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Roots and Beginnings: The Lord of the Rings (dir. Ralph Bakshi)
Look, you and I both know everything wrong with outlaw animator Ralph Bakshi’s star-crossed adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: off-model character designs (Aragorn’s miniskirt, Boromir the Hollywood Viking), shaky pronunciations (“Aruman”?), a general tendency to be incomprehensible unless you let your preexisting knowledge of the books do all the work, a seeming underexposure of every frame that makes the opening sequence of The Godfather look like something you need to put on sunglasses to view, the fact that it’s really just an adaptation of approximately 2/3 of The Lord of the Rings at all. But man oh man, did Bakshi nail the horror parts. There are a lot of those in The Lord of the Rings, after all – there’s a reason that the orcs and Sauron became an even more pervasive template for all fantasy to follow than the heroes did, with the possible exception of Gandalf – and Bakshi’s uncanny rotoscoping, black-psychedelic skies, and truly menacing voice work and foley art give the whole film the feel of something you should watch on a rainy late-October afternoon to get in the mood for Halloween. The Witch-king whipping his head around the moment Frodo puts the Ring on, the skin-crawling whispers of “COME BACK, COME BACK, TO MORDOR WE’LL TAKE YOU,” the leering fanged faces of the orcs – these are terrifically nightmarish sounds and visions. And if the movie they came from was just a consolation prize for a Tolkien-loving kid who wouldn’t really get the feature-film payoff he was looking for until the turn of the millennium, the nightmare was a sufficient appetizer for that eventual dream.