And speaking of being fair, yes, this animated feature directed by Ralph Bakshi, produced in America, and partially filmed in Spain in no way qualifies as anime. You caught us. But there is an anime The Lord of the Rings feature fast approaching, and because it's difficult/frowned upon to constantly pause and hit "print screen" while you're in the multiplex, we've landed on covering this adaptation as a compromise. Don't like it? Too bad.

This was my first brush with this adaptation, but not with LOTR in general. Peter Jackson's films are foundational for me, hitting right in that sweet spot of the transition between middle and high school, and they prompted me to read Tolkien's novels around the same time. I didn't turn into one of those Middle Earth obsessives who pored over the pages of The Silmarillion, but The Lord of the Rings is a story I'm very familiar with and have great affection for. So, I was also surprised by how much I enjoyed this version despite its flaws.

I mean, I think most animators would have a difficult time living up to Bakshi's oeuvre and reputation, checkered though it may be. Through his work in the '70s, he's often credited for expanding America's animation audience and appetite outside of the family-friendly Disney fair that had dominated the industry up to that point. You could even argue he helped pave the way for the gritty, cerebral anime films and OVAs that found some popularity in the American market in the '80s and '90s.

Incidentally, if you want more background on Ralph Bakshi and this film in particular, Dan Olson has a great hour-long video digging into this stuff.

It's a movie that deserves to be seen painted on the side of a van. Like, at its best, it's incredibly evocative, if not avant-garde.


Its legacy can also be felt in Jackson's adaptation. As I understand it, the lineage is complicated and not wholly intentional. Still, Bakshi's framing here of the Ringwraith searching for the Hobbits is basically one-to-one with how the live-action version depicts it, down to how the lads are hiding in the nook of that tree.

People were calling LoTR unfilmable at the time, so it's to Bakshi's credit that he turned it into something at least partially iconic.

He's so goofy, and I kinda love him, but you're correct. While Jackson's films mostly work as a cohesive whole that sweeps you into the story, the 1978 cartoon has a lot of these moments and creative decisions and compromises that pull you out of it. They're not all bad, though. I think the opening narration, for instance, is charmingly cheesy. It doesn't even attempt the pretense of looking animated, as it's all shadowplay done by real actors behind a red filter/screen. I can't say I've seen something like that in another major animated motion picture, so I appreciate the novelty.

The film itself, too, is a constantly shifting blend of styles and techniques that bleed into each other in a lot of fascinating (and not always great) ways.

So, there are a few different techniques going on here. As we all know from Hiroshi Nagahama's hit adaptation of The Flowers of Evil, rotoscoping is animating by drawing and painting over live-action footage. There's a lot of that in this film, and it works really well, conveying stuff like subtle body language, the weight of clothing, momentum, and so on.

There's also partial rotoscoping, where animators draw over a portion of the live-action footage. So the orcs, for instance, get beady red eyes and big silly white teeth. That's how you know they're orcs.

And then there's also a lot of live-action footage that's processed in a particular way, but otherwise not animated at all. Like this guy in Bree. I love this guy and his mustache. But he's not a cartoon. You get this effect by exposing and xeroxing the film in a particular way.

And you do all this because, as it turns out, drawing an entire 2+ hour epic fantasy cartoon is really, really hard and expensive and time-consuming.

I generally don't mind the awkwardness of it all because it's very singular and unique. There are plenty of more traditionally and cohesively animated films out there. I like watching one that gets weird with it. But you can't ignore how these disparate elements often work against each other. It's wild to see the same characters in the same scene flip back and forth between their rotoscoped versions and their heavily filtered live-action stand-ins.

The battle scenes are the "worst" offenders since their complexity necessitates extensive live-action components, so you get scenes that mix these techniques and make the contrast even more jarring.

The modern anime way of dealing with large crowds, by the way, is 3D modeling, which they didn't have in 1978. Is that better or worse than live-action footage? I'm not here to say, but I just think it helps to look at these components as solutions to a problem using the technology they had at the time.

It's frustrating, and the film's structural issues exacerbate it. Pacing is all over the place; it makes some jarring cuts to the story, and most problematically, it tries (and fails) to cram both The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers into a single movie that lacks a proper ending.

Me. No, thank you. Anyway, Bakshi originally wanted to do a proper trilogy, was negotiated down to two movies, and then never made the sequel for a variety of reasons (probably because making this one was already so difficult). And contemporary audiences, expecting the full story, were pretty pissed at the time too. There's a funny-in-hindsight anecdote on the movie's Wikipedia page: United Artists refused to put a "Part 1" in the film's title because they didn't believe audiences would pay to see half a movie. Oh, if they only knew.

I am interested in seeing so for myself, but as Rohirrim is its own story, I will have to approach it differently than this one. My favorite thing about this adaptation was experiencing a tale I was already familiar with through a fresh, creative vision. Knowing the novels helped fill in the movie's many gaps, and knowing Jackson's version helped elucidate a lot of the cool stuff here. For example, the scene at Galadriel's scrying pool has a completely different tone in Bakshi's version. She teases Frodo with a whimsical irony, swishing her robes around as if she had already fully realized the foolishness and futility of taking the Ring for herself.


It's a far cry from Jackson's and Blanchett's horror-tinged vision of an apocalyptic maybe, and I like that! I think both reads of the material work, making me appreciate the source even more.

Admittedly, it's going to be difficult for any of the inevitable future The Lord of the Rings adaptations to have a better Legolas than this. Just look at him. He's perfect, and he's voiced by Anthony Daniels. This is my canonical Legolas now. Sorry, Orlando.

Jackson's films win overall on homoeroticism, though. Like, Frodo and SAM have a lot of cute interactions here, but the live-action version fully understands that they're boyfriends and deeply in love.

As sure as Boromir's beard is luscious.