Running time 133 minutes Country United States United Kingdom Spain Language English Budget $4 million Box office $30.5 million The Lord of the Rings is a 1978 film directed. It is an adaptation of 's high fantasy epic, comprising and the first half of.
Set in, the film follows a group of, and who form a. They embark on a quest to destroy the made by the Dark Lord, and ensure his destruction. Ralph Bakshi encountered Tolkien's writing early in his career, and had made several attempts to produce The Lord of the Rings as an animated film before being given funding by producer and distributor. The film is notable for its extensive use of, a technique in which scenes are first shot in live-action, then traced onto animation. It uses a hybrid of traditional cel animation and rotoscoped live action footage.
The film features the voices of, and, and was one of the first animated films to be presented theatrically in the sound system. The screenplay was written by, based on an earlier draft.
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Although Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings was a financial success, it received mixed reactions from critics, and there was no official sequel to cover the remainder of the story. Nonetheless, the film became a that continued to run as a matinee and a midnight movie for nearly two decades, and was an influence on 's, as detailed in the DVD extras of.
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–. –. –. –. – Production Development Director was introduced to The Lord of the Rings during the mid-1950s while working as an animator for. In 1957, the young animator started trying to convince people that the story could be told in animation.
In 1969, the rights were passed to, where filmmakers and each tried to adapt the story. (Contrary to an, Disney never owned the rights to The Lord of the Rings. ) In the mid-1970s, Bakshi, who had since achieved box office success producing adult-oriented animated films such as, learned of UA and Boorman's attempts to adapt the story.
He was told that Boorman had planned to produce all three parts of The Lord of the Rings as a single film, and commented, 'I thought that was madness, certainly a lack of character on Boorman's part. Why would you want to tamper with anything Tolkien did?' When Boorman's fell apart, Bakshi approached the studio and proposed that he direct a three-part animated film adaptation of the book: They said fine, because Boorman handed in this 700-page script, and do I want to read it?
I said, 'Well, is it all three books in one?' They said, 'Yes, but he's changed a lot of the characters, and he's added characters. He's got some sneakers he's merchandising in the middle.' I said, 'No, I'd rather not read it. I'd rather do the books as close as we can, using Tolkien's exact dialogue and scenes.' They said, 'Fine,' which knocked me down, 'because we don't understand a word Boorman wrote.
We never read the books. We ain't got time to read it. You understand it, Ralph, so go do it.' — Director The office was located in the same building, and Bakshi spoke to then-president.
'I thought he would understand what The Rings meant, because UA did not.' Bakshi and Melnick made a deal with Mike Medavoy at United Artists to buy the Boorman script. 'The Boorman script cost $3 million, so Boorman was happy by the pool, screaming and laughing and drinking, 'cause he got $3 million for his script to be thrown out.' However, after Melnick was fired from MGM, the deal fell through. Bakshi then contacted Saul Zaentz (who had helped finance Fritz the Cat) to ask him to produce The Lord of the Rings, and Zaentz agreed. Before the production started, the original three-part adaptation was negotiated down to two parts at United Artists, and Bakshi met with Tolkien's daughter Priscilla to discuss how the film would be made.
She showed him the room where her father did his writing and drawing. Bakshi says, 'My promise to Tolkien's daughter was to be pure to the book.
I wasn't going to say, 'Hey, throw out Gollum and change these two characters.' My job was to say, 'This is what the genius said.' ' Directing. Bakshi in January 2009 Bakshi said that one of the problems with the production was that the film was an, because 'epics tend to drag. The biggest challenge was to be true to the book.'
When asked what he was trying to accomplish with the film, Bakshi stated 'The goal was to bring as much quality as possible to the work. I wanted real illustration as opposed to cartoons.' Bakshi said that descriptions of the characters were not included because they are seen in the film: It's not that important to me how a hobbit looks.
Everyone has their own idea of what the characters look like. It's important to me that the energy of Tolkien survives. It's important that the quality of animation matches the quality of Tolkien.
Who cares how big Gandalf's nose is? The tendency of animation is just to worry about the drawing. If the movie works, whether you agree about Bilbo's face or not, the rest becomes inconsequential. — Bakshi's major artistic influences on the film were classical illustrators such as and; he stated that no contemporary illustrators were an influence on the style of the film.
The film is a clash of a lot of styles like in all my films. I like moody backgrounds.
I like drama. I like a lot of saturated color. Of course, a big problem was controlling the artists so they drew alike. How do you have 600 people draw one character alike? The tendency is to want to let the artist have some freedom but then someone would leave off a hat or horn on a hat on a character. I think we've achieved real illustration as opposed to cartoons. Artistically, we can do anything we want.
— Ralph Bakshi Screenwriting and development An early draft of the screenplay was written by, who told the bulk of the story in flashback, from Merry Brandybuck's point of view. After Bakshi and Zaentz saw Conkling's first draft, fantasy author was called in for a rewrite. According to the website of publisher, Beagle wrote multiple drafts of the script for only $5,000, on the strength of promises from Saul Zaentz to hire him for other, better-paying projects afterward. Zaentz later reneged on these promises.
Differences from the book The film makes some deviations from the book, but overall follows Tolkien's narrative quite closely. Of the adaptation process, Bakshi stated that elements of the story 'had to be left out but nothing in the story was really altered.' The film greatly condenses Frodo's journey from Bag End to Bree. Stop-overs at 's house, Frodo's home in Buckland, and the house of the mysterious deep in the are omitted. Maggot and his family and Bombadil and his wife are thus all omitted, along with, a hobbit who accompanied Frodo at the beginning.
According to Bakshi, the character of Tom Bombadil was 'dropped' because 'he didn't move the story along.' Additionally, the character is amalgamated with.
Animation Publicity for the film announced that Bakshi had created 'the first movie painting' by utilizing 'an entirely new technique in filmmaking.' Much of the film used live-action footage which was then to produce an animated look. This saved production costs and gave the animated characters a more realistic look. In animation historian 's The Animated Movie Guide, reviewer Marea Boylan writes that 'up to that point, animated films had not depicted extensive battle scenes with hundreds of characters.
By using the rotoscope, Bakshi could trace highly complex scenes from live-action footage and transform them into animation, thereby taking advantage of the complexity live-action film can capture without incurring the exorbitant costs of producing a live-action film.' I was told that at Disney the actor was told to play it like a cartoon with all that exaggeration. In Lord of the Rings, I had the actors play it straight. The rotoscope in the past has been used in scenes and then exaggerated.
The action becomes cartoony. The question then comes up that if you're not going to be cartoony, why animate?. It is the traditional method of rotoscoping but the approach is untraditional. It's a rotoscope realism unlike anything that's been seen. It really is a unique thing for animation. The number of characters moving in a scene is staggering. In The Lord of the Rings, you have hundreds of people in the scene.
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We have cels with a thousand people on them. It was so complex sometimes we'd only get one cel a week from an artist. It turned out that the simple shots were the ones that only had four people in them. — Ralph Bakshi For the live-action portion of the production, Bakshi and his cast and crew went to Spain, where the rotoscope models acted out their parts in costume. During the middle of a large shoot, union bosses called for a lunch break, and Bakshi secretly shot footage of actors in costumes moving toward the craft service table, and used the footage in the film. Many of the actors who contributed voices to this production also acted out their parts for rotoscoped scenes.
The actions of Bilbo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee were performed by, while served as the performance model for Frodo Baggins. Other performers used on the rotoscoping session included John A.
Neris as Gandalf, Walt Robles as Aragorn, as Gollum, as Galadriel and Aesop Aquarian as Gimli. Although some cel animation was produced and shot for the film, very little of it appears in the final film. Most of the film's crowd and battle scenes use a different technique, in which live-action footage is (per an interview with the film's cinematographer, Timothy Galfas, in the documentary Forging Through the Darkness: the Ralph Bakshi Vision for The Lord of the Rings) to produce a more three-dimensional look. In a few shots the two techniques are combined.
Bakshi claimed he 'didn't start thinking about shooting the film totally in live action until I saw it really start to work so well. I learned lots of things about the process, like rippling. One scene, some figures were standing on a hill and a big gust of wind came up and the shadows moved back and forth on the clothes and it was unbelievable in animation.
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. The characters have weight and they move correctly.' After the Spanish film development lab discovered that telephone lines, helicopters, and cars could be seen in the footage Bakshi had shot, they tried to incinerate the footage, telling Bakshi's first assistant director that 'if that kind of sloppy cinematography got out, no one from Hollywood would ever come back to Spain to shoot again.' Following the live-action shoot, each frame of the live footage was printed out, and placed behind an animation cel.
The details of each frame were copied and painted onto the cel. Both the live-action and animated sequences were storyboarded. Of the production, Bakshi is quoted as saying, Making two pictures the live action reference and the actual animated feature in two years is crazy.
Most directors when they finish editing, they are finished; we were just starting. I got more than I expected. The crew is young.
The crew loves it. If the crew loves it, it's usually a great sign. They aren't older animators trying to snow me for jobs next year. Although he continued to use rotoscoping in, and, Bakshi later regretted his use of rotoscoping, stating that he felt that it was a mistake to trace the source footage rather than using it as a guide.
(co-creator of ) was one of numerous staff taking a role in animation on this film. Ploog also was involved in other animations, notably.