Ralph Bakshi’s animated Lord of the Rings is an oddly inconsistent movie

Monday, January 20th, 2025

I recently watched Ralph Bakshi’s animated Lord of the Rings for the first time in ages, and it is an oddly inconsistent movie:

Bakshi’s LOTR adaptation has a unique look, employing an animation style barely used in modern times — Rotoscoping. This was a technique used extensively in the early days of animation, with artists tracing over live-action footage. It worked wonderfully for this film, giving the characters dynamic energy and a sense of perpetual motion, but Bakshi went one step further. To keep the budget down, the team used live-action special effects rather than animating them by hand, giving many scenes an ethereal look. He also implemented a technique known as solarization, which essentially flipped the light and dark areas on film so they’re reversed, resulting in a stark high-contrast image.

This is most notable in any of the Fellowship’s clashes against the orcs or the Balrog fight in the caves of Moria, and especially in the finale, the Battle of Helm’s Deep. When paired with the bold graphical look and flat colors of these monsters, the ominous effect changes the entire mood, giving it an eerie feeling with a painterly quality. If the backgrounds of this LOTR movie are dreams, then these sections are nightmares! It’s one-part pop art, and one-part grainy classic film, but these visuals stick with you to add gravitas of the large-scale skirmishes that otherwise would take months to draw by hand.

That description is generous. Dan Olson goes into exhausting detail about how Bakshi progressed from Fritz the Cat to Lord of the Rings. You might want to skip ahead 22 minutes, to when he discusses the actual Lord of the Rings, or 29 minutes, to where he discusses pseudo-solarization and the odd mix of animation styles:

The rotoscoped art, traced over live-action footage, looks remarkably different from the pseudo-solarized art, which resembles a bad photocopy that’s been colored:

Lord of the Rings Hobbits Hiding from Black Rider

Lord of the Rings Nazgûl

The final story from Heavy Metal, where Taarna rides her pteranodon over the desert landscape, was actually animated using a similar technique, with a physical model of the landscape painted with lines along its edges, so they could fly the movie camera over the terrain and then produce high-contrast photocopies of the film, which could then be painted for the final animation:

Bakshi can get pretty defensive about The Lord of the Rings. He was certainly bitter that they dropped the “Part One” from the title. His earlier Wizards isn’t good, but it is oddly compelling. His later Fire and Ice isn’t a good film, either, but it does feature some amazing rotoscoped action sequences atop beautifully lush background paintings.

Comments

  1. Gaikokumaniakku says:

    “His later Fire and Ice isn’t a good film, either, but it does feature…”

    Scantily clad chicks.

    And probably fantasy magic.

    I trust your judgements on most matters, but if loving Fire and Ice is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

  2. Isegoria says:

    You’re definitely allowed to love Fire and Ice for what it is:

    It’s a bit like Star Wars, but with Leia played by Jayne Mansfield, in an outfit smaller than the infamous Return of the Jedi bikini, and the Death Star taken out by Han Solo.

    That said, the film does feature some amazing rotoscoped action sequences atop beautifully lush background paintings — including some by Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light.

  3. Isegoria says:

    You can watch Fire and Ice on YouTube, free with ads.

  4. gaikokumaniakku says:

    If your youtube connection isn’t working, you can download an open-source diagnostic tool here:

    https://www.qbittorrent.org/

    as endorsed by Edward Teach.

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