Ralph Bakshi

(YouTube Streaming, September 2020) Considering the epochal pop-culture thunderbolt that was Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2001–2003, it’s inevitable that Ralph Bakshi’s prior take on the material would be relegated to the rank of a footnote. Not fair to the effort invested in the production, perhaps, but understandable. Nearly everyone watching the 1978 film after 2003 will be comparing it to Jackson’s trilogy, despite the fundamental differences in budgeting, special effects and creative intention between the two versions. This earlier version had to do what it could with a middle-range budget, nonexistent special effects and the limitation of working with one film rather than three—while a sequel was planned, the 1978 film’s modest success and bad relationship between Bakshi and other producers prevented Tolkien’s vision from being fully realized at that time. Bakshi also tried speeding up production by rotoscoping a lot of material, and while some of this can be justified as an artistic choice (giving an unsettling realistic appearance to the evil characters, specifically), the result feels like an awkward blend of hand-tinted villains and cartoonish heroes—perhaps impressive at the time, but outdated today. Story-wise, it almost goes without saying that the singular film is a speedrun of Tolkien’s story all the way to Helm’s Deep, skipping many details along the way. I didn’t get much enjoyment out of the result, but then again, I wasn’t really expecting to—Bakshi’s film was famous as a flawed adaptation even when I was a young SF&F fan in the 1990s, and the availability of a near-perfect take on the same material has now solidified its place as a curiosity.