The Lord of the Rings

What most people remember is the mix of the live-action tracing within the traditional animation and just how effectively creepy it managed to be, but for the time this did a pretty good job of adapting the dense novels.

Now that cinema technology has made a live-action "The Lord of the Rings" possible, these versions are likely to be displaced. They'll retain a nostalgic charm, though, especially for those to whom they were the first peek into the fantastic world of Middle Earth. [24 Aug 2001]

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.

The Lord of the Rings, is both numbing and impressive. Yet it would be difficult to recommend this movie to anyone not wholly absorbed by the uses of motion-picture animation or to anyone not familiar with Tolkien's home-made mythology, which borrows liberally from various Norse myths, the Eddas, the Nibelungs and maybe even Beatrix Potter.

Unquestionably, Bakshi has perfected some outstanding pen-and-ink effects while translating faithfully a portion of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy. But in his concentration on craft and duty to the original story - both admirable in themselves - Bakshi overlooks the uninitiated completely.

Lacking a firm center in Frodo's story, the film plays itself out as a bewildering parade of elves, dwarves, ores, trolls and talking trees.

The film is flat, dull, and sloppy.