Lord of the Animated Rings: Bakshi's "Lord of the Rings" v Rankin-Bass's "Return of the King"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WcJbPlAknw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW_ocZLaRdI

who the hell designed all those Rankin-Bass characters? I love all their eye wrnkles.

which one has wheres theres a whip theres a way? because that one.

That is the Rankin-Bass one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljEzSRQn4eM

Also you are OTM.

voting rankin-bass for "Where There's A Whip There's A Way." I was once in a band that covered that although unfortunately it never got recorded :( Also, the godawful overacting (a friend and I used to LOL for hours over Merry's "Will he NEVER cut the cake?!") plus general weirdness of picking up with Return of the King, which causes the story to make no sense and be extra confusing to kids renting it because of clear connections to the Hobbit film.

Actually, the Bakshi has that problem too - I remember it being rented for me at age 8 or 9, pitched as "The Hobbit 2," and it just bored/confused the crap out of me...

hahaha xpost re: where there's a whip

uh whoa what did I even do to that video link
here we go

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdXQJS3Yv0Y

"Where There's A Whip There's A Way" is surely some of the finest verse Tolkein ever penned.

I mean, it's no "Goblin Town," but it's got its moments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogTDa-vG2MQ

YOU GO MY LAD
HO HO MY LAD

have been tinkering for years on a track that samples this, trust me it is really really awesome

I think my proudest moment in life was convincing these two Mormon missionaries to sing a bunch of songs from the Hobbit & Return of the King instead of telling me abt 'read the scriptures & pray.' Do you know how I knew they would know these songs? Because they were Mormon missionaries.

i remember this 'return of the king' being really awful. at least their 'hobbit' had its moments.

i think the bakshi has its moments, too -- the creepy prologue, and the voice of gollum (that creepy hick voice of his is so unexpected, but somehow it works for the character). it's definitely more a brave experiment than it is a successful adaptation of the novels.

I saw a little bit of the Bakshi one on Cartoon Network a few years back but didn't get to watch it at the time bcz I was living w my grandma and she didn't want to. I've really wanted to see it though ever since. Rented Wizards about a year ago; it was pretty cool.

where there's a whip was in the hobbit, not a choice.

the hobbit is weirdly not on dvd? at least it isn't available through netflix

we just got bakshi's 'lord of the rings' for my son to watch since he has heard the hobbit at school over the past few months. this LOTR was a huge event in my young life, I must have been 7 when it came out? wow it's crap now. torture.

ok it wasn't that bad but I wasn't in the mood

for rotoscoped hobbit shit, and all that. I mean.

Hahah oh the flashbacks. I actually saw both The Hobbit and The Return of the King when they both first broadcast. (Having not seen the Bakshi film until some years later, and then only actually reading LOTR some time after that. Talk about having the story ruined for me several times over.)

Return is gloriously idiotic and has the most bizarre cast in the universe. Bakshi's LOTR is often lumpen but sometimes works, to wit:

i think the bakshi has its moments, too -- the creepy prologue, and the voice of gollum (that creepy hick voice of his is so unexpected, but somehow it works for the character).

Weird bit of trivia -- a couple of years after the film is when Brian Sibley did the BBC radio LOTR -- he got the same actor, Peter Woodthorpe, to do Gollum. Always thought he did a very good job, really.

where there's a whip was in the hobbit, not a choice.

...you mean Return, surely.

In the pre-VCR times I also ended up with a vinyl box set of the entire Hobbit film's audio track as well as an abbreviated Return. Might actually both be better that way in the end! When you were nine and had only seen Hobbit the once but could at any time one chose hear Richard Boone completely pouring it on as Smaug, a character who pretty much *has* to be acted with overbearing arrogance, it was as creepy as hell.

i watched the bakshi so many times circa 1980 on cable. *rescreened* it about a year or so ago, it's kinda weird and half-assed but not worthless. the rankin-bass adaptations are funny but lotr didn't need the extreme kiddie treatment like the hobbit

One of the funniest things I've ever read is this Agony Booth recap of the Bakshi movie. Especially the writer's constant reminders that this version of Sam is really, really, really gay for Frodo, and his description of Gollum as . . . the dumbest looking character in a movie full of them . . . [he's not]scary or menacing, and moves like a cardboard skeleton with Parkinson's.. Plus this:

Alvin reacts with horror to this, and pulls one of the most ridiculous expressions I've ever seen. I inadvertently paused right on it in order to write this bit, and I think you'd be missing out if I didn't provide a screencap to show you just how stupid it looks.

http://www.agonyboothmedia.com/images/articles/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_1978/lord_of_the_rings_09.jpg

Hahah love that recap.

the hobbit is weirdly not on dvd? at least it isn't available through netflix

Both the Rankin-Bass ones are on DVD & are the kind of cheapo DVDs that are $6 new, max. So even cheaper used.

Most ridiculous thing about the Bakshi might be 'Aruman' - Saruman retitled so as to avoid confusion with Sauron, except they forget so sometimes he's called Aruman, sometimes Saruman.

TBH I found the voicework on that movie so grating that I can only watch it with the French dubbing. It makes it easy to pretend Aragorn is Serge Gainsbourg. Maybe I need to watch this again. That DVD has the richest language options, it's just ridiculous.

always dug bakshi's balrog

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/balrogbashki.jpg

LoTR is a huge mess but has some terrific imagery.

FYI, someone forgot to plug something in when they mastered The Hobbit DVD so it's missing most of the sound effects and some background music (I'm a big animated Hobbit nerd who has both the VHS tape and Ned's full-movie LP box set for comparison).

Where There's A Whip There's A Vote. Love all these regardless of actual quality. I watch the Rankin-Bass Hobbit every Christmas morning, and have since the early 80s (it used to be on one of the UHF channels every Christmas morning at 8; once it came out on VHS I was no longer beholden to broadcasts and my life was changed).

I always defend the Bakshi film. It is not a successful adaptation in the end, but it's a very inspiring mess. The Jackson films are absolutely a successful adaptation, are much better films, way more affecting/awe-inspiring. At the same time, they do not contain anything like the proggy 70s chaos of the Bakshi.

I actually LIKE the fact that it includes rotoscoping and straight animation, gives the movie a kind of surrealist fuckery aspect which reminds me of the deranged mood of those covers for those early Ballantine LOTR paperbacks. Bakshi's rotoscoped Orcs are straight up nightmares, I actually prefer this vision of them to the way they look in the Jackson films.

The Bakshi does drop the ball a bit on Gollum's character design. This is the great thing about the Rankin Bass Hobbit-- their fishlike Gollum is amazing.

The thing besides the hellish Orcs that makes the Bakshi treasurable for me is Leonard Rosenman's brilliant symphonic score, which I still consider one of the very finest fantasy film scores ever composed. So doom-laden, atonal, modernist-primitive, unremittingly menacing except for the rest stop of the Mithrandir music. I do love what Howard Shore achieved for the Jackson cycle very much, but Rosenman, if you are willing to accept Tolkien as a modernist hell, knocks Shore into a hat.

The Rankin-Bass ROTK is valuable for sheer payload of lolz, but pretty shit next to their Hobbit which is great IMO.

Yeah I gotta go against you on Rosenman there -- not ineffective at its best but Basil Poledouris on Conan completely crushes him on the doom-laden/high pulp front, and at Rosenman's worst he's pretty awful.

Well I didn't say he tops Basil's Conan! He doesn't. But they live in the top 10 fantasy scores 2gether IMO.

What did you hate abt the Rosenman? The lighter music with its Holst "Jupiter" swipe?

(On a side note, if anyone wants to hear Howard Shore surpassing what he did musically for LOTR, his next high-fantasy score was for a big-budget Korean videogame called Soul Of The Ultimate Nation, it's scored for huuuge orchestra with what sounds like an ondes martenot, and it's probz the best fantasy score of the past decade)

I love both but come the fuck on, Bakshi is an all-time great just for the technical innovations alone

Rosenman's pretty clunky in general, based on what of his other work I've heard as well -- either sappily sparkly or just going through the motions. Very little to hang your hat on.

This Shore score sounds worth checking out, though!

the Rankin-Bass, especially the Hobbit, operate on a much more consistent level than the Bakshi version but the animation is verrrry stiff and it gets over almost entirely on the strength of the voice talent and the character design.

Bakshi otoh is this sprawling mess that just has higher peaks of genuinely scary/horrifying and mind-bending imagery, a great score, a much darker and foreboding tone and is just a marvel to watch on a technical level even given its flaws (like the fact that the French company that developed the negative of all the background shots of buildings, landscapes etc mistakenly under-exposed all of it, rendering it almost entirely in thick blacks - they did this with the intention of obscuring various modern details, not realizing that Bakshi's studio was going to paint things like telephone poles and power lines out of the frames.)

xpost my magic cauldron tells me you are talking about his 80s genre scores like Robocop 2 and Star Trek IV. Those are exactly as you describe. I never listen to them.

Rosenman came up in the 50s and pretty much maintained peak through the 70s. You wanna hear Fantastic Voyage, the 2nd Planet Of The Apes movie, and his stuff for the famous James Dean films. His big claim to fame is being p much the first film composer to bring full-blown atonality to the table.

Ned, should have mentioned that that CD of Shore's video game music is scarce but not expensive. I don't think it has US distro but I got mine from an Amazon reseller for 16 bucks.

Sorry for the musical derail, LOL there will never ever be an ILM Rolling Film Scores thread.

like the fact that the French company that developed the negative of all the background shots of buildings, landscapes etc mistakenly under-exposed all of it, rendering it almost entirely in thick blacks - they did this with the intention of obscuring various modern details, not realizing that Bakshi's studio was going to paint things like telephone poles and power lines out of the frames.

!!! whoa!!! I guess I need to read that Bakshi book you got, eh?

xpost -- not if you don't start one!

What Bakshi book?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

yay Bakshi

Sat down and watched the Rankin/Bass Hobbit for what I think was the first time since I was a kid. I had the entire thing memorized, of course, down to exact intonations of totally banal lines... not only from repeat childhood rentals but also from many many plays of the storybook album. It is, of course, a herky-jerky mess, in the way of old kids' TV specials and the narrative capacities of children - things just jump to other things, events happen, there's not really much of an arc, the dwarves do nothing the entire time, Gandalf as repeated deus ex machina etc. etc. The pacing is also very much weighted in favor a couple of big, drawn-out and vivid encounters, Gollum and Smaug...so everything in between barely gets set up before it gets solved again.

Some of that is kinda innate to the story and not necessarily in a bad way, but anyway what drew me in as a kid was the look and feel of the world and that still holds up imho. Love love love how totally 70s it all is, with the watercolor backgrounds and the little detail lines on all the faces. It's totally limited animation - repeated frames, large groups standing stock still while the one important character does something, lips that don't move or even appear sometimes... but it doesn't look or feel like Scooby-Doo. But it's the voice work that really sells it - Bean as Bilbo and Huston as Gandalf are definitive for me and still shade my readings of all the books. A sweet and cozy little film, with plenty of miscellaneous ideas to stir a kid's imagination. Worked for me I guess.

Have you listened to the BBC radio version

Have you heard the Bo Hansson album

Have you lived at all

have you enacted the entire story yourself in a forest with your friends as an adult, not a child

Have you had an Elvish wedding

(N.b., that's "Elvish" with an h.)

no to all of the above

but i forgot to mention that gollum really is fantastic in this, way better than serkis's.

Some of that is kinda innate to the story and not necessarily in a bad way, but anyway what drew me in as a kid was the look and feel of the world and that still holds up imho. Love love love how totally 70s it all is, with the watercolor backgrounds and the little detail lines on all the faces. It's totally limited animation - repeated frames, large groups standing stock still while the one important character does something, lips that don't move or even appear sometimes... but it doesn't look or feel like Scooby-Doo.

Important to note! While this is a Rankin-Bass production and all, I forgot to mention on this thread earlier that the bulk of the animation was in fact done by Topcraft, the Japanese animation studio that would eventually mutate into Ghibli. Thus:

http://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-japanese-studios-of-rankinbass/

It was founded in February of 1972 by ex-staff members of Toei Doga, including president Toru Hara. After meeting with Arthur Rankin Jr., they got their first job animating “Kid Power”, based on a “Wee Pals” newspaper comics strip by Morrie Turner (1923-2014). Directors assigned on the show included Katsuhisa Yamada and Tokiji Kaburaki, with Tsuguyuki Kubo as the supervising director. They would also complete three episodes of “The Jackson 5ive” show, which was otherwise done by Halas & Batchelor in England and Pegbar Productions in Spain.

Topcraft would provide full service for Rankin/Bass, even doing storyboards; for example, the storyboards for “The First Easter Rabbit” was done by Keiji Hisaoka. They would also prove to be the most capable of handling Rankin/Bass’s more ambitious projects. Their adaptation of “The Hobbit” took five years to make and cost $3 million, one of the most expensive made-for-TV animation of the era, according to a 1977 New York Times article.

As for what Topcraft did for their home country, when they wern’t getting anything from Rankin/Bass, they served as a service studio for larger studios to contract out, including Toei (Mazinger Z), TCJ/Eiken (Onbu Obake, Jim Button), Tatsunoko (Gatchaman), and Tokyo Movie Shinsha (Lupin the 3rd, Chie the Brat). In the 1980s plans were made to produce “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind”, based on Hayao Miyazaki’s manga. Miyazaki himself would direct, and he and his partner Isao Takahata, who served as the film’s executive producer, chose Topcraft to produce the film. The finished film turned out to be a hit, establishing Miyazaki as a feature director. Topcraft officially dissolved in 1985 when the name was changed to Studio Ghibli. The rest, as they say, is history.

Also of note, linked from there, is an NYT piece from the time about the adaptation:

http://www.nytimes.com/1977/11/27/books/tolkien-hobbitani.html?_r=1&

Five years! Wow. Great info.

"Like Bilbo, I'm approaching 50," said Bean

^^^ this helped

loved this movie too, have also memorized the exact intonations of the teddy ruxpin and go-bots (goooo-BOTS!) commercials on the vhs tape my parents made. (much later i saw an uncut copy and was completely stunned by the ~5 seconds here and there that had been removed for go-bots: entirely new frames; i devoured them.) john huston the definitive gandalf; "fifteen birds" the song's definitive arrangement; monster character designs like the furry spiders and slavering goblins and gollum with his lidded, bulbous underground eyes all frightening and inspiring. could do without "the greatest adventure" but love the arrangement of "no knowing, no knowing what brings mister baggins".

topcraft also animated r-b's the last unicorn, i think, which is also genuinely weird, frightening, fertile.

young me could and did recite the storybook record of this from memory

Otto Preminger gives the Elvenking the fearsome Preminger guttural wallop. Hans Conreid dies movingly as Thorin Oakenshield; Cyril Richard is the king of the elves, and Brother Theodore, the New York expert on the macabre, is a suitably "preciousss" Gollum.

holy shit i had no idea of any of these. brother theodore!

The thing that's interesting to is that while it has a (much) greater fidelity to the original than Jackson's films, though there are certainly removed sequences and elisions, the points near the end where it differs struck me, in later years, as very cynically seventies, post-Watergate/Vietnam. Thinking specifically of the Battle of Five Armies sequence -- when Gandalf interrupts the initial clash to warn about the goblin army, everyone immediately goes from chants about killing everyone else to things like 'my most trusted friend and ally,' while Bilbo looks on all this with bemusement and withdraws of his own accord. (Not to mention the wonderfully anachronistic line to the camera "Personally I'd rather be back in Hobbiton.") Then after the battle it turns out that half the dwarves have died -- I seem to remember a bit where Bombur tells Bilbo "We...won" then either passes out or dies himself. And even though I thought Conreid nailed his final speech perfectly, having Bilbo just give a soft farewell in response and nothing more seems almost to frame it all as nothing but waste. I have no problem with this read in general, or this twist they put on the story, but it's not the book, and maybe was a read that could only happen at such a historical moment.

Meantime speaking of adaptations, there IS always the Russian live-action Hobbit from 1985. Here's part one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sl7w2Z0vGpA

(Ignore the subtitles on that one -- dumbass parody stuff. But the video is indeed what it is.)

Ah, much better -- here's a straight through version of it with no subtitles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m0l3Yr1B50

that was a favorite piece of chemically-aided entertainment amongst my friends in the russian dept

Great post, Ned. The film goes out of its way to mark the artificiality of the switch between the foes hating each other and the foes uniting with fine words, as Bilbo all but rolls his eyes. Very much reflecting exasperation with detente and Nixon-in-China stuff I think, the cynicism of foreign policy and war. But if you're not really looking for it, or you're a little kid, it can also just read straight, as them deciding to unite quite reasonably. The "Together!" as they unite could totally come across as a "yay!" moment, even if it's followed by this vast devastation to no purpose at all, and Thorin's deathbed recriminations.

Best song is certainly "Goblin Town" but "Fifteen Birds" is similarly great and I've never really stopped having "Blunt the Knives" or some variation on it stuck in my head. Far far better than the one in Jackson's, that's for sure.

I also remember having a great running-gag with my 8th grade art class buddy where the lyrics got turned around to be a series of savage slanders against Bilbo: Drinking blood, crushing skulls - That's what Bilbo Baggins does!