The Lord Of The Rings is Bakshi-t crazy.
The 1978 animated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings is an oddball relic that, depending on who you ask, either lands squarely in the realm of cult classic or lingers as an ambitious experiment that didn’t quite hit its mark. Directed by Ralph Bakshi, whose gritty, countercultural animation style had already made waves in Fritz the Cat and Wizards, this attempt to capture Tolkien’s sprawling narrative for the screen has a distinct, almost psychedelic charm. But here’s the rub: does it really work, or is nostalgia doing some heavy lifting?
At the time of its release, The Lord of the Rings was nothing short of a high-risk venture. Bakshi took a hard swing at the unadaptable and, for better or worse, brought a unique vision to the task. The film’s use of rotoscoping—a technique where live-action footage is traced over to create animated motion—was praised for its ambition but quickly became one of its most polarising features. The uneasy combination of rotoscoping and traditional animation is striking, but it’s also jarringly inconsistent. Characters and scenes shift in tone and texture, from shadowy realism to cartoonish exaggeration, creating an experience that’s both surreal and unsettling. While some of the rotoscoping adds a layer of eerie realism to characters like the Nazgûl, other scenes—especially action-heavy ones—come off as disjointed, as though the animation itself can’t quite settle on how Middle-earth should look.
Character design is another bold stroke, with Bakshi’s versions evoking reactions almost as mixed as the animation. Aragorn, looking uncannily like Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh, gives an unsettling edge to a character we usually associate with quiet nobility. Gandalf is the wise, commanding figure we expect, but Frodo, portrayed more as a scared child, feels oddly diminished. Then there’s Bilbo, who looks as though he’s perpetually on the verge of a medical emergency, his animation so bizarrely overwrought that he often appears to be suffering a stroke mid-sentence. And Bakshi’s Balrog, complete with bat wings and a lion’s face, is a uniquely eccentric take that, while visually arresting, is a bit of a showstopper for all the wrong reasons.
For all its strange character choices, the film still manages to capture some striking images. The Nazgûl have an ethereal menace, looming as shadows rather than figures, embodying fear itself more than any tangible threat. And while the pacing and truncated narrative can’t sustain Tolkien’s epic sweep, the film retains moments that linger—like the visceral image of the Nazgûl hunting down the hobbits (which would go on to inform Peter Jackson’s vision) or Frodo’s barely contained fear in the face of Mordor’s reach.
Viewed today, Bakshi’s film is less a coherent adaptation and more a fever dream of Tolkien’s world, the product of a pipe or two of the halfling’s leaf. It doesn’t really deliver on the narrative—Helm’s Deep at least gets satisfying closure, but Gondor’s ultimate fate and the destiny of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum are just abandoned, unresolved. Its atmosphere, however, is uniquely its own. For every stilted line of dialogue or awkwardly rotoscoped action sequence, there’s a moment that manages to evoke a visceral response, even now. You don’t watch Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings for its narrative fidelity or even its aesthetic polish; you watch it to remember what it felt like when fantasy was still largely a wild and untamed cinematic genre, full of strange, uncompromising visions and not a few psychotropically-inspired images.
Would we even still be talking about Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings if it hadn’t sparked imaginations all those years ago? Perhaps not. But for those of us who grew up with it – and I count myself among their number, or who stumbled upon it before the internet could tell us how weird and flawed it was, there’s a lingering affection. It’s a half-told story, wrapped in strange visuals and even stranger creative choices, but it still managed to captivate—and that, perhaps, is its greatest legacy.
