Nov. 24, 1978 Gusto feature: The animated film version of "The Lord of the Rings"
Once upon a time, we arts and entertainment writers got
to go on promotional junkets with all expenses paid by the hosts. This is what happened on one
of them.
Film
animator Ralph Bakshi sits blankly in front of the microphone at the posh Beverly
Hilton in Beverly Hills, looking something like a prize fighter who’s just endured
15 rounds and something like one of the hobbits in his newly-drawn version of
J.R.R. Tolkein’s fantasy epic, “The Lord of the Rings.”
He looks
like one hobbit in particular – the lovable lead figure, Frodo, the Ringbearer.
No doubt he wishes that, like Frodo, he had a magic ring that would allow him
to disappear from this particularly perilous rite of passage, this post-review,
pre-release press conference.
Sitting
next to him is gray-bearded, grandfatherly Saul Zaentz, president of Fantasy
Records, producer of the Oscar-winning “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and
producer of “The Lord of the Rings.” If Bakshi were a boxer, then Zaentz would
be his wise old manager. On the other hand, if Bakshi is Frodo, then Zaentz is
Frodo’s Uncle Bilbo.
Either
way, Zaentz lets Bakshi do the dirty work. The 40-year-old animator wastes no
time in putting his Brooklyn-bred street smarts to the task. He begins by taking
the offensive. He’s been a Tolkien fan since 1956, he says. Animation has never
been attempted on a story this complex, he continues. And finally: “One can’t
spend 2½ years on a film trying to figure what EVERYONE will consider about it.
One can only take one’s best shot.”
So much
for objections as to why he made Gollum a pure cartoon figure or why he skimped
on the characterizations or why he left out figures like Tom Bombadil from the
first book of the trilogy or why the second book is compressed into battle
scenes full of charging horsemen or why the film ended at the Battle of Helm’s
Deep.
“It seemed
like a turning point,” he asserts. “It seemed to me to be a natural way to go.
The next picture will start it all over again.”
It’s not
a film for the uninitiated. Those who have not read the trilogy are apt to be
overwhelmed by the parade of wizards, dragons, dwarfs, elves, hobbits and
mortal men. Those who get queasy at the sight of blood, even cartoon blood,
should beware of the brutal battle scenes. The film is rated PG.
On the
other hand, those who have read the trilogy (20 million worldwide, including
one friend of this writer who devoured the books eight times) are likely to
complain about oversimplification and wind up seeing the film over and over
again anyway. It opened to packed houses in major cities last week. It’s due in
the Buffalo area Dec. 20.
The only
thing Bakshi will concede about it is that, at two hours and 16 minutes, it’s
probably too long. He prefers instead to dwell on the singular accomplishment
of having brought Tolkien’s fantasy to the screen in the first place – something
he’s wanted to do since he was an inker at Terrytoons.
For
Bakshi, animated film is part art and part challenge. The man who made the
first general-release X-rated cartoon, “Fritz the Cat” in the early ‘70s,
considers “The Lord of the Rings” a breakthrough. For one thing, he shot it all
first in live action, then had an army of 200 animators convert it into
drawings. Expensive? Not really. A film with live actors would have cost $30
million. Bakshi brought it in for around $8 million.
“New
techniques were needed,” he says. “Otherwise, we would’ve had a cartoon rather
than the first realistic painting in motion. People will be seeing things that
never happened in animation before. I don’t want to be Walt Disney. I want to
take an art form that has been bastardized and make it a medium adults can
enjoy.”
The
problem is that many moviegoers may not realize what they’re seeing. Compared
to Disney or Hanna-Barbera, this is high art. Bakshi’s characters have human
facial expressions, they move as if they have weight, they even move in slow
motion. And then there’s the sheer magnitude of the scenes.
“This is
realistic motion for the first time,” he says, “with a cast of thousands. We
used the same techniques as live artists. We went for lights and shadows as
opposed to line drawings. If the lighting went a certain way live, we went with
it. It was still an interpretation, but the joy, shock or amazement was that it
looked similar to photographs and it looked similar to live action.”
To
determine how each character looked, Bakshi first made drawings of the
Fellowship of the Ring, then sought out people who looked like them. For the
hobbits, he used children and short adults. The model for Frodo was not really
Bakshi. It was Sharon Beard from the Mickey Mouse Club. Bakshi conceded that
the most difficult characters were Boromir, who wound up looking like a Viking
chieftain, and strong, slow-talking Aragorn, who bears a startling resemblance
to Ed Ames.
“We met
with Tolkien’s biographer, his annotator and his daughter,” Zaentz reports. “They
wanted to see it done and they warned us of the pitfalls of fantasy, any
fantasy. Christopher Tolkien had a comment on the Ringwraiths. He said they
didn’t have hands in the book. And it was Priscilla Tolkien who told us no
matter what you do, there’ll be a percentage of Tolkien fans that’ll say they
imagined the characters taller or shorter or with more hair.”
“What is
the status of the sequel?” someone asks.
“It’s
difficult to make just one movie,” Bakshi replies wearily, “so we made just one
movie. It’s been 2½ years in the making. The second will come when the second
comes.”
* * * * *
IN THE PHOTOS: Ralph Bakshi in 1978 and the animated Frodo Baggins.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE: The animated "Lord of the Rings"
got a 49% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where the critical consensus was that it
"never lives up to the grandeur of its source material." It made
money, but there wasn't a second film.
One of the people who saw
it was director Peter Jackson, who turned the Tolkien novels into a
full-fledged live-action trilogy 25 years later. In a 2004 interview, Bakshi
said: "I'm glad Peter Jackson had a movie to look at – I never did. And
certainly there's a lot to learn from watching any movie, both its mistakes and
when it works. So he had a little easier time than I did, and a lot better
budget."
Bakshi had better luck
with "American Pop," an animated 1981 feature, and wanted to make
movies out of J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" and Hunter
Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," but the projects fell through
and he turned to television. He retired in 2015 and these days markets his
paintings.
Comments
Post a Comment