Producer tackles hazards of hobbits, orcs, and elves

Press, 28 August 1978, Page 22

Producer tackles hazards of hobbits, orcs, and elves

By

ALJEAN HARMETZ,

of the "New York Times, (through NZPA).

Los Angeles It is not easy to create the third age of Middle Earth in Los Angeles in August. The configurations and the dangers are different. In Middle Earth, the mountains of the south are heavy with unseasonable snow. Climbing upward, the hobbits shiver. The wargs have come west of the mountains, and. with them have come the orcs on the prowl. “Run you bastards, run." Ralph Bakshi shouts to the orcs he has created on 75,000 clear plastic cells.

Bakshi has been a traveller in Middle Earth for 22 years now and has lived there more or less permanently for the last three. On November 15, his S6M animated version of the first half of the late J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” will open in 20 cities, including New York. For the moment, on four floors of a Los Angeles office building. Middle Earth is a world in transit — from Tolkien's words to Bakshi’s 250,000 separate images.

He has designed every foot of the film. More than 150 artists do the actual animating. Two hundred housewives with steady hands do the routine work of painting the images on to cells. In the background room, a surrealist painter gives indications of Mordor — the centre of evil — on thick, durable paper called illustration board.

“My Mordor is,” Bakshi said, “very much like Auschwitz. It’s ashes. It’s cold. It smells of the decay of humanity. The dead die and stay unburied.”

In contrast, Rivendell, haven of the elves, is “rich old wood, very Victorian. turn-of-the-century Vienna.” Rivendell is air-

brushed and glows with magic, and the Shire, home of the hobbits, is tinted with earth colours and gives the illusion of being hand carved. He fell in love with Middle Earth, Bakshi says, in 1956, when he was 19 years old and his real world was the old-time neighbourhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn: "Tolkien has created, for me, a perfect other world of brilliance. beauty, and strength.” He got out of Brownsville. At 26, he was the head of C.B.S. Terrytoons. His first feature, “Fritz the Cat,” was also Hollywood’s first X-rated cartoon. He followed it with “Heavy Traffic,” “Coon Skin,” and “Wizards.” Now he worries — a thick, thrusting, heavyset man with a Brooklyn accent who is the creator of three deliberately crude and vulgar cartoons — “If I have kept Tolkien’s vision, if I have brought as much love to this project as I possibly could.” “ ‘The Lord of the Rings’, ” he said, “is not a comic book. It is totally realistic. But it wouldn’t be believable either in live action or as a standard cartoon.”

Walt Disney. Stanley Kubrick, and John Boorman all tried and failed to find a medium that would translate the words of Tolkien’s mythology into images. In autumn, 1976, Bakshi was 24 hours away from losing his chance to try: “I had an agreement with M.G.M., but I proposed a form that M.G.M. didn’t understand, a new technique — first shooting a whole live-action film as a guide and then change it scene by scene into animation.

The studio backed out of its agreement. Bakshi could keep the rights to “The Lord of the Rings” if he came up with another backer to cover .$600,000 that United Artists, distributor of M.G.M. films.

had previously spent in development costs. If not, the rights would revert to M.G.M. the next day.

With the help of a fel-low-producer, Saul Zaentz, "The Lord of the Rings” was taken away from M.G.M. and became a totally independent production for United Artsts’ release. ’We finance and deliver the picture,” Zaentz said. "Ralph has final cut. United Artists just gets a distribution fee. That makes the gamble considerably greater and the possible rewards considerably greater.”

When he agreed to bankroll “The Lord of the Rings,” Zaentz had no idea how large or small his investment would be: "One couldn’t even guess how much it would cost to film live-action battle scenes with thousands of people.” Bakshi’s philosophy was: “Animation needs money. It is a medium where the more money you pour in, the more return you get.”

The live version of the movie began shooting on the plains of Spain a year ago. One hundred and ten mounted riders of Rohan defended Helm’s Deep from 800 orcs, and the Council of Rivendell laid on a single hobbit, named Frodo, the burden of “Ringbearer.” It cost S2M to create the film that is now being replaced — literally frame ’by frame — with animation. The 164 artists Bakshi trained for the film are painters rather than animators: “I put my advertisements in ‘American Artist’ and the ‘Soho Weekly News.’ I choose people who would otherwise have gone into painting on canvas.” Yet translating live action to animation is, in some ways, almost impossible. “What about a thousand animated bodies? If a character walks and talks well, can he ride a horse

and eat realistically’? If one character rides a horse well, can nine of them? Normally, in animation, you have only two or three characters together. There are nine characters in ‘The Fellowship of the Ring,’ all moving together. “It is unfair that once something was solved in live action, it didn’t stay solved in animation. How could I make nine animated characters move together? Certain colours translate to animation. Others don’t. The live actors move at a certain speed. That speed may be too fast or too slow for the animated characters they represent. What happens to characters when they go behind other characters? A reaction on Aragorn’s face in live action wouldn’t work for animation.”

It is Aragorn, the king with a broken sword, who concerns Bakshi the most. “With every other character, I had certain licence. The hobbits are short and furry. Gandalf is a wizard with a white beard. Gollum is so totally obsessed with the Ring of Power that he’s easy to draw. Dwarfs and elves do not exist where we can observe them, but, with Aragorn, I had no licence. If Aragorn didn’t move reali s t i c a 1 Iy, with weight, if he wasn’t a man on the screen, the picture wouldn’t work. If he isn’t real, no-one is real.”