Talking Big

As a young child, this film was my introduction to the world of JRR Tolkien. Some of the shots terrified me. Truly. Here are some snippets of Ralph Bakshi talking about his film in 1978.

“The question then comes up that if you’re not going to be cartoony, why animate? I think it’s the same reason Howard Pyle illustrated. Why illustrate? Why not just take a photograph? The reason is that there is an energy there and that’s important.”

“In THE LORD OF THE RINGS, it is the traditional method of rotoscoping but the approach is untraditional. It’s a rotoscope realism unlike anything that’s been seen. It really is a unique thing for animation. The number of characters moving in a scene is staggering. In THE LORD OF THE RINGS, you have hundreds of people in the scene. We have cells with a thousand people on them. It was so complex sometimes we’d only get one cell a week from an artist. It turned out that the simple shots were the ones that only had four people in them.”

“No contemporary illustrators inspired me on this film. The major influence was guys like Pyle and Wyeth. It’s very classical. Actually, the film is a clash of a lot of styles like in all my films. I like moody backgrounds. I like drama. I like a lot of saturated color.”