A new video essay brilliantly breaks down the 1970s Lord of the Rings movie. While Peter Jackson’s trilogy is the most popular adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s high fantasy epic due to its incredible critical and box office success, a lesser-known version was produced earlier during the late 1970s. Appropriately titled The Lord of the Rings, the animated adaptation was released in 1978 from director Ralph Bakshi and screenwriters Peter S. Beagle and Chris Conkling.
The film follows a familiar story that audiences know well from Tolkien’s novels and Jackson’s films. Hobbits Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry embark on a perilous quest to destroy the One Ring forged by the Dark Lord Sauron, eventually recruiting the help of Aragorn, Boromir, the elf Legolas, the dwarf Gimli, and the wizard Gandalf. The film features the voices of William Squire, John Hurt, Anthony Daniels, and Michael Graham Cox. Though it was a financial success, grossing $33 million on a $4 million budget, the film was not very well received, mostly because it peculiarly ends after the Battle of Helm’s Deep, never telling the remainder of the story.
Now, a brilliant video essay from the YouTube channel, Folding Ideas, is breaking down Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings movie from 1978. In the video, Dan Olson begins by recognizing the 20th anniversary of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings coming up this December and dives into an in-depth comparison between his trilogy and Bakshi’s animated film. Check out the video essay below:
Click here to watch the video.
Olson’s analysis also mentions how Bakshi’s adaptation was the first version of The Lord of the Rings that audiences were exposed to. This was the case for none other than Peter Jackson, who cites the 1978 animated film as a strong influence on his live-action trilogy. While the video essay primarily focuses on Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, it also discusses his earlier filmography, which mostly consisted of R-rated and NC-17 animated films that deal with topics like racism and drug abuse, and how this impacted his adaptation of Lord of the Rings, which was a sequel to a children’s book, The Hobbit.
Overall, the video essay does a great job pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of Bakshi’s adaptation. The film was ambitious to a fault, as it tried to cram two books into one movie. To accomplish this, it trimmed most of the fat from Tolkien’s work, like the Tom Bombadil sequence, but in the end, these decisions still didn’t leave enough room for The Return of the King. Despite its many misgivings, Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings was an important stepping stone towards the IP becoming the pop culture behemoth it is known as today.
