Movie · 1978 · Adventure, Animation, Fantasy · 2h 12m · PG · English
Curator score: 2.2/10 (86.1K ratings)
Fantasy...beyond your imagination.
Overview
Young Hobbit Frodo Baggins is thrown into an amazing adventure when he's tasked with destroying the One Ring, created by the dark lord Sauron. Frodo must travel in a small fellowship of nine warriors and accomplices. But it won't be an easy journey for the Fellowship of the Ring, on the ultimate quest to rid Middle-earth of evil.
Ratings
Curator score: 2.2/10
IMDb: 6.2/10
Letterboxd: 3.19/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 48%
Metacritic: 51
TMDB: 6.6/10
Director
Ralph Bakshi
Production
Fantasy Films, Bakshi Productions, Saul Zaentz Film Productions
Cast
Christopher Guard, William Squire, Michael Scholes, John Hurt, Simon Chandler, Dominic Guard, Michael Graham Cox, Anthony Daniels, David Buck, Norman Bird, Peter Woodthorpe, Fraser Kerr, Philip Stone, André Morell, Annette Crosbie, Michael Deacon, John Westbrook, Alan Tilvern, Billy Barty, Jerry Maren
Curator Review
Verdict
A fascinating, uneven fantasy adaptation with striking visual ideas, but also a rushed, fragmented narrative and some awkward rotoscoped movement. It’s more of a cult curiosity than a definitive Lord of the Rings experience.
Best for
Tolkien completists
animation historians
viewers curious about ambitious 1970s fantasy
fans of experimental rotoscoping and handmade visual style
Skip if
you want a fully coherent, polished epic
you’re expecting the later live-action trilogy’s scale and emotional clarity
you’re sensitive to uneven animation and abrupt storytelling
Overview
Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings is less a seamless epic than a bold, scrappy attempt to compress a monumental story into a single animated feature. The result is often fascinating: eerie, painterly, and occasionally genuinely uncanny, with a strong sense of mythic dread that suits Tolkien’s world well.
Worth noting
At the same time, the film is clearly fighting its own limitations. The pacing is compressed, the transitions can feel abrupt, and the rotoscoping gives some scenes a stiff, uncanny quality that will either intrigue you or pull you out of the movie entirely. It has the feeling of a production that is always reaching beyond what it can fully control.
Bottom line
If you’re interested in fantasy cinema as a history of experiments and compromises, this is worth a look. If you want the story to land with emotional sweep and narrative confidence, this version is likely to feel more like an artifact than a satisfying standalone adventure.
Top Letterboxd reviews
🌻 lindsay 🌻 (3★) · 879 likes
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the animation style in this actually. EXCEPT for Sam’s character design 😭 Bakshi really said this man will be ugly 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
kotryna (2★) · 755 likes
not gay enough
Justin Peterson (3.5★) · 440 likes
In a post Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings Trilogy world, this basically feels like the animated CliffsNotes for 'The Fellowship of the Ring' and 'The Two Towers'.
(I hope now that we have reached 2020, that CliffsNotes has not become a dated reference for students in literature class.)
"So all you had to do was say friend ... and enter ... Those were happier times..."
I fondly remember discovering this little gem at a Blockbuster on New Year's Eve… more
Tim Brzakala (2★) · 429 likes
They do Sam dirty in this mother fucker.
DANIEL (4★) · 284 likes
yo, this shit fucks! this shit bangs, and bangs hard. I’m talking rock hard veiny throbbing free skin orc-dick powerfuck fucks. I’m talking ivory pillar elf dick stem fucks, I’m talking wizard staff, spears and halberds thrown, rotoscoping magic fuckin exploding nightmare balrog jizz fucks. Peter Jackson might have made some streamlined classics, but he didn’t make borderline smut like this shit. fucking rock me shock me nazgul me, baby! rock and roll! rock and fucking roll!