Decades Before ‘The Rings of Power,’ the 1978 Animated ‘Lord of the Rings’ Showed the Potential of Tolkien’s Power

A few weeks ago, Amazon unveiled its expensive, ambitious new series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It’s been 19 years since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King grossed over a billion dollars, going on to win 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It’s been 10 years since director Peter Jackson went back to the J.R.R. Tolkien well to deliver The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first part of a new trilogy that was never as beloved or influential as the previous trilogy — but still managed to rake in $2.9 billion over three films. No surprise, then, that Amazon is banking on the assumption that there’s still a ton of interest in a franchise that’s been one of this century’s major cultural landmarks. (In fact, you could argue that The Lord of the Rings helped open the door for the other significant pop-culture fixture of the last 20 years, the Marvel Cinematic Universe.)

But where does all that leave the earlier attempts to adapt Tolkien? Put another way, when was the last time you watched the 1978 animated adventure The Lord of the Rings, which fans long assumed would be the closest we’d ever get to seeing Middle-earth on the big screen?

The year before this largely-forgotten animated film hit theaters, another Tolkien project made its way to audiences: The Hobbit, an NBC television movie that aired over Thanksgiving weekend of 1977. The Hobbit was supervised by Rankin/Bass, the braintrust behind the wholesome animated Christmas classics Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman. But 1978’s The Lord of the Rings, which arrived in theaters almost exactly 12 months later, was directed by Ralph Bakshi, who’d made his name with the X-rated 1972 animated sensation Fritz the Cat. A Tolkien devotee, he had to fight to get the rights — and then had to wrangle with executives who didn’t understand the books’ appeal. As Bakshi later recalled, some of the more clueless suits would ask, “Is Lord of the Rings about a wedding?”

Watch the 1978 film now, and it’s both eerily familiar and utterly foreign. Drawing from story elements in The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s follow-up book, The Two Towers, Bakshi’s movie doesn’t just resemble Jackson’s — some of the shots seem to have directly inspired similar images in the subsequent trilogy, almost as if Bakshi’s film is a storyboard for what was to come. That “borrowing” always annoyed Bakshi: “I’m glad Peter Jackson had a movie to look at — I never did,” he said in 2004. “And certainly there’s a lot to learn from watching any movie, both its mistakes and when it works. So he had a little easier time than I did, and a lot better budget.”

If you’ve read the books, or seen Jackson’s trilogy, you know the contours of Bakshi’s animated epic. Noble Frodo (voiced by Christopher Guard) is given the One Ring by Gandalf (William Squire), who tells him he must journey to Mordor to destroy it. Accompanied by, among others, his loyal friend Sam (Michael Scholes) and the brave warrior Aragorn (John Hurt), Frodo goes about his harrowing task. Gollum (Peter Woodthorpe) shows up along the way — and, no, your ears do not deceive you, that is indeed C-3PO himself, Anthony Daniels, voicing Legolas. 

Both animation and fantasy films were in a period of transition when this Lord of the Rings arrived. In the late 1970s, Disney’s best days seemed behind it — founder Walt had died in 1966 — and edgier, more experimental animated movies such as Fantastic Planet and Bakshi’s Wizards, which came out the year before The Lord of the Rings, were taking greater artistic risks. Star Wars was 1977’s biggest film, sparking a wave of copycat sci-fi adventures, like Disney’s live-action The Black Hole. But this was before the gold rush of 1980s fantasy movies aimed at younger audiences — Excalibur, Labyrinth, Willow — so Bakshi was, in essence, not just figuring out how to visualize Tolkien’s world but also how to make a film of this kind. That remains his Lord of the Rings’ most invigorating element: He seems energized by the blank canvas in front of him.

At this point, it’s probably worth mentioning that the movie isn’t especially good. The characters tend to be a little dull, and since Bakshi had to condense so much plot in just 133 minutes, everything seems rushed, like a CliffsNotes’ version of the story where you get the high points but not the emotional nuance. Jackson’s three-hour-plus pictures may have been bloated — my fear is that Hell consists of being permanently stuck in some of those scenes where Frodo is just walking endlessly — but you nonetheless feel like you’ve experienced something substantial. By comparison, the 1978 Lord of the Rings never gives you time to really invest in Frodo and his friends.

And yet, the film has a weird, mythic pull — it’s not quite amateurish, but there’s a charming innocence to what can be a fairly dark fable. What’s apparent in every frame is that Bakshi’s creative team was simply doing the best they could with the limited resources they had. And the results can be spectacular. Shooting live-action sequences and then rotoscoping them, he found a way to make the Orc army terrifying in a different way than Jackson did decades later. As opposed to the more traditionally animated Frodo, the Orcs feel savage and hyper-real, practically unholy in how they move. The imperfections of the rotoscoping technique are a huge strength, and even nearly 45 years later, there’s something deeply unsettling about these Orcs. Rendered today with modern technology, they might have looked “better,” but they wouldn’t have actually looked better. 

That freedom of experimentation is everywhere in this Lord of the Rings. Bakshi’s love of Rembrandt helped inspire the vivid backgrounds, making it seem that the characters were embedded inside gorgeous matte paintings. And in the creation of Gollum, Bakshi conceived a figure as hideous and pathetic as the one Andy Serkis would later cement into the public consciousness. One of animation’s enduring pluses is that it’s not beholden to the rules that govern live-action photography, and although CGI has greatly expanded the possibilities for the medium, nothing in Jackson and Serkis’ brilliant depiction can quite compare to the ugly, squiggly wretch that Bakshi’s team came up with. As with much of the 1978 film, Gollum is thinly developed as a villain, but he’s nonetheless a bit of nightmare fuel, a monster whose tragic devotion to the Ring has destroyed him.

The Lord of the Rings was meant to be the first of two installments, the kind of release strategy that’s commonplace today but back then was considered bizarre. The film ends with Gandalf the White emerging and the Orcs being defeated — and the tease of an exciting conclusion coming in the next film. But that finale never happened, which gives Bakshi’s film a weird poignancy: It’s infused with the promise of something that won’t ultimately materialize. That said, you can feel the movie’s DNA in the risky animated offerings that popped up in the 1980s, with everything from The Secret of NIMH to The Black Cauldron trying to be slightly grownup in their themes. And some of your favorite moments from the Jackson films are in this Lord of the Rings. (Even in a truncated form, Gandalf’s “You shall not pass” scene is pretty stirring.) 

But what’s most striking about Bakshi’s version is that it speaks to a bygone age in which Tolkien wasn’t yet big business — wasn’t some all-important piece of intellectual property. The 1978 Lord of the Rings comes from an era when hard rock bands and D&D nerds loved this stuff. There’s something proudly niche about the film — it’s uncool and unpolished in the best ways. Frodo and Sam’s bond doesn’t have enough time to really forge, and some of the series’ boldest sequences are in that sequel that didn’t get made. But much like our heroes, Bakshi’s film believes that there are brighter days ahead. They didn’t happen for Bakshi himself — Jackson got the glory — but the pioneering animator showed the world the potential of Middle-earth. All this time later, we’re still living there. 

Tim Grierson (@timgrierson) is the senior U.S. critic for Screen International. A frequent contributor to Vulture, Rolling Stone and the Los Angeles Times, he is the author of seven books, including his most recent, This Is How You Make a Movie.