Sword and Sorcery in Pencil and Paint: The Animated Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Long before Peter Jackson made his enduring and beloved adaptations of J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy trilogy, Middle-earth was first glimpsed in animation. And after the middling response to both The Hobbit trilogy and The Rings of Power tv series, it returned to animation again in 2024 (to another middling response). I will not be covering The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim here as it is not an adaptation of any of the main books, but I do want to watch it eventually.

Was Jackson’s initial trilogy of films a fluke? Was it a once in a generation/lightning in a bottle moment where everything aligned in exact minute detail to create one of the grandest cinematic visions ever assembled? Did these previous forays into an animated take on this genre-defining fantasy series offer anything of value? 

Well, looking back on it, we can easily state that The Lord of the Rings films were a moment when the planets aligned and everything fell into place just so to create a memorable and still towering artistic achievement. The Hobbit films and The Rings of Power feel like lukewarm retreads at once too indebted to the previous vision to create their own identities within the material while struggling to do exactly that. 

So, where does that leave these animated films?

Well, not to jump too far ahead, but they are a bit all over the place in terms of their individual achievements and strengths. Not all of them were made for the big screen. In fact, two of them were done by Rankin/Bass, a company best remembered for their annual stop-motion holiday tv specials. What all of them detail is how well epic fantasy could work in animation and how studios need to stop thinking of it as a medium built exclusively for children and/or family-friendly entertainment. 

We begin in 1977 with a Rankin/Bass television special of The Hobbit. The studio had previously made several traditionally animated projects before, Frosty the Snowman and Return to Oz probably being the best known, but these have not remained in the cultural imagination quite like the others. Imagine for a brief minute what a stop-motion Lord of the Rings would look like. Frankly, I’d like to see at least a trial animation sequence out of sheer curiosity.

What we got is probably the best of this lot. An animated film that looks like the works of Arthur Rackham in motion with creature designs that are stranger than any other version I can think of. Where else will you see an emaciated amphibious Gollum and a Smaug with the facial structure of a grotesque feline? Whatever its demerits, The Hobbit is worth watching at least once simply for the strangeness of its visual language. This is a Middle-earth unlike any of the others committed to film.

After all, this envisions the various species and fantastical creatures in ways that differentiate them from each other and from the typical depiction. For all of their many strengths, Jackson’s forays into Middle-earth did codify certain visual interpretations of these things and various films, tv shows, and video games have almost been too afraid to breakaway from these depictions. His Hobbit films presented the Mirkwood Elves that looked exactly like their Lothlórien counterparts. Not so here as the elegant and shimmering Elrond stands in stark contrast to the more earthy, ancient, and wild looking Thranduil (voiced by Otto Preminger of all people).

The older I get, the more I appreciate the wild visual swings this adaptation takes. These wild swings are nearly enough to overpower the narrative deficiencies and strange adaptation choices. The obtrusive adult contemporary folksy ballads, often done in a pastiche of medieval sounds, that essentially paper over parts of the narrative that got lost in adaptation weigh this thing down. So long Beorn and the Arkenstone along with any kind of development of the Lake Town residents who merely exist to kill Smaug and participate in the Battle of the Five Armies. And good luck trying to differentiate the thirteen Dwarves that accompany Bilbo on his journey both because they all look too similar and none of them get any kind of character development.

If nothing else, The New York Times review nailed it: “Rankin and Bass Productions have now carefully translated The Hobbit into film. The result is curiously eclectic, but filled with nicely effective moments… Whatever its flaws, this television version of The Hobbit warrants attention.” Yeah, that sums it up pretty nicely.

Rumors existed for years that Walt Disney wanted the film rights to The Lord of the Rings. While that would have been a terrible fit between material and studio, the mind does wander into what gorgeously detailed and ripe animation would have been produced from it. Imagine a Silver Age Disney take on the world that is on par with the technical achievements and artistry of Sleeping Beauty and weep for what never was, visually speaking. The dense symbolism, characterizations, darkness, and overall tone would have been smoothed over by the Mouse for mass commercial impact, however. (Look no further than The Black Cauldron.)

Still, it might have wound up better than whatever Ralph Bakshi and his acquired visual style and taste managed to do with it. To give a broader overview for a minute: Bakshi is a creative that I often find myself struggling with. Both to understand and to appreciate his work, which I frequently find juvenile, consistently sexist (if not bordering on misogynistic), and an edgelord treatment of racial/social issues. Yet I keep trying to crack why he has such a devoted cult following by engaging with and watching his various films hoping to eventually find one that is coherent, mature, and fully realized. This has yet to happen.

Part of the problem, and one of the major ones found here, was Bakshi’s insistence on rotoscoping. This leaves the distinct impression of various characters looking like they belong in drastically different films. The more realistically rendered Aragorn does not look like he operates in or interacts with the same world as the very cartoonish Hobbits. This mishmash of tones, visual styles, and surface-level rendering of the world leaves Middle-earth in a half-formed state. Characters never seem to be interacting with their environs so scenes of snow-covered hills are static while characters plod through them without actually disturbing their flatness. It is shoddy work that is consistently stiff and inexpressive.

The static backgrounds could have been forgiven if some visual invention had been shown in the character designs, details, and/or animations, but they lack any distinct weight or grace of movement. They move along like rubbery dolls in the frame never co-existing successfully with their environments or each other. Think of the way that Treebeard holds Merry and Pippin in his hands but we never really see them in his hands when we see him walking in three-fourths view, but when we see a close-up of his hands there they are sitting and bouncing like small children being told a story that they love.

Ignoring as much as we can Peter Jackson’s formally audacious and leisurely paced blockbusters, Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings only bothers with a puddle deep understanding of the literary world. Some of this can be chalked up to this being roughly 1.5 books with a potential sequel covering the rest of the story never materializing, and the rest chalked up to Bakshi’s notable and reoccurring deficiencies as a director. Many of his films are formless and lack self-discipline, and that is quite obvious here. (It is also hilarious to me that Bakshi accused Jackson of not understanding Tolkien and merely making a CGI-heavy toy commercial when it is clear that Jackson deeply understood and revered the material.)

While other films, animated or not, make a point to explore and project their characters inner psychological motivations and emotions, this film is perfectly fine with rendering Frodo a child-like eunuch who is incorruptible and unbelievably dull. We never for a moment feel the incredible push-and-pull of the task laid before him and its immense psychological toll. In fact, all the Hobbits are reduced and simplified to childish ciphers from the more complicated and richly developed originals. The wonder and awe they feel while gazing upon Lothlórien is never felt. The splendid majesty of the Ents is never given full life since the Hobbits vacantly clap their hands that the walking/talking tree also does not like Orcs. Not only are these characters never given a fully realized animated emotional life, but they are underwritten and poorly conceived.

With the notable exception of the prologue, which sees black figures moving against a red background and acting out the forging of the ring, Gollum’s origin story, and some of the pertinent events of The Hobbit before transplanting us in the Shire during Bilbo’s birthday party, none of the film is a successful translation or adaptation of the source material. And describing the prologue as successful is not entirely without criticisms as it is clear that the live-action portions had maybe two takes to get the pantomimes on film before moving on to the next scene. There are about two (maybe more) different films fighting for dominance within this. By the end, it is the audience that has been beaten to submission.

After the critical underperformance and modest box office of The Lord of the Rings, the animated attempts at Middle-earth stalled out for two years. Apparently not advertising your film as Part One with no hint of a Part Two to come is a surefire way to upset audiences. Stopping the story at the Battle of Helm’s Deep was also an odd choice as there was no closure to anything that happened and the story gives the impression of a stalled-out engine that just quits working in the middle of the trip.

Then in 1980, Rankin/Bass attempted to complete the story with The Return of the King. This television special brought back much of The Hobbit cast (John Huston as Gandalf is such strange yet genius casting), returned to the previous film’s animation style, and made numerous changes to the source material in the process. While more of an official sequel to The Hobbit, and a strange choice to just skip over everything else in favor of the grand finale, it does essentially complete the informal trilogy.

We open with Gandalf and a minstrel summarizing The Hobbit (over a montage of clips from the previous special) and the major narrative beats of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. As far as fantasy tropes to summarize something too complicated to explain goes, this works well enough. With a limited amount of screentime, they had to speed run through massive reams of plot and incident. However, this also demonstrates the deficiencies of only giving a short running time to material as dense as The Lord of the Rings.

Despite popular belief, this was not made because the sequel to the Bakshi film failed to materialize. Originally intended for release as Frodo, The Hobbit II and put into production shortly after completion of the first one, The Return of the King was always intended as the follow-up. Frankly, this is a baffling decision as it makes some of the plot points and decisions made by the characters nearly incomprehensible without the previous two films as background. Part of the issue is that in the ensuing years, Warner Brothers obtained the home video rights for each of the films and packaged them together as an animated trilogy despite only two of them being connected in any meaningful way (complete with artwork that recalls the infinitely more beloved Jackson films).

The Return of the King narrows its focus largely to the journey Frodo and Samwise take on Mount Doom to destroy the ring, which leaves characters like Aragorn, Éowyn, Gollum, Merry and Pippin left adrift with barely sketched in personalities and narrative functions. Looking for Gimli and Legolas? Well, they are nowhere to be found here. Once again large chunks of plot are left to a minstrel to deliver over montages with a soundtrack that sounds like a pastiche of both medieval sounds and very 1970s adult contemporary soft rock/folksy ballads. If not delivered by the Minstrel of Gondor, then these summaries of hundreds of pages of text are read off by Gandalf as an excuse to get to the next money shot (read: action scenes).   

Yet for all of these narrative problems, I still enjoy this and The Hobbit. Namely because they are so visually interesting. Not only in style, which is incredibly angular and recalls the works of Arthur Rackham, but character designs which are often unconcerned with making them representative than they are with being evocative of a mood. The Orcs here are like bloated grey warthogs with oversized fangs and horns wearing armor, for instance. While places like Gondor look like a stained glass window as the rolling hills and vast valleys are watercolor patchworks leading up to impossibly large castles. It shows the imaginative possibilities of this property in animation where the limitations of what is possible to achieve are much lower than live action. 

In later years, Arthur Rankin Jr. admitted that bum-rushing the narrative sweep and scope of Tolkien was a mistake. He expressed not only a distaste for the final product (“It’s not a very good film”), but a deep regret for not simply making the entire trilogy instead. When pressed about why they did not go this route, he said, “I didn’t know that the audience would still for it. I was wrong.” I wish that they had taken a crack at the entire trilogy instead if only because their visualization of the property is so much more interesting, lush, and detailed than the jarring and incredibly limited work of Bakshi.

It would be 41 years before another crack at an animated Middle-earth would happen. Announced as being fast-tracked into production in 2021 before being released in 2024, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim takes loose material influence from the appendices and crafts a complete narrative around it. There should be no surprise when I say that this was produced entirely so New Line Cinema would not lose the film rights to the property. But does that mean it has no artistic value? Well, the critical and audience response has been and continues to be lukewarm.

In the end, this loosely connected series of adaptations is largely inessential. Worth watching and seeking out for the curious, or for purposes of nostalgia, but not mandatory viewing experiences. Frankly, the Rankin/Bass films offer more unique and stranger takes on the material, for all their demerits and there are several, than Bakshi’s frenzied, shapeless take that routinely demonstrates the weaknesses of rotoscoping as a technique. While nothing will ever approach the majesty and acclaim of Jackson’s films, these are a unique mirror image of individual tastes taking the material for a journey through the Misty Mountains and beyond.