# Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings



## Greybeard (Jun 1, 2011)

I recently spotted Ralph Bakshi's animated Lord of the Rings on Blu-ray.  It's been decades since I've viewed it, so I don't recall too much.  It does seem that this film is universally reviled, though.  Why is that?

I don't remember it being that bad.  In fact, I always thought of Bakshi as being a visionary, especially after seeing Fire and Ice.


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## Heavy Thorn (Jun 2, 2011)

The film really chops LOTR into bits, starting with Fellowship and ending after the battle of Helms Deep (if I remember correctly).  Things are out of order and on-the-nose, and it's just all-around kind of annoying.  I watched it when I was a kid and thought it was cool, though the Balrog scene gave me nightmares, but I watched it again about a year ago and it was pretty bad.

Also, the mixture of live action and animation, and the fact that half the film was pasted red... none of it really worked out that great.


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## BeigePalladin (Jun 6, 2011)

also, have you seen Boromir in it? 'noble men of the west' apparently translates into 'silly, half-cartoon Viking'...


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## Demesnedenoir (Oct 28, 2022)

I will raise this thread from the dead just for the fun of it.

I am one of the probably rare people who saw Bakshi's LoTR in the theaters before reading the books as a kid, and I loved it. Bakshi was working under major limitations. The studios gave him two films to animate the massive LoTR story and then killed the second. I still recall seeing an illustration of the Witchking in Fangoria or some such magazine that didn't the movie, and it was sweet. For the 1970s and the limits placed upon him, Bakshi did at least okay.

The soundtrack was awesome.


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## pmmg (Oct 28, 2022)

When I saw that, there were not many choices in animated material. I thought it was okay. And I appreciated the effort they made with realism (painting over live actors), but when I saw it again later as an adult, it did not continue to make the high marks meter. I would call it a time capsule now, and not a great work. This is one of the reasons, I came to believe that all the LORT supporting material was not very good, which led to my low expectations for the Fellowship movie.


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## Demesnedenoir (Oct 28, 2022)

My expectations for any epic fantasy movie are low, heh heh.


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