Around the 3rd grade, my parents rented out The Lord of the Rings 1978 animated movie which I credit as spawning my initial love for the fantasy genre. While I had seen other fantasy movies come and go (including the old animated The Hobbit), it was this version that captured my imagination for elves, dwarves, hobbits working with humans to wage war against the dark forces of orcs, Mordor and Sauron. As a result, at least a few times every year, I’ll watch this movie, even though in truth it probably hasn’t aged all that well. On the other hand, it does get right quite a few things whereas the other versions such as Peter Jackson’s live action movie does not.
While I won’t do a plot summary style review, I wanted to comment on various aspects of this movie. First, I think it’s important to note that this movie was made as a type of hybrid movie that was a little misleading in title if you were a fan of the books. Here, this version actually is a mix between The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. While I haven’t read either book in some time, it is worth noting that the part post Boromir’s demise and Frodo and Sam splitting from the Fellowship is from The Two Towers. Yet we miss some crucial parts from The Two Towers such as Frodo and Sam’s voyage into the Marsh of the Dead.
What I read was that originally Bakshi intended for this to eventually lead into the Return of the King. However, due to lack of funding/interest, he was unable to produce a follow up. Of course, there is a different animated version of Return of the King, but done under the same group that handled the animation for The Hobbit. Here, especially as a young child, who had viewed these movies in chronological order, I felt the ordering to be disorienting because I could not conceive that there were two different animators responsible for these movies. An example I frequently cite is the drastic difference where Gollum metamorphoses from a flash bulb eyed frog into a starving Ethiopian gay boy back into a frog (minus flash light eyes). But can you really blame a kid who probably was 9 or 10 at that time especially without easy access to the internet?
Yet at this impressionable period of around the 3rd grade, I loved this movie. This was high adventure and fantasy to me, not terribly gory (compared to the bloodier Conan and Sword and the Sorcerer movies) but vivid with the medieval weapons mixed with a quest to destroy the One Ring. Some of the battles in the movie are quite good for that period especially the Helms Deep one, although truthfully that’s one of the things that hasn’t held up that well. Again for a child of 9 or 10, seeing thousand of arrows fly over the battlements of the fortress followed up by the onslaught of thousands of orcs was the start of epic fantasy for me (much like the battle at Gavin with the X-Wings and Y-Wings in their near hopeless cause to confront the massive Death Star in Star Wars)
Besides, the battles were a host of memorable characters. Both Aragorn and Legolas ended up being my favorites here. Admittedly, I dressed up as Aragorn with a brown cape and plastic play sword (probably from Conan) for that Halloween. I honestly really hated Sam because of his morbidly obese appearance with his marshmellow-like features, especially his overly exaggerated monstrous nose and goofy voice that made him unbearably exhausting to listen to. Then with Gollum he lacks any intimidation factor at all because he’s so scrawny and even Sam is able to easily take him down. Most of the time Gollum writhes and crawls around, even though the voice actor does a pretty good job in bringing his dialog to life.
Yet the truly memorable characters for me are the villains in all of this, particularly the Nazgûl and orcs. The Nazgûl are particularly the most fearful renditions I have seen with their beady red eyes, dark black and olive green silhouettes and the presence bringing about dark, dank mists of blue or red while speaking in possessed, ancient voices. With the orcs, they also are scary to view with their own red eyes, even though most of the time they fight as competently as the average storm trooper. However, the orcs score a lot of kills in this movie especially in brutally skewering Boromir with multiple arrows then abducting Merry and Pippin. Also, when Merry and Pippin encounter the encampment of orcs, the orcs are shown in a blood red type of lighting, which makes them even more nightmarish to the diminutive pair.
The other perennial favorite of mine is none other than Galadriel. She has a minor but highly memorable role here being the brief moment of guidance for Frodo and his companions. Unlike Peter Jackson’s version, Galadriel isn’t as melodramatic and appears more like a Disney queen character in her depiction. Besides being elegant and beautiful, the thing I’ve come to enjoy over time is the voice actress Annette Crosbie as Galadriel speaks with a royal and mindful step befitting of her station. Whenever I read fantasy novels containing elven females, a common description of their speech is that of having musical voices. Annette Crosbie’s portrayal of Galadriel comes closest to what I imagine lines up with that description as she possesses a rhythm and quality that is akin to listening to a fairy godmother figure reading a bedtime story for a child.
Some of the best things to see in this version of the movie are the landscapes. The art is done quite well such as the exterior of Rivendell, certain areas in Moria and Helm’s Deep. I think it’s worth pausing the movie to really appreciate some of the drawings the artists did for these scenes as they do a great job of evoking the fantasy element and world building.
Of course, the movie has a number of flaws. While it tries to stay true to the book(s), there’s a few controversial decisions that had been made. One is the infamous changing of Saruman’s name to Aruman (which I heard was inconsistently done). Part of the idea was that the producers thought that Saruman’s name could be confused with Sauron. Another scene completely absent from the movie is Tom Bombadil and the Barrow-Wights. If anything, I think the movie attempted to highlight key points since it was trying to condense two epic novels into a single showing.
Another major controversy was the portrayal of the Balrog. One of the biggest inaccuracies fans have pointed out was that the Balrog did not make any noise in the way this version would roar. The Balrog here also was turned into some bizarre lion headed batwinged shadow creature as opposed to an elemental demon. I think Peter Jackson probably had a better rendition of the beast than what was portrayed but more importantly the Balrog in the animated version simply wasn’t very scary. In fact, outside of snagging Gandalf’s ankle with its whip, the Balrog really didn’t do much to warrant its fear and almost no information was provided to the audience who weren’t familiar with Tolkien’s work outside to warrant the sudden change in demeanor of the Fellowship.
Probably, my biggest gripe in the movie (besides Sam’s depiction) is the battle at Helms Deep where thousands of orcs shot thousands of arrows and a bunch of stupid humans didn’t take cover behind the stone defenses of Helms Deep. If you watch, these men simply stand in the open just “waiting” to take an arrow as opposed to ducking behind the high crenelations of the defensive structure. This is more infuriating given the fact that the forces at Helms Deep from Rohan numbered in the hundreds, meaning that every man needed to count.
Similarly, there’s a really bizarre and nonsensical scene just before the battle starts where a few wolves show up and one seems to tackle some random dude just standing around on the outside. It’s never explained why some moron would be outside the protective shelter of a goddamn fortress when an army of tens of thousands of orcs were about to invade. Also, it’s never mentioned what happened to these wolves that appeared thereafter. They just show up for a brief cameo, have a light snack then dissipate into the mist.
Another failure in this movie to me is why Saruman decides to fight Rohan at Helms Deep or even that he wants to fight Rohan at all. While Helms Deep itself provides a good location as a defense, the movie does not explain what the point any of this was. The only thing we know for certain is that Saruman has decided to ally with Mordor and Sauron and is helping to find the ring. So wouldn’t his better strategy to be finding Frodo and the One Ring? Yes, some of his orcs capture Merry and Pippin and there’s a brief second when one orc gropes around them to find something. But the connections aren’t well made between any of this to expatiate to a casual viewer why any of this should make sense.
Despite my criticism for those flaws, I still think the fight at Helms Deep is one of my favorites in general. It’s very atmospheric with the red mist/skies, the dense fog (where all of this inexplicably goes away a few scenes later) and oppressive as innumerable orcs march to meet the valiant men of Rohan. The rain of arrows part is very memorable and you get a few nice melee scenes with the orcs trying to siege the walls.
Then there’s the bizarro ending. Considering Rohan’s forces had been cut down significantly in the attack, it would stand to reason that they don’t really have much of a chance against the remaining orc army that has managed to breach Helms Deep through Saruman’s fireball assault. When the horns blare in the dawn the following day, the orcs suddenly grow fearful and run in fright away from the door, which allows Rohan’s remaining army to ride out to their doom. Here’s where Peter Jackson’s version does a better job since at least the horn that’s blown is explained to have certain properties. Also, because the remaining army are mounted, they breach the door to launch a hard riding attack against the worn orcs.
However, in the animated version, there is a sudden turn of the tide because at one point Rohan’s forces are found to be completely surrounded by the vast forces of the orcs. There’s not much left seemingly possibly a few dozen at best (compared to the supposed hundreds from the night before). It seems that the orcs either tactfully had been mindful of their retreat to trap them in the open or that they had an epiphany that these guys aren’t really much and let’s go fuck ’em up.
But where things get messy for me is the music. The music is almost triumphant rather than potentially tragic and that we see the orcs start to move closer to the humans. Part of the confusion is that there’s no representative from the orcs’ side who states the abrupt change in tactics. My mom’s first viewing (which was close to my own) was that both sides were going to call a truce and I’m guessing that the music partly suggested this along with the orcs slowly approaching the men.
Then you had Gandalf appearing with Eomer and his Riders of Rohan, charging down to scare off the orcs. And considering that the orcs were numbered in the “tens of thousands” (as mentioned by Saruman himself) one might think that they would be less intimidated by the Riders of Rohan. And the reason the numbers here are important to me is because in an earlier dialog between Aragorn and Gandalf, Aragorn discusses how the Riders of Rohan were not many. So while they had the intimidation factor built in, it was more like for gorilla warfare tactics.
And again Peter Jackson’s visual display did a lot better job with the dramatic and emotional moment of the orcs being blinded by Gandalf charging with the aid of the morning sun and thousands of horses from Eomer’s army to break the orcs’ formation. With the animated version, we only get a bunch of wild screams and Gandalf swiping left to right his sword but not really hitting anything except two very slow motion dying orcs (I always thought these two death scenes were exceptionally funny and completely inconsistent to the rest of the film. Not to mention the sheer blood lust of Gandalf’s sadistic vengeful swings made me sympathetic for the blood gurgling orcs).
Now, I know that some of my criticisms are partly due to the infamous use of rotoscoping that might’ve made certain aspects harder animate. And I will say that the rotoscoping aspects make this movie a real time capsule for people to watch since you rarely would see rotoscoped movies. So that aspect alone is a novel reason to watch this version.
I really wish just for completeness though that the rest of the Return of the King and the end for the Two Towers had been made by Bakshi and his crew. I wasn’t really satisfied by the animated production of the Return of the King as that one was more geared towards children and used the same studio that had done The Hobbit. Of course, I’m certain in a similar vein, doing the battles of the Black Gate and Gondor would have been near impossible since those were far more massive in scale compared to Helms Deep. And I have seen the behind the camera footage of those battles where a large number of performers were used before the rotoscoping effects were put into place. But I still feel too much was missing from the Tower Towers from the animated versions. And this was a big deal to a fan like myself because we wouldn’t receive the Peter Jackson version for a little over a decade (remember: I saw these animated ones in the mid 80s)
At any rate, I still love this movie. It’s a good dinner movie for me when I need something to pass time while having something on in the background as I consume a meal.
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