Quote:
Originally Posted by TheOrcWithNoName
I first saw this film back in 1982 I think, either on video or terrestrial TV.
Back then, before the age of home computers, video games, sfx & cgi, I thought it was pretty good for what it was. Okay so the finished product was pretty poor compared to today's slick offerings,
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Not to pick on you personally, but I've seen this kind of comment over and over again on this thread. The reality is that even in 1978 the consensus was that the Bakshi film was terrible. Nobody (over the age of about 12) thought that animation was any good back then either!
There were better animated films made in the 1930s! Check out "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" - 1937 - for an example of something done well 40 years before Bakshi's dire attempt.
In fact, it has only been in recent years that CGI has come to play a part in animated movies. For example, "The Lion King" - 1994 - is all "traditional" animation. CGI didn't become popular in animation until after "Toy Story" - 1995 - and of course that film is all CGI.
CGI in itself is not always that great ... I've seen shockingly bad CGI cartoons that were made for television just a few years ago.
Anyway, compare Bakshi's film to "The Lion King" ... both made using old school animation techniques. TLK looks fantastic and Bakshi's film looks like a mess. Even the early parts of Bakshi's film, the best looking parts, still have bad moments.
Frankly, Bakshi was just a lazy filmmaker. He had made two full-length animated movies before "The Lord of the Rings" - "Fritz the Cat" (which uses a kind of rotoscope technique since almost all the backgrounds are drawn over real footage of New York) and "Wizards" which is probably his best film.
"Wizards" is a fantasy/allegory set in a future world where old Nazi propaganda films fall into the hands of an evil wizard and he brings them to life with the power of magic. The climactic battle scene between the forces of good and evil was done with rotoscoping, in much the same way as "The Lord of the Rings", due to Bakshi running out of money. He commented "I thought that if we dropped all the detail, it would look very artistic, and very beautiful, and I felt, why bother animating all of this? I'm looking for a way to get realism into my film and get real emotion."
Unfortunately Bakshi is full of it. The rotoscoped animation in his films looks terrible ... and we thought it looked terrible in 1978. It was only done because of budget limitations and because Bakshi essentially couldn't be bothered animating his action sequences properly. It's really nothing to do with the "state of the art" of animation in the 1970s because these were low budget movies. As far as "The Return of the King" and "The Hobbit" go - they were low budget "made for television" movies aimed at children, not even "real" movies. At least the songs in "The Return of the King" are sort of amusing in a camp way if you don't take your Tolkien too seriously!
There
are a few moments in Bakshi's "The Lord of the Rings" that are quite good. Some of the moments with The Black Riders, the famous shot of the Ring bouncing, the voice acting of the guy who portrays Gollum ... but they hardly make up for the awfulness of the rest of the film. As for Bakshi's film being "more faithful" to the books - well, it uses more actual dialogue from the books but it's hardly more faithful in any tangible way. Besides, it only goes to show how you can quote plenty of lines from a book and still make a terrible adaptation!
Lastly, John Hurt is a great actor but he is completely miscast as Aragorn.
Jackson's films have some shortcomings as adaptions - going to Osgiliath, dumbing down Saruman, using Gimli as comic-relief, trying to turn Aragorn into a main character and therefore saddling him with a stupid "arc", not developing Merry and Pippin properly, not understanding the point of the Scouring (and thus leaving it out) - but at least they are not badly made films. You can't point to CGI as some kind of saviour either, because there isn't that much CGI in the films. Most of the film uses real locations ... real sets (not green screen) ... detailed miniatures ... forced perspective to make the "hobbit actors" look smaller, thousands of extras. Gollum is the obvious exception, of course!
Naturally there are CGI elements inserted into various shots ... but compared to most modern films of this kind, not that many. It's one of the reasons why the film works well - even Gollum is played by a real actor, even if he has been painted out and replaced by a CGI character.
My main complaints about Jackson's films (other than the ones I listed earlier)?
1. Too much action and not enough suspense - the Black Riders are wonderfully ominous early on but once Aragorn waves some burning sticks at them they are not longer scary and the "action film" style kicks in.
2. Mordor should be scary as hell (literally) but instead is terribly anticlimactic once Frodo and Sam get there. It's just grey and boring. The film seems to have run out of steam by this point. This is partly down to the problem generated by the "too much action and not enough suspense" style of Jackson's direction. It's hard to believe that this is the same guy who directed the chilling "Heavenly Creatures"!
3. In the amount of time Jackson spends saying "goodbye" to the characters he could have given us a quick "Scouring". The Scouring of the Shire is essential for the character development of Merry and Pippin and would also have given a satisfactory sendoff to Saruman.