Best movie ever!

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

One word - awful. The terrible animation ,wooden voice acting and cheap feel make this movie one of the worst of all time. Bakshi the dolt should have finished what he started. Even now it wold still be nice to finish it, with modern technology could give it a nice send-off. Rankin Bass- home of the syrupy sweet kiddie holiday stop motion garbage should have never been given the rights to do this movie. What were they thinking ,and look at how bad the characters are animated - Pippin looks like a hot dog and Gandalf looks much worse then he should. Oh well,total bomb. Hear that Bakshi , you left a lot of fans disappointed ,you owe it to em to finish it your way.

I would like to preface this review by saying that this disaster of a movie is not just awful by comparison to the Peter Jackson CGI epic made decades later, but is indeed awful in its own right. In fact, I am a big fan of the cartoon masterpiece that was the rendering of "The Hobbit," this movie's much more worthy prequel. However, this movie falls under its own merits without the need for comparison.The script, to begin with, is a twisted cluster of overlapping narratives layered so deeply that it becomes impossible to decide if it is the minstrel, or Gandalf, or Frodo or Samwise who is telling each scene. From moment to moment, the narration tells the story rather than letting the film itself provide its own visual rendering. It feels as though the writers had the need to tell everything as it happens, much like a small child narrating his actions as he plays "kitchen," calling out "stir, stir, stir" to ensure nobody mistakes his pretend hand gestures for another kitchen task. But the overwrought narrative is far from necessary, as anyone who saw "The Hobbit" can tell you, visuals and dialog could be more than enough to tell the story on its own, though you would never know it given the distrust the script has for the viewer's ability to figure anything out without direct explanation. Now, I understand that cutting a many-hundred page novel down to an hour-and-a-half cartoon is rough going for any writer, but the bungled job of pacing created by the need to explain even the fact that the characters are walking makes the movie feel like nothing that deserves time receives it and everything that doesn't is overwhelmed by it. It's almost as if the movie doesn't want to be watched, but rather, be an audio book with supplementary visuals.The voice acting is painful at its best, though I can't completely fault the players given the lousy script. Hyper-severity of tone and lack of intentional comic relief make the movie exhausting to watch. Though it is always worth a laugh to listen to marching orcs sing the disco in a round "Where There's a Whip, There's a Way," the bizarre juxtaposition with a more classical movie score and the folksy vibrato of Glenn Yarborough just contribute to a sense of sonic chaos. Even thematically this movie gets everything wrong. The strange efforts to humanize the orcs simply confounds the epic sense of confrontation between good and evil crafted by Tolkien in his novels.This movie is awful, one of the worst ever made. If you're hankering for a cartoon venture into J.R.R. Tolkien's masterpiece, go back and watch "The Hobbit," because this movie is guaranteed to disappoint.

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.

When Rankin and Bass unveiled their version of Tolkien's "The Hobbit" in 1977, it was a charming if abbreviated made-for-television animated film that was fun and even a bit scary. Their voice casting choices were fine, especially Richard Boone, whose cancer-rasped voice brought the dragon Smaug to life, and Theodore as the creepy and loathsome Gollum, who evoked fear and disgust but little pity. In 1978, Ralph Bakshi attempted to bring the first half of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy to the big screen in his lushly animated epic. Unfortunately, his big-budget film flopped, much to the disappointment of Tolkien's fans, and Bakshi would be unable to make his sequel. In an effort to finish off the unfinished series, Rankin and Bass tried to make their own version to satisfy the audience who wanted to see closure. It was and remains an unmitigated disaster.Why is this cartoon so awful? Well, the answer lies mainly in the word "cartoon". Unlike The Hobbit, which featured beautifully painted scenery that evoked delicate watercolors and ethereal linework, which had so evidently been crafted with loving care and cast with thought to matching characters to actors, The Return of the King had all the earmarks of having been hastily cobbled together. It wasn't so much an animated homage to a great writer's work as a hatchet job. A huge chunk of the events in Tolkien's books were missing between where Bakshi's fairly faithful rendition ended and this abomination began. The drawings were slapped together and were often repetitious and ugly. Voice actors from the first film returned and some of them worked: Orson Bean was fine as Frodo, Theodore was again great as Gollum, Theodore Bikel did a fine job as Aragorn, and Roddy McDowall was wonderful as Samwise Gamgee. The rest were abysmal. Instead of hiring actors to do the characters, cartoon voice actors such as Don Messick (Scooby-Doo) and Casey Kasem (Shaggy) were cast. It was downright painful to hear a Nazgull being done by Scooby Doo through a distortion filter. Many characters integral to Tolkien's story were cast away: Where was Gimli? Faromir? Any of the elves (other than Elrond) such as Legolas or Glorfindel? How about the Army of the Dead or Sauroman? Merry and Pippin didn't develop as characters; Gollum remained merely vile, as if Bakshi's attempts to show this tortured being's strangely noble and pathetic side never happened. The dialog was stilted and sometimes unintentionally hilarious ("As the flag's standard broke the wind. . ."). It was awful beneath description from beginning to end, appearing to be a shameless attempt to cash in on the hopes of frustrated fans who'd wanted the second animated movie made.That, of course, was the entire problem. This cartoon was, despite its trappings and claims, just a cartoon, less charming by far than The Hobbit and far less noble than Bakshi's film. Both of those were honest attempts at creating art, and each succeeded in its limited way until swept aside by Peter Jackson, who finally gave Tolkien's opus the treatment it deserved. The two earlier films merit a place of honor for trying to achieve cinematic beauty. Rankin and Bass's The Return of the King deserves to simply be forgotten.