The Lord of the Rings

Surprisingly, many of the more striking images in director Ralph Bakshi's truncated animated adaptation of JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings revolve around horseback riding, be that our fellowship heroes galloping up an incline while a street artist's spray painted depiction of space swirls in the background or the Ringwraiths cantering in a turbulent, crackling void. In both described instances it's really the backgrounds that sing; tableaux that pulse with cosmic energies that contrast rather alarmingly with the simplicity applied to the majority of the film's characters. In the main, our mix of wizards and warriors are pointedly plain in their rendering, their figures lacking any of the detail you might expect from a piece striving to establish a lived-in setting. At least initially, this cartoonish plasticity works somewhat well in contrast to the enemies our heroes face, who are much more obviously only lightly dressed live action elements. Whereas the movements of Frodo and his friends are the product of the kind of frame-by-frame tracing that Disney's animators employed when arranging their dancing princesses, the massing Orcs seen here are only partially sketched over. This key difference in conceptual execution suggestive of a kind of hierarchical approach to character design, with good guys given the full painted treatment while their slathering opponents are, very obviously, presented as (literal) intruders in this land. Sadly this spell does not last. Once the scale of human movement increases to include armies on horseback the techniques used to illustrate Mordor's massing forces are again employed, regardless of the change in alignment. An approach that belies any creative intent more serious or complicated than simple budget management.