Sometimes, it takes a very strange course of events to lead somebody towards literature or any other piece of art they appreciate. In my case, it all began in the mid-1980s, when I, like many of my classmates, got hold of my first home computer. Our parents believed that those new toys would help us study. They were, naturally, wrong. Instead of solving mathematical problems or taking an interest in technical studies, we spent months in front of TV screens playing video games. One of the most popular was The Hobbit, an adventure game based on J.R.R. Tolkien's novel. The Hobbit was a great intellectual challenge, and many of us borrowed the book from the school library only to get clues on how to solve the game. Sadly, there was no need for the book's sequel – the famed fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings. The game was never made, except for a parody called Bored of the Rings.
Despite that, I was actually intrigued when The Lord of the Rings was first aired on former Yugoslav television a couple of years later. That wasn't the first time I had ever seen an adaptation of Tolkien on the small screen – one of the children's theatres in Belgrade had their version of The Hobbit aired (with a baby-faced man trying to pass as Gandalf). I also saw segments of The Lord of the Rings in the form of a comic book. So, when I actually saw the film, I felt somewhat familiar with the material – a story about a few brave heroes, members of different mythical races, on a mission to stop the evil, all-powerful sorcerer from taking control of Middle-earth. Unfortunately, due to circumstances outside my control, I was forced to stop watching somewhere in the middle of the film. Luckily for me, I had to wait only a year before the rerun, and finally I saw the whole thing. But shortly after the closing credits I began to wonder: "Is that it? The first tale? There must be a sequel."
A year later, when I finally added three volumes of Tolkien's masterpiece to my collection, I began to understand why Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings ended the way it did. Seeing 1,200 pages of text, able to keep me preoccupied for weeks and months, I was again reminded of an old wisdom: "Great books make mediocre movies, and vice versa." This happens mostly because sometimes it is simply impossible to bring the rich content of hundreds or thousands of pages of a book into a hundred or fewer pages of script. Film-makers who try to capture a book's spirit on the screen usually fail, either by omitting too many important elements, or by stuffing in material and making the film an unwatchable bore (David Lynch's Dune could be a good example). Bakshi, although he somehow managed to condense the most important elements of The Hobbit into the first few minutes of the film, knew that he couldn't turn the entire Tolkien novel into a two-hour film, and was forced to use only the first two books – The Fellowship of the Ring and parts of The Two Towers.
Another problem that any film-maker ready to bring Tolkien to the big screen faces is the high cost. With today's CGI and special effects, Peter Jackson's plans to make a feature film version are not so far-fetched. Two decades ago, making an animated film seemed like the only alternative for producer Saul Zaentz. In doing so, he employed Ralph Bakshi, the maker of sometimes controversial animated films, responsible for bringing adult content and sensibilities to what had been, until that time, an almost entirely children's genre.
Bakshi's techniques in making this film are somewhat similar to those employed in his Wizards – a sci-fi/fantasy epic he had made a year earlier – a combination of animation with rotoscoped live footage. Here he used live actors and managed to combine them with drawn characters, perhaps in order to make the events of the books more dramatic. This backfired somewhat – unlike the Orcs, the human characters seem a little too unrealistic, and viewers are often forced to play a guessing game of "who is who". Another thing that might be a flaw is the amount of violence, especially bloodletting, which makes this film closer to Braveheart or Conan the Barbarian than family entertainment. On the other hand, Tolkien's original text, which was at times rather dark and adult, may also be responsible for that.
Anyway, although inferior to the book, The Lord of the Rings is quite interesting and a rather original attempt to bring a literary masterpiece to the big screen. Although it mostly failed as a standalone cinematic entertainment, it served its purpose by intriguing viewers enough to yearn for more Tolkien, both on the page and on the screen.
(NOTE: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.review on April 22nd 1998.)
