What do you think of the Bakshi cartoon?

[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.