Bakshi v PJ A Contest of Scripts

I so agree with you Halfwise. the Bakshi version is really ugg-bugg ugly.

Not so ugly that PJ didnt steal whole visual cues from it- Bilbos party, the Black Rider scene, the Gates and the inn of Bree, the Ford ect.

I think the Black rider scene was taking from a drawing by John Howe, probably by both film versions.

Howe nicked it from Bakshi- according to his website:

'This painting was inspired by the Bakshi movie, where the Hobbits cower under a tree root as the Black Rider seeks them. I thought it was the best scene in the movie, and it must have trod a path in my subconscious, as it certainly is nowhere to be found in the Fellowship of the Ring.'

I'll be derned.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:Not so ugly that PJ didnt steal whole visual cues from it- Bilbos party, the Black Rider scene, the Gates and the inn of Bree, the Ford ect.

Bakshi had a couple of nice shots (and yes, PJ borrowed them) but the difference is that PJ's version doesn't look like it was animated by a coke-addict who then vomited over the finished print.

No but the script does!

Nice one Eldo. and PJ doesnt make Sam look like a pervert. or Elrond look like Charles Bronson.

Given that Sam looks remarkably like an uncle of mine (and no thats not a joke) I never saw him as looking like a pervert Mrs Figg.

I've decided to exercise massive restraint and not touch that.

I remember making a snide remark about Sam looking like a sexual predator and getting that same response. No offense meant to your uncle, Petty. I do find their choice for how to draw Sam rather bizarre though, given how different he is from the style of the other Hobbits.

EDIT: Apparently I don't have as much restraint as Halfwise.

I am not mentioning it as a defense of the animation style- huge swathes of which I dont like any more than anyone else here- merely as an explanation for why I never saw Sam in such a light. My uncle is a very nice man, he even smokes a pipe. With weed (a habit he picked up in Palestine in WW2, what with there being no alcohol available there)

I get where you're coming from; I just felt a little bad. I try not to judge people based on appearance but, well, there are a few characters in the animated LOTR that I just don't get. Grinch-Gollum and Native American Aragorn are others.

I always thought PJ's Smeagol was not a million miles away from Bakshi's- and its million times better than an awful lot of previous depictions of Smeagol in illustrations.







In fact I would go as far to say that there is a noticable similarity between Bakshi's and PJ's Gollum, which I suspect was even greater before they made the decision to just use Serkis's own face as the template.

Bakshi's Gollum is light-years ahead of the Rankin-Bass version but I haven't been able to shake the Grinch resemblance since it was first pointed out to me.

And yeah, PJ's Gollum looked pretty weird until they decided to go full Serkis.

I'll give you native American Aragorn though- I can only guess it was an attempt to give the impression he was a great tracker and outdoorsman in a visual manner- but I love John Hurts voicing of Aragorn so swings and roundabouts for me on that one.

It's been a while since I've seen it all the way through but IMO the voice acting is a bit of a mixed bag. Definitely better than Rankin/Bass ROTK though. That's the one that stands out in my memory for the horrible voices ("Where There's a Whip There's a Way" notwithstanding).

Couldnt find it an Aragorn clip on youtube but this review comments on the voices- Aragorns first- jump to 2.40ish for it.

poor Boromir, with that horny hat. and Galadriel, a poor mans Jessica Rabbit.

Yeah the vicking style hat is very stupid no getting round that and Galadriel is a bit blue in the mirror scene (i guess to make her seem otherwordly but its still better than PJ's mad light show thing she does rght in the middle of her beautiful speech, I hate that. )
And Galadriel is voiced by the wonderful Annette Crosby -

And again with Boromir the look is awful but the voice casting I really like, its the same Boromir has did the BBC radio version, Michael Graham Cox, a classic Shakespear stage actor-

.

Sorry, that didn't sound like Aragorn to me at all. Nowhere close, actually.

Somehow the visuals in that review don't seem as bad as some other things I've seen, so many others are horrid. In contrast to the reviewer I actually prefer the look of the rotoscoping to the traditional animation, which to me is just way too off and goofy looking.

Some of the rotoscoping is decent, but some of it is godawful! And mixing the styles randomly is unbelievably jarring visually, especially on the big screen. When I saw it when it first came out, most of the audience had walked out by the first 20 minutes. As I remember it, only about half a dozen of us hardcore Tolkien fans stayed all the way through, (and that was mostly because we were paralyzed. )

I've watched it since on the small screen several times. It's safer that way. I'm prepared to give RB credit for trying, but I also know that he is a good enough animator to know when he's putting out a halfassed product, and this was definitely that.

I agree completely about the rotoscoping David- if it was at the least consitent- but sometimes its done well, sometimes appalingly, and sometimes characters are for 90% of the film traditionally animated and then for no apparent reason are rotoscoped for a scene.

If you compare the standard in it to say Fire and Ice, another Bakshi fantasy film which uses rotoscoping its not anywhere near as high a standard-

I cant get past the ugly characters and the rotoscoping stuff. All my attention is focused on the hideousness and I forget to listen.