The Lord of the Rings (1978)

Rating: 60%
Oh my gosh! only days left until The Hobbit! I really need to finish reviewing the animated films! So my doing that, here's my review for The Lord of the Rings.

Plot: In the second age of Middle-Earth, the Dark Lord Souron forged the One Ring to rule them all. But then Isildur cut off the ring from his finger and took it for himself. Over the years the ring passed into legend when Isildur lost it and then was eventually recovered by Gollum. Then Bilbo found the ring in Gollum's cave and took it as his own but 60 years later was forced to leave it behind by the wizard Gandalf. Gandalf then learned about the ring being Souron's ring, and so sent Bilbo's nephew, Frodo on a quest to find a way to destroy the ring.

Okay I'm going to do my best to talk about what's good about this film without just plain preaching that Jackson's version is better (even though it's beyond true). So what's good about it? Well firstly, there the plain fact that it was telling the story of the first two books for all intents and purposes. It may not take its time like Jackson's films, but I thought with going through Fellowship of the Ring especially, they can across pretty well with telling the story. Another good thing is that it has some dialogue and a couple of particular moments from the book that weren't in the live-action trilogy. And the design for pretty much everything Lord of the Rings were interesting to the point were they make this film a nice way to interpret or imagine J.R.R.Tokein's world differently. But then there's everything bad but mostly just mixed feelings with everything else. First example are the characters. Some of them are done well with cases like Frodo being a little more heroic, Boromir appearing more of a dear friend for the fellowship, and Aragorn looking a little more like him and his clan of rangers have gone downhill tremendously after their kingdom fell in my opinion. But at the same time, there's a lot of room for improvement for actually developing characters, mostly because some of these characters were close to not developed at all. I mean Legolas, Gimli, Merry and Pipin along with practically any main character from Rohan were hardly given any development. Most of them were just there to appear and say a couple of lines just for the sake of some loyalty to the books. Another example of things turning out mixed is the animation. You see some of the animation was specifically made were they used live-action footage that was then 'rotoscoped' to produce an animated look. This was made to save production money and to give characters a more realistic look. They were so confidant at this idea that they even publicly claimed that it was "the first movie painting" and that it was "an entirely new technique in filmmaking." So what it? In a way yes. I mean editing between shots of actual animation and this realistic looking take of animation could make mixed results with how different both type of animation are. But for all intents and purposes, the animation was well done. It wasn't as much of a ground breaker as the makers of the film seemed to think it was, but it was a really fun and a very fascinating take on animation as far as trying to take it to the next level. But when you get to some of the actual animation, I thought the movement of the characters was a little silly. But the main issue is the way they paced this movie. Now I still stand by what I said about them altogether doing a nice job at telling the story in the amount of time. But some scenes went a little too quick. The big example is when they got to The Two Towers pretty much everything went by really stupid fast. It was like they weren't really trying to do all the big stuff that happened during most of that book without really developing anything. In fact some thing were just introduced and never mentioned again. I don't know how people who haven't seen Jackson's films will interpret this film, but I'd like to believe that they'd have a problem with how they were trying to do so much stuff and leave some of it hanging.

And that's my review for The Lord of the Rings. It's a nice interpretation of the first two books as far as imagining Tolkein's brilliant world differently then what most of us are familiar with. But most of what they do with some of the animation, characters and pacing of some of the story just mixed things up that make it an okay film to watch, but - let's be honest - not even as close to as epic as what Jackson did.