fearfulofspiders
The Hobbit gave a brief glimpse at what could be expected for this version of The Return of the King. What it really is, is one of the worst adaptations laid upon one's eyes. Absolutely dreadful.The thing's that lost me were the asides made by some of the characters, especially the vision Sam has with and without the Ring -- he has a vision of playing with the Orcs in a merrier time than the current predicaments at hand... dear me, seriously?! Also, the time-line of this film is ALL OVER THE PLACE. Frodo's capturing is so rushed, that they had to reduce it to a few lines of dialogue voiced by Sam. The dialogue itself is cringe-worthy. For an example of complete over the top lines would be "Eowyn am I" or "You lost the very finger upon which it rode?!" As much as it is an interesting idea to use the events of the War of the Ring in flashback, its execution literally is execution. It's terrible the way they utilized the story into such a lackluster and unfaithful version of Tolkien's tale.The acting is wretched. Credit which can go to the screenplay.The music... makes one want to put a gun to their ear. It's completely sleep-inducing.Overall, this is one terrible adaptation. Rivaling the equivalent of what the Sci-Fi Channel would've done had they adapted The Return of the King into an animated feature, Rankin Bass's version is one many people wish they could get out of their heads. This is one HUGE disappointment.
natt-2
I will ignore the obviously superior films by Peter Jackson when evaluating this low-budget cartoon.So ... I think that the team behind this had a success with The Hobbit, even though the animation was horrible. Orcs do not look like toads, Elrond does not have a goatie and stars around his head, gollum does not look like a fish etc. (even if it got worse here when the skeletor-nazguls showed up) Still, The Hobbit (1977) worked in my mind (I gave it an 8 vote here), Glenn's songs were great there, the voices were very good, the story was a children's story, my 4-yr old girl loves it (I saw it for the first time just a month ago). So, The Hobbit was great.How can this fail so miserably? Of course, the whole idea of omitting almost everything in The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers does not work very well. Who is this Aragorn dude who is made king? We feel nothing for him. Galadriel? Whatever. Theoden? Some guy who falls from a horse and dies. He should have had a better horse. Eowyn? Some random girl who gets lucky.Glenn's songs are also worse in this one, including only two numbers I really liked (Frodo of Nine Fingers and Where there's a whip). The folksongs seems much better suited to the children story in The Hobbit.I gave this a 4 ... only because it is still Tolkien somewhere there in the background. It is still the battle of Pelennor fields (and they don't show it just like dots as they did in the battle of five armies). Perhaps I am being too kind to the film.And whoever decided to make Sam a Christian? That was just plain weird.Having said that, the film works best when it deviates from the original story, as with the singing orcs and the dream sequence with the waving orcs or when Sam conquers Mordor.This film is only for the die-hard Tolkien fanatics who just have to see it. I don't think I will even show it to my daughter.
pirate1_power
It was the first time that Rankin/Bass had dared to take on a two-hour special. But, having plunged into Tolkien's Middle-earth once before, it was a challenge they could pull off with the expertise R/B fans had always expected of them. Hence, The Return of the King: A Story of the Hobbits, to give the film its full title.One wonders, I'm sure, what inspired Romeo Muller to change Bilbo's age from "eleventy-one," as Tolkien wrote the number, to one hundred and twenty-nine. Still, it was a thrill having most of "The Hobbit"'s vocal contributors back: Orson Bean, John Huston, Theodore, Paul Frees, Don Messick, Glenn Yarbrough --- and adding Casey Kasem, Theodore Bikel and Sonny Melendrez to the mix, too --- to take us on the journey that Ralph Bakshi should have finished, but didn't.Many are the tales told about how Bakshi was only given enough financing to see us through most of The Fellowship of the Ring and approximately the first half of The Two Towers. When it became apparent, though, that the second Bakshi Ring movie would never come to pass, that made it possible for the folks at Rankin/Bass to seize a golden opportunity. And this they did, as we know by now, with a vengeance. Playing the story straight, as they did with "The Hobbit," the R/B team set out to take all the best elements from Return of the King and begin the film in flashback, with Bilbo's 129th birthday party, as he, Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Gandalf and Elrond look back at the good times and excellent adventures that culminated in the end of the Third Age of Middle-earth ..... and with it, in Gandalf's words, "the beginning of the New Age of Man." Again, as I did with Peter Jackson's version, I will dispense with a plot synopsis, assuming that you are already familiar with the legend without having to hear me tell it to you. Among the several strange moments that one does not notice about Rankin/Bass' Return of the King occurs during the sequence in which Gollum battles Frodo for control of the One Ring of Power. In a move considered unprecedented at the time of its original showing, Rankin/Bass decided to depict this climactic showdown graphically. The closeup of Frodo's just bitten hand shaking as though it were an earthquake monitor was, for its time, the most horrifying scene R/B's animators had ever attempted. To this day, one shudders in surprise that this scene was even cleared by ABC's censors! In place of Tolkien's original songs, Maury Laws and Jules Bass save the day again (assisted partially by Bernard Hoffer, who would later write the score cues and theme songs for R/B's classic 80s series, Thundercats, Silverhawks and The Comic Strip). "It's So Easy Not to Try," "Small Things," "Retreat!", "Where There's a Whip, There's a Way" and "The Ballad of Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom" are all singable, they help the story along (indeed, in the case of "Where There's a Whip, There's a Way," it has the proverbial great beat you can dance to --- or, one presumes, torture your enemies with!) .... and they're songs you can believe in! But no one sequence in the film is as deeply powerful visually as Aragorn's Coronation Procession, set to the film's title song. Here's something you didn't know: For one short panning scene, the animators went to Jerusalem, where they shot live-action footage of people cheering. The footage was then studied and brilliantly rotoscoped, so that it actually looks like there are citizens of Minas Tirith cheering on the coming of their King! Once again, we see that the Rankin/Bass team were second to none in their constant efforts to share with their audiences adventures unlike anything they had previously experienced. And because they were the only production entity that had pioneered the "dramatic animated television special," they could take this type of story and put it into the context that was its rightful due.This, then, was the power behind The Return of the King --- a simple, straightforward saga that would not bow to the attitudes of so-called sensationalism, but would nevertheless be the only Tolkien adventure that one could truly believe in.And then, as the world knows by now, came a man named Peter Jackson. But that, again as they say, is another story.........
