What do you think of the Bakshi cartoon?

[Pitchwife]

I can't claim to be an expert on animation, so I won't go into the technical questions that POTH has commented on quite competently, as far as I can tell. From my point of view, the rotoscoping works best on such scenes as the early confrontations with the Black Riders, the fight with the Orcs in Moria and to some degree the tide of evil in the final battle at Helm's Deep, to which it lends a somewhat surreal, 'otherworldly' quality which I quite like; but I agree it gets rather weird in the second half of the film.
(Which reminds me - when I first saw the film in cinema back in the winter of 1978/79, I was on the eve of coming down with the flu and got rather feverish during the viewing, so I actually wondered how much of the weird visuals in the later half might be due to my rising temperature. A rather psychedelic experience!)
And Leonard Rosenman did a great job on the score, as far as I'm concerned. The main theme is touching and unforgettable, as are the dirge for Gandalf in Lothlórien and the choir in the final battle scenes (if you listen closely, you'll notice that for want of better lyrics, he had them chanting his own name backwards - 'Namnesor Dranoel'; quaint, but it works!).
As for Bakshi vs Jackson, I'll be the first to admit that PJ handled a number of things much better - such as presenting Boromir as a likeable character who just temporarily succumbed to a temptation to strong for him, and Sam as the hero he is rather than a comic potato. (Even the Rankin/Bass ROTK, abominable as it is in many aspects, brought out the heroic side of Sam better than Bakshi - but then again, we don't really get that much of that side of Sam in the parts of the book Bakshi covers.) I guess the root of all my qualms with PJ is that he came so damn close to getting it right in so many ways that it hurts all the more when he messes up and gets off on some completely gratuitous nonsensical tangent.
Which finally brings me to another point in favour of the animated versions (even the R/B ones, I'm afraid). All adaptations of a work of literature in a visual medium - whether mere illustration, animation or live action - influence and limit our own imagination of the characters and events to some degree; and just as illustrations are, in this respect, less 'harmful' than movies, animation is, in my subjective view, one step further removed from pretending to be 'the real thing' than live action, as we're more conscious of looking at everything through someone else's artistic filter.
Looking at it from a slightly different angle: Michael Moorcock, in his rather blasphemous essay on Tolkien 'Epic Pooh', claimed that Tolkien was so successful because we, the readers, are actually much better writers than the Professor himself was and make up for his literary shortcomings by the use of our own imaginations. This is not the thread to debate his statement as far as the books are concerned, but I think it applies to the films in a way: in our minds, we're all better film-makers than Bakshi, so we can flesh out the gaps and smooth out his mistakes while we're watching and still enjoy the show. With a live action movie like PJ's, we don't have that much leeway to exercise our own imagination, we depend more on the film-maker to get it right for us, and are more disappointed if he doesn't. Or that's how it seems to me.

[PrinceOfTheHalflings]

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

I guess the root of all my qualms with PJ is that he came so damn close to getting it right in so many ways that it hurts all the more when he messes up and gets off on some completely gratuitous nonsensical tangent.

Yes, I couldn't have said it better myself, Pitchwife! That is exactly my feeling.

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

...in our minds, we're all better film-makers than Bakshi, so we can flesh out the gaps and smooth out his mistakes while we're watching and still enjoy the show. With a live action movie like PJ's, we don't have that much leeway to exercise our own imagination, we depend more on the film-maker to get it right for us, and are more disappointed if he doesn't. Or that's how it seems to me.

I think some of that is "animation vs. live action" ... but some of it is just "bad film maker vs. good film maker". There is no doubt that PJ is really good at making films, but he is a bit like Steven Spielberg in that his films look fantastic, but they sometimes lack a certain something. The lights are on but nobody is at home, so to speak. The appearance is there, but the substance is lacking, or wrong. PJ knows how to make films, that's for sure, but does he know how to make LOTR?

The problem is that because PJ is a good film maker, we are not left with much room to imagine our own version. He's already overloaded us with memorable visuals ...

[Mugwump]

Originally Posted by Fool-of-a-Took

What do you think of the Bakshi cartoon?

I saw it when I was much younger. Technically it was interesting for its "cartoon drawn by tracing over live action film" method, which at the time was considered novel and quite innovative.

My main problem with the film was that, not having read the novel, the cartoon-film was confusing -- I couldn't follow who all the characters were and what they were doing, or why. But mostly what I hated about it was that it was a lie. It was entitled Lord of the Rings but it covered only about the first half of the novel.

Originally Posted by Diamond18

... the Elves were worse than I'd remembered. They weren't actually green, more like bluish-gray. Their bodies were squat but their legs were long. Their eyes were nothing short of evil and surly. They were balding, and the hair they had was wispy and stringly. Their hangs and feet were amphibian. They were butt-ugly. In short, they were the exact opposite of what Elves should look like. ... I'm wondering...does anyone know of a motivation for depicting the Elves this way? I mean, did the animators ever explain why the Elves were so unlike "real" Elves? Or were they, as others have suggested, just high?

It will be hard for most people today to understand, but our vision of elves today is largely formed by Lord of the Rings, in which Tolkien restored the original ideas of how the "elves of faerie" were portrayed in myth. What's hard to realize is how strongly the popular conception of elves had been shaped by hundreds of years of bad fairy tale and folklore caricature. Until Tolkien the popular conception of elves was more like the "Keebler elves" or "Santa's elves" -- leprechauns or wee Victorian pixie-fairies.

As a result, early artistic renderings of Tolkien's elves were often quite "off" from what we understand them to be today. An example was the first recording I had of The Lord of the Rings, a dramatic reading that was published in the 1970's by Jabberwocky Audio on cassette tape. It was very well produced, and a worthy effort... except for one thing: all the elves spoke with very high-pitched, falsetto "pixie" voices, more squeaky even than Minnie Mouse's.

Which was really too bad. The author of the script, who had done a very good job (for a BBC radio performance in 1954, I believe), must have had a fit if and when he heard the way these American actors portrayed his elves 20 years later. It was very funny, in a sad way.

This version was rereleased in 2001 on CD and is still available (photo below), unfortunately with the same squeaky elf voices.

[Pitchwife]

Originally Posted by Mugwump

but our vision of elves today is largely formed by Lord of the Rings, in which Tolkien restored the original ideas of how the "elves of faerie" were portrayed in myth.

Or so he claimed. For an interesting discussion of the differences between Tolkien's Elves and the elves/fairies of traditional folk mythology, see this thread (one of my personal all-times favourites).
Horrible as the Rankin/Bass elves are as depictions of Tolkien's Quendi, their look somehow suggests a glimpse of the dark and malicious side (if not the dangerous beauty) of traditional fairies.

[Nerwen]

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

This is not the thread to debate his statement as far as the books are concerned, but I think it applies to the films in a way: in our minds, we're all better film-makers than Bakshi, so we can flesh out the gaps and smooth out his mistakes while we're watching and still enjoy the show. With a live action movie like PJ's, we don't have that much leeway to exercise our own imagination, we depend more on the film-maker to get it right for us, and are more disappointed if he doesn't. Or that's how it seems to me.

Originally Posted by PrinceOfTheHalflings

The problem is that because PJ is a good film maker, we are not left with much room to imagine our own version. He's already overloaded us with memorable visuals ...

Hardly fair as a criticism, though, is it? I've heard this argument before, and it strikes me as a little, well, perverse almost. However, I'd agree that it probably explains why people spend more time nitpicking the live-action films.

[Mugwump]

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

Or so he claimed. ... Horrible as the Rankin/Bass elves are as depictions of Tolkien's Quendi, their look somehow suggests a glimpse of the dark and malicious side (if not the dangerous beauty) of traditional fairies.

Yes, the earlier view of faeries did portray "the other" according to the worst instincts of xenophobic racial hatred that came largely from the infusions of Germanic myth into English culture that occurred during the Saxon invasions.

But I was talking of physical characteristics of elves, Tolkien's reversal of the infantilizing of their appearance that occurred during the Victorian era. Before that they at least looked mostly human in size, stature and form.

[Huscarl]

I have always loved this oddly inspiring film- the vivid and almost supernatural imagery it offered, and John Hurt's voice!

Those Ringwraiths were far more sinister than the LoTR trilogy's, IMHO?

This film (especially the last battle), Michael Wood and Excalibur (1981) got me gripped by history!

[alatar]

Couldn't figure out why Peter Jackson's LotR was playing yet again on the TV this weekend. Then I saw an ad, showing that it's being released (or re-released, or re-re-released...I'm already losing count) on Blu-Ray DVD. Then I saw something even more interesting (or scary, depending on your point of view) - the Bakshi version is coming out on DVD and Blu-Ray as well!

You can read a short blurb about it here.

Anyone buying it?