Ripping-Off the Ring

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all...

AND IN THE DARKNESS bind them. J.R.R. Tolkien could not have known when he wrote that verse that one day, The Ring, his ring, would lure thousands to the Darkness of a movie house, bind them with the fetters that a $4.00 admission fee lashes to its victims and force them to watch a cinematic travesty. He could not have known that his epic fantasy trilogy, The Lord of The Rings, would one day become a sloppy animated cartoon billed as the triumph of the imagination in movies. He could not have known...or he might not ever have written the books at all.

Before going any further, however, something must be made clear. I first read The Lord of The Rings when I was 10 and in the intervening 10 years I have read them seven or eight times. I am one who holds the Trilogy in a special place of esteem -- you might say I love these books. Not everyone feels this way about Lord of The Rings, but those who criticize the books for being a dull, silly tale or simply nothing special have always been an enigma to me. I simply could not understand why anyone could fail to be as enchanted by Tolkien's world as I was.

It took Ralph Bakshi, Chris Conkling and Peter S. Beagle (a Tolkien biographer) to show me what people who don't like Tolkien see when they read his books: A world of ludicrous little people, pedantic wizards and interminable sword and sorcery cliches. Conkling and Beagle have a great burden to bear for their treacherous adaptation of Tolkien's story, but the truly responsible party is Bakshi.

Lord of The Rings, perhaps more than any other popular work, exists not so much in print as in the imaginations of its readers. Tolkien's world is his world, with its own laws, peoples, history, and time.

But Tolkien leaves his world open to interpretation. He does not dictate the exact appearance of the Black Riders, or the Balrog; he leaves it to us to envision these horrible things in the depths of our own minds. Likewise, each individual has his own Gandalf, his own Frodo, his own Middle Earth.

Bakshi's animation fails largely because he tries to dictate all these things from his own vision an interpretation that is dauntingly shallow.

His Hobbits are cloying creatures made totally unreal by the jerky animation. His Black Riders with their red eyes and shuffling walks suggest the Jawas from Star Wars, not the nightmare spirits who scared me so badly on my first encounter with them at 10 that I put down the book for two years and hid under the covers for weeks afterwards. His Gandalf is a finger-wagging bore, his battle scenes endless parades of ill-defined masses moving back and forth across a painted landscape. His Orcs prompted one lady to say, "That one looks like Nixon!"

The greatest blow comes last, when one suddenly realizes that the voice-over at the end has calmly informed you that this is the first half of Frodo's journeys. In short, sucker, you paid all that money only to have to spend it again to see the sequel.

Well, I'm not planning on falling into that trap I'm not going to fund anyone who turns the Battle of Helm's Deep into nothing more than a Cowboys and Indians scene, complete with Gunsmoke music and Gandalf as John Wayne leading the rescue. Maybe that's all the book is, essentially, but Bakshi seems to exaggerate that which is formulaic and even trite in the books. Moreover, his animations are wooden and lazy -- groups of figures will stand without moving while a battle rages around them. The synch of the lips and sound falters and only for brief moments can you forget that this thing is a cartoon. Bakshi superimposes animation and live footage, washing the whole scene in psychedelic colors, negative images and painted color. Yet for all the apparent flash, Bakshi's imagination runs dry quickly and soon the characters, landscapes, and action repeat themselves.

BAKSHI AND COMPANY must be blatant since they do not reach below the surface of the books to convey what Tolkien was really writing about: The books succeed, despite admittedly two-dimensional characterization and large doses of sword fightin' and horse ridin', because Tolkien subtly leads you into his world and somehow makes you care about what goes on there, makes you afraid of the evil which threatens it, and involves you in the adventures as if you were there. Bakshi's world is merely a cartoon, somehow you can't get around that whether you know the books or not, as my companion who had never read them attested. Perhaps Bakshi asked for a leap of imagination that was too great for me to make -- Tolkien certainly asks for one that is too great for many. But there is a difference between Tolkien's subtle, literary appeal and Bakshi's visual ultimatum.

Certainly many will applaud this movie as a daring work. It was always there to be done, one supposes, and there are enough Tolkien freaks around who will plunk money down to see their dream come to life.

And why not? Perhaps because some dreams are better left alone lest they shatter at a touch and lose their magic in becoming real. This movie does just that to Tolkien. But that won't stop anyone from turning out the second half of Bakshi's tour de force. Once the Ring took control of its possessor, nothing could stop him from wanting more and more, even if the ultimate result was for the worst. Hollywood has the Ring now, and the business of perversion proceeds as Tolkien might have predicted. "...In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows Lie."