Ralph Bakshi adapts J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as an animated feature film. Co-scripted by Peter S. Beagle, only about half of the three novels are actually covered; from the forming of a fellowship to help Frodo Baggins destroy the Ring of Power to the siege at Helm’s Deep. And this leads to a rather awkward non-conclusion in which the story ends abruptly. The animation is also quite poor, combining rotoscoping with cel drawn animation; creating a bizarre style that’s incredibly distracting. Additionally, the coloring is extremely dark and drab, using a lot of browns and grays. Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings is an interesting attempt to bring Tolkien’s work to the big screen, but it ultimately doesn’t work.

Fan of Bakshi's style? You'll appreciate this version. If you're looking for the superior telling of Tolkien's story, though... this ain't it. Personally, I'm down with both Bakshi's and Jackson's versions, but that's because I grew up on Bakshi's films and appreciate his animation style. While this version is highly condensed and an incomplete telling of the story, I think it still does an admirable job of remaining faithful to the books.

This is an "interesting" version of LOTR, in that it is mainly animated, but uses rotoscoping for live action & is part of the history of putting Tolkien on the screen. The adaptation is incomplete; it ends after the Battle of Helm's Deep in the 2nd book of the trilogy; the story to that point is greatly compressed, even given its running time of 2+ hours. Bakshi's style is not for all and actually can be quite hard to watch, even if like me, you are a fan both of animation and Tolkien. The result is best described as a curio; a brave venture, but ultimately doomed by its shortcomings and so an unsatisfactory failure.

How do you make a 2-1/2 hour version of a book series that only covers roughly half the books feel longer than 12 hours of a live action adaption? If you want to learn the answer to that question, watch this.

Basically the whole *Lord of the Rings* trilogy crammed into a 2h13 animated movie. It really begs the question: why am I watching this when I could just watch the infinitely better version? It's better than what I expected going in though, the characterizations are decent and I was engaged with it most of the time. It's so rushed though and it doesn't take it's time with any of the events that happen. The animation is very similar to the one it *The Hobbit* who was done just a year before. Whenever there's an action sequence though, the animation really drops... it looks like they used real actors to play the scenes and then added a Snapchat filter over it to make it look like animation. Really horrible and it ruined most of the action for me. The Balrog was laughable, Gollum looks more like himself compared to the frog version in *The Hobbit*, and Gandalf is a badass as usual. Decent score and voice acting. Final battle was pretty cool if you can tolerate the animation.