That may have been inevitable, considering how mightily Tolkien labored to create a believable Middle Earth: every character in place, every magical occurrence explained. In the book, there is never of moment of doubt about the necessity for Frodo to journey to the land of Mordor to destroy the evil Ring of Power. In the film, we are tossed suddenly into hobbits' lives of peace and ease in the Shire, then whisked out just as quickly on a journey through the sinister forests and caves of the Middle Earth. A sense of history, of inevitability, hung over Tolkien's epic, and it's hardly surprising that a much-streamlined film version has lost most of that.
What the film gains at Bakshi's hand is a very clever bag of animator's tricks, most of which serve to make Tolkien's characters palpable after all those years on paper. There are some, of course, who will complain about the characterizations. Gandalf is entirely too much the cartoon wizard, far more avuncular and less ambiguous than in the book. Frodo and his fellow hobbits look more like big-eyed greeting-card kids than weird creatures from another age of Earth. On the whole, however, Bakshi has taken Tolkien's list of names and traits and given them weight and movement.
And how they move. Working from a live action film shot before the first drawing was made, Bakshi and his crew of artists -- 150 strong -- have imbued the cartoon form with vital signs never seen in animation before. Bodies move in realistic concerts of sinew and bone, faces show expression previously reserved for live actors, and, most impressively, we begin to forget, after a while, that we are watching animation at all. The reality-fantasy gap begins to shrink before our eyes.
That is not to say "The Lord of the Rings" is flawless. Far from it. Technical wizardry aside, it is much too long. Jim Henson once said, "Muppets can't hold attention as long as humans can," and Bakshi would have done well to apply that theory to his animations. When the magic begins to pall, the characters that captured our imagination for the first 90 minutes revert to cartoons, and squirming begins. By the time the film ends after 2 1/4 hours, we are just plain tired of it.
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