Lord of rings movies in order movie#

The Hobbit and The Return of the King are visually consistent, Rankin/Bass having used the same crew for both films. The Hobbit is easily the best of the trilogy, and remains (until next year) the only film that shows TolkienвЂ™s first novel in its entirety. and Jules Bass, adapted for television three years before The Return of the King. I next watched The Hobbit, also by Alan Rankin Jr.

Lord of rings movies in order movie#

Regardless if you thought the movie was faithful to the book or not, I think seeing Middle-earth come to animated life that young would spark anyoneвЂ™s imagination. Incidentally, I share BilboвЂ™s love for maps, and had I watched RotK as a kid, I wouldвЂ™ve rewound those map and village scenes over and over, just to study the lines and trails. Those moments actually stood out to me: it was like watching living storyboards to the live-action movies. RotK stretches its limited animation to pad out the run time, like using extra-long establishing shots of villages and Minas Tirith, or scenes of hands gliding over motionless strategic maps of Middle-earth. The only significant addition in this RotK is a scene where Samwise is tempted by the Ring, a moment that further sharpened the corruptive nature of SauronвЂ™s jewelry. I had to use my adult memory of the Peter Jackson films as a shorthand to decipher the action and characters in this RotK. Trying to recreate the вЂ™80s watching experience was a failure then. Frodo, Sam, Aragorn and the rest are locked on a rail, pushed mechanically towards the resolution, just so it could finally be said that Tolkien had been adapted for the screen. Rankin/Bass were concluding a story they had no part of before, and with all the events of Return of the King having already been set previously in motion, they didnвЂ™t even get their own chance to properly introduce the characters. So Rankin and Bass needed to tone down everything Bakshi made too dark for television, and with less money and less time than he had. Exciting but not super scary adaptations, with a helluva lot of Glenn Yarbrough on the soundtrack. The Rankin/Bass modus operandi is to make movies for kids. Bakshi covered The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers novels, and the movie he put out was violent, weird, and scary. Rankin and Bass were tasked with the unenviable job of following up on Ralph BakshiвЂ™s The Lord of the Rings, which had come out in theaters a year earlier in 1979. and Jules Bass (their powers combined, they are Rankin/Bass Productions, most famous for their stop-motion Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer specials). This TV-movie was directed by Alan Rankin Jr.

And find the rest completely incomprehensible. Were I still the naive вЂ™80s child and had just saw The Return of the King, IвЂ™d guess IвЂ™d have been delighted by the movieвЂ™s color and animation. And certainly no idea that halfway around the world, a teenage Peter Jackson, who had by now seen the animated trilogy, was getting an idea, that maybe itвЂ™d be up to him to tell TolkienвЂ™s tale on-screen better than this. Inured on arcades and football, I have no concept that the cartoon is the conclusion to a larger story. So letвЂ™s say we are all very young again and there is The Return of the King playing in the VCR in my living room. You have no choice but to watch whatever makes its way to your home. The Return of the King is exactly the kind of tape olвЂ™ pops would have brought home to his kids, whenever he could remember that heвЂ™d already checked out Encino Man a million times before. People who were kids in that decade know the scenario: your parents come home in the evening, one of them grabbing a random VHS from the rental store. This was done out of practicality - The Return of the King DVD was the first used copy I found in the area - and also to attempt recreating the вЂ™80s home movie experience. I watched the last movie of the animated Lord of the Rings trilogy first for this article. On this edition of вЂњWatching Series,вЂќ we take a look at the three loosely connected animated Tolkien movies from the late 1970s: The Hobbit (1977), The Lord of the Rings (1978), and The Return of the King (1980).