cult film freak: RALPH BAKSHI'S ANIMATED APOCALYPTIC-FANTASY 'WIZARDS'

Title: WIZARDS Year: 1977 Rating: ****

Animation director Ralph Bakshi's infamously rushed/ill-conceived LORD OF THE RINGS, combining the then-new Rotoscoping process of animating actual people/objects without seeming entirely animated, began with WIZARDS where that bizarre, half-baked process eventually makes sense...

Not centered on an already famous source like J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth trilogy, WIZARDS (liken to Terry Brooks's SWORD OF SHANNARA) is set in the post-apocalyptic future where, instead of the usual barren scorched landscape, everything's gone back to the dreamy world of wizards, elves, fairies...

From Ralph Bakshi's WIZARDS

And one scene-stealing humanoid-robot that opens the movie's rudimentary action, named Necron 99, who, a hybrid of Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns and future EMPIRE STRIKES BACK bounty hunter Boba Fett, steals the picture by being cool and violent in an animated-feature seemingly geared for comic-book-obsessed teens...

But Bakshi also made WIZARDS for children, so the red-armored, yellow-eyed, creature-riding, gun-toting assassin only shines sporadically... while mostly centering on an old wacky wizard named Avatar, who resembles Robert Crumb's Mr. B. Natural doing a Peter Falk/Columbo imitation (including the "one more thing" line), and, with a breezy, sarcastic attitude, seems more befitting the head-shop 1960's than a sleek-futuristic 3000's...

Rotoscoped War Footage in Ralph Bakshi's WIZARDS

Yet most of WIZARDS concerns 1940's war-time-Germany as Avatar's Saruman-looking brother wizard Blackwolf has unearthed Nazi propaganda for his frog-like mutants to rise-and-conquer based on nostalgic Fascism... so the climactic battle is an epic cartoon vs live-action war-footage that actually works since, unlike LORD OF THE RINGS, the fantasy element's literally battling modern technology...

Although the best sequences are fully-animated... herein sometimes resembling an innocuous children's cartoon, so outright flowery and colorful it could be geared to girls over boys (foreshadowing MY LITTLE PONY), intentionally clashing with Bakshi's vibrant adult-themed/sexually-driven HEAVY TRAFFIC artwork, plush watercolor backdrops, narrated hand-drawn storyboards or immense dark fortress/castles, ominously framing a bright fantasy world with perpetually encroaching darkness...

From Ralph Bakshi's WIZARDS (voiced by Robert Romanus)

Meanwhile, Avatar and two sidekicks... a young idealistic elf warrior (voiced by Robert Romanus) and a gorgeous full-breasted faerie pinup... embark on a HOBBIT-like journey that includes rambling pathways, dark mysterious caverns, giant spiders, magical forests and some terrific swordplay... that should have taken up more of what's mostly an anachronistic politically-themed presentation than the action-packed, location-to-location fantasy/adventure built into the promotion and title...

Which is still involving and visually mesmerizing... especially since that rudimentary assassin Necron (re-programmed and renamed Peace) hangs around longer than expected: he just needed to be more formidable for much longer because, let's face it, Hitler and his Nazis are pretty much (especially by the year 3000) old news.