The Lord of the Rings (1978 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings arrived in American cinemas on the 15th of November 1978, carrying a weight of ambition that very few animated films had ever attempted. Bakshi had spent years fighting to bring J. R. R. Tolkien's sprawling epic to the screen, and the result was something genuinely unprecedented: a hybrid of hand-drawn cel animation and rotoscoped live-action footage, covering the first half of a story that the studio refused to label as Part One.

  The film grossed $30.5 million at the North American box office, making it a financial success by any measure. Yet audiences who bought tickets expecting the complete story went home feeling cheated, and critics called it everything from "brave and ambitious" to "numbing and impressive" to something that left one reviewer "exhausted and sickened." No sequel ever came from Bakshi's hand.

  How did a project rooted in a deep personal love for Tolkien become a film that its own director eventually said he would never have made if he had known what was coming? The answers live in the production battles, the unusual technique, the fractured relationship with producer Saul Zaentz, and the long shadow the film cast over Peter Jackson's live-action trilogy two decades later.

• 2. Years in the Making

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  Bakshi first encountered Tolkien's writing in the mid-1950s while working as an animator for Terrytoons. By 1957 he was already trying to persuade people that the story belonged on screen in animated form. It would take nearly two more decades before that conviction translated into actual production.

  In 1969, United Artists held the rights and commissioned John Boorman to write a script. That script was deemed too expensive and abandoned in 1970, but it cost United Artists $3 million. Bakshi learned about the abandoned project from a 1974 issue of Variety and immediately approached the studio. He was startled to learn that Boorman had intended to compress all three volumes into a single film. Bakshi's reaction was blunt: "I thought that was madness, certainly a lack of character on Boorman's part."

  Before Bakshi, the rights had attracted a remarkable collection of names. Denis O'Dell had wanted to make a film for the Beatles and approached David Lean, who was busy with Ryan's Daughter, Stanley Kubrick, who called it "unfilmable," and Michelangelo Antonioni. None of them took it on.

  Bakshi made what he described as a "yearly trek" to United Artists and finally convinced executive Mike Medavoy in 1975 to back two or three animated films plus a Hobbit prequel. Medavoy offered Boorman's script; Bakshi refused it, calling it something that would produce a film like "a Roger Corman film." He held out for a commitment to do the books "as close as we can, using Tolkien's exact dialogue and scenes."

  When the executive who had agreed to fund the project, Dan Melnick of MGM, was fired in 1976, Bakshi's studio had already spent somewhere between $200,000 and $600,000. His replacement had not read the books and, according to Bakshi, asked whether The Lord of the Rings was about a wedding. Bakshi then called Saul Zaentz, who had helped finance Fritz the Cat, and Zaentz agreed to produce. Before a single frame was shot, Bakshi visited Priscilla Tolkien and made her a promise: "My job was to say, 'This is what the genius said.'"

• 3. Building the Script

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  Chris Conkling came to Bakshi not as a writer but as a researcher, hired initially to advise on costumes and character behavior. Together they wrestled with how to divide Tolkien's work across multiple films. They considered a three-film structure but concluded they could not figure out how the middle installment would function without a beginning or end. Conkling even drafted a treatment for a single three-and-a-half-hour feature covering the entire story before the two eventually settled on scripts for two 150-minute films.

  Conkling's second draft told the bulk of the story in flashback from Merry Brandybuck's point of view and included Tom Bombadil, Farmer Maggot, the Old Forest, Glorfindel, Arwen, and several songs. Bakshi found it "a much too drastic departure from Tolkien" and asked for something more straightforward.

  Still not satisfied, Bakshi and Zaentz brought in fantasy author Peter S. Beagle for a rewrite. Beagle's first draft dropped the flashback structure entirely and opened with Bilbo's Farewell Party, building toward the Battle of Helm's Deep and closing on Gollum leading Frodo and Sam toward Shelob. The revised version added a brief prologue on the history of the Ring. Even as scripts evolved, fans were writing to Bakshi demanding he "get it right," and artist Mike Ploog recalled that Bakshi kept revising the story to include particular creatures at the urging of those fans.

  The decision to drop Tom Bombadil came down to a single practical judgment from Bakshi: the character "didn't move the story along." Farmer Maggot, Goldberry, the Barrow-wight, and the hobbit Fatty Bolger were also cut. Mick Jagger approached Bakshi wanting to play Frodo, but by that point the voice roles were already cast and recorded. David Carradine offered to play Aragorn and even suggested making the whole project in live-action; Bakshi told him it could not be done without being "tacky."

• 4. The Rotoscope Gamble

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  Publicity for the film announced that Bakshi had created "the first movie painting" through what it called "an entirely new technique in filmmaking." The technique was rotoscoping: filming live actors, printing each frame, placing it behind an animation cel, then tracing and painting the details onto the cel. Every frame of the live footage went through this process.

  For the live-action phase, Bakshi took his cast and crew to Spain, where performers in costume acted out scenes in open landscapes and empty soundstages. Additional photography happened in Death Valley. Bakshi was so frightened of the horses on set that he directed those sequences from inside a caravan. During a large shoot, union bosses called a lunch break at an inconvenient moment, and Bakshi quietly filmed actors in Orc costumes walking toward the catering table, then used that footage in the film.

  The voice cast came largely from the BBC Drama Repertory Company, recruited during a trip Bakshi made to England. Anthony Daniels, who voiced Legolas, remembered that the entire cast recorded together in one studio but were required to leave a two-second gap between lines, which he felt produced "rather stilted dialogue."

  For physical performance, the actors did not always match their voice roles. Billy Barty provided the rotoscope body for both Bilbo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee. Sharon Baird served as the movement model for Frodo. John A. Neris performed as Gandalf, Walt Robles as Aragorn, Felix Silla as Gollum, Jeri Lea Ray as Galadriel, and Aesop Aquarian as Gimli. Working on the film alongside Bakshi were Tim Burton, Disney animator Dale Baer, and Mike Ploog.

  The Spanish film development lab eventually discovered that telephone lines, helicopters, and cars were visible in the footage. Lab workers tried to destroy the footage, warning Bakshi's first assistant director that if that level of carelessness became known, no Hollywood production would ever return to Spain to shoot.

  Most of the crowd and battle sequences did not use traditional rotoscoping at all but a different method in which live-action footage was solarized to create a more three-dimensional appearance, a process confirmed in an interview with cinematographer Timothy Galfas for the documentary Forging Through the Darkness: the Ralph Bakshi Vision for The Lord of the Rings. Bakshi later regretted tracing the source footage directly rather than simply using it as a guide. He felt the realism the technique produced was genuine: "I don't think I could get the feeling of cold on the screen without showing snow or an icicle on some guy's nose."

• 5. Music and the Score Fight

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  Leonard Rosenman composed the film's score, but the music Bakshi actually wanted was never recorded. Bakshi had sought music from Led Zeppelin. Producer Saul Zaentz overruled him, insisting on an orchestral score because he could not release the band's music through his Fantasy Records label.

  Rosenman's vision for the score was enormous: a 100-piece orchestra combined with a 100-piece mixed choir and a 100-piece boy choir. The final ensemble was considerably smaller. Bakshi initially called the result "majestic" but later reversed his opinion entirely, saying he hated the score and found it too cliched.

  The academic reception was more measured. Ernest Mathijs, writing in Lord of the Rings: Popular Culture in Global Context, described the score as "a middle ground" between Rosenman's earlier dissonant work and his more traditional later output, concluding that it "has little that marks it out as distinctively about Middle Earth."

  The score was issued as a double-LP soundtrack album in 1978. That album reached number 33 in the Canadian RPM Magazine album charts on the 24th of February 1979. Rosenman received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Motion Picture Score for the work.

• 6. Reception and the Missing Ending

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  United Artists executives made a choice that enraged Bakshi and bewildered audiences: they released the film without any indication that a sequel would follow. They calculated that audiences would not pay to see half a film. Bakshi believed the opposite, arguing that a "Part One" label would have led viewers to respect rather than resent the incomplete narrative.

  The film grossed over $3.2 million in the United Kingdom and earned nominations for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, a Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film, and Bakshi won a Golden Gryphon at the Giffoni Film Festival. Yet fan reaction was fierce. Animation historian Jerry Beck wrote that fans "intensely disliked" both the "cheap-looking effects" and the missing conclusion.

  Critics split sharply. Frank Barrow of The Hollywood Reporter called the film "daring and unusual in concept." Joseph Gelmis of Newsday wrote that it offered "a visual experience unlike anything that other animated features are doing at the moment." Roger Ebert described it as "an entirely respectable, occasionally impressive job" that "still falls far short of the charm and sweep of the original story." Vincent Canby of The New York Times landed on two words that captured the tension: "both numbing and impressive."

  David Denby, writing in New York magazine, felt the film would confuse anyone who had not already read Tolkien, and concluded that "the lurid, meaningless violence of this movie left me exhausted and sickened by the end." Barry Langford, in the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, pointed to specific structural problems: the prologue was shot as "silhouetted dumb show through red filters" rather than rotoscoped, resulting in clumsy mime and a voiceover that erroneously announced Mordor had defeated Elves and Men at the Battle of Dagorlad, which made the subsequent action harder to follow.

  Bakshi had only four weeks to cut the film from a rough cut of nearly 150 minutes after the animation was complete. He had asked for three additional months and was refused. The edit that survived rearranged the ending so that Gollum leading Frodo and Sam toward Shelob came before cutting back to Helm's Deep, to avoid closing on a cliffhanger.

• 7. Sequels That Never Came

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  Bakshi began working on a sequel even before the first film's reception was fully settled, and B-roll footage was actually shot. The Film Book of J. R. R. Tolkien's the Lord of the Rings, published by Ballantine Books on the 12th of October 1978, still referenced the sequel on its inside cover jacket.

  Zaentz went as far as trying to block Rankin/Bass's The Return of the King TV special from airing so it would not compete with Bakshi's planned continuation. That special had been storyboarded before Bakshi's film was released. Bakshi was aware of Rankin/Bass's The Hobbit TV special and commented during a lawsuit that "Lord of the Rings is not going to have any song for the sake of a record album."

  The sequel collapsed not through studio indifference but through a personal rupture between Bakshi and Zaentz. Reports differ on whether the fight concerned the dropped "Part One" subtitle or Bakshi's fee for the second film. Bakshi found relief in conversations with Priscilla Tolkien, who told him she loved the film. But he refused to make Part Two. Zaentz later confided to John Boorman that making the film had been the worst experience of his life.

  Warner Bros. reportedly approached Bakshi later to make the second part. He refused, angry that he had not been consulted about the live-action films already in development. He did use the renewed interest to restore the film and had the final line of narration redubbed. The DVD version ends with the line: "The forces of darkness were driven forever from the face of Middle-Earth by the valiant friends of Frodo."

  The film was adapted into comic book form by Spanish artist Luis Bermejo under license from Tolkien Enterprises. Three issues were published for the European market beginning in 1979, but copyright problems prevented publication in the United States or translation into English.

• 8. Jackson's Debt

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  Peter Jackson watched Bakshi's film for the first time since its original premiere in 1997, when Harvey Weinstein screened it at the start of story conferences for the live-action trilogy. Jackson had photographed himself with Bakshi as a fan in 1993 and described the 1978 film as "a brave and ambitious attempt."

  In the audio commentary for The Fellowship of the Ring, Jackson said Bakshi's film introduced him to The Lord of the Rings and "inspired me to read the book." In a 2001 interview he said he "enjoyed the film and wanted to know more." He specifically pointed to one image he remembered clearly: "the black Riders galloping out of Bree... from the Ralph Bakshi film." On the DVD commentary, he identified one shot in his own film, a low angle of a hobbit at Bilbo's birthday party shouting "Proudfeet," as an intentional homage to Bakshi, calling the angle "brilliant."

  A less deliberate connection came through Jackson's conceptual artist John Howe, who unknowingly recreated a scene from Bakshi's film in a painting showing four hobbits hiding under a branch from a Ringwraith. The painting appeared in the 1987 J. R. R. Tolkien Calendar, and Jackson turned it into a scene in his own film.

  Bakshi's relationship with Jackson's trilogy was never straightforward. He praised Jackson's special effects but said Jackson "didn't understand" Tolkien and had made "special effects garbage" to sell toys. He accused Jackson of not crediting the earlier film's influence. Jackson acknowledged the influence as early as 1998, when he told a fan he hoped to outdo Bakshi. In 2015 Bakshi apologized for some of his sharper remarks. Bakshi summed up his own position with a kind of stubborn pride: "I'm glad Peter Jackson had a movie to look at. I never did."