Wizards
(Fox Region 1 DVD)
(1977)
review by Big McLargehuge

Back in the 1970s there were two predominant types of Animation in the United States, Disney feature length animation and Saturday Afternoon animation. Both offerings were targeted squarely at children. Ralph Bakshi cut his teeth on kids animated shorts beginning in 1959.

At the end of the 1960s though he started to push the envelope of animation/audience relationships and worked more and more adult themes into his work. This would culminate into a very productive period from the middle 1970s to the early 1980s and feature several full-length animated films targeted squarely at adults.

The 1972 film Fritz the Cat brought Robert Crumb’s counterculture comics out of the San Francisco hippy scene to nationwide audiences. Crumb has since disowned the filmed version of his work. Artist complaints aside, Fritz the Cat showed America that animation wasn’t just for children.

America, for what it’s worth, wasn’t ready.

Bakshi’s influence on animation cannot be denied. He paved the way for features and television animation that were not necessarily meant for kids. Bakshi used the same techniques in Fritz the Cat, Wizards, and all his other titles that he’d learned and honed at Hanna/Barbera, plus add a healthy dose of rotoscoping to give his work a more polished and stylized feel. Rotoscoping is when animators draw over projected live action film, essentially recreating live action scenes in animation. One of the benefits of the rotoscoping process is it presents animation at 22 frames per second, or, live action film quality, one of the drawbacks to rotoscoping is it looks like crap. It also does not balance out AT ALL with the hand drawn stuff that makes up the rest of the film, so either the cell animation or rotoscope parts stick out.

If you’ve seen one animated Bakshi film, then you can recognize ALL of Bakshi’s film from only one or two frames.

Wizards comes relatively early in his career and plays sort of like a warmup to his most expansive work, an adaptation of Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings (1978). Wizards is a fantasy story pitting the world of mutants who use technology against the world of elves and fairies who use magic in a post apocalyptic Earth. Each faction is led by one twin brother, Blackwolf the evil and Avatar the good, and follows the well established plot and theme of all quest fantasy. A group of people, in this case Avatar, Elenor, Weehawk, and Peace, head off to find the thing that will prevent Blackwolf’s mutant army from overtaking the entire world. If you’ve read ANY quest fantasy at all, Wizards won’t deviate at all from the established formula.

Bakshi uses Nazism as his background for technology, and frames all of Blackwolf’s troops, sets, propaganda, and battle sequences chock full of the twisted cross, rotoscoped Weirmacht stormtroopers, and inexplicably, rotoscoped scenes from Zulu and El Cid.

The story left me cold and the animation left me colder.

Bakshi’s character design is steeped in old Tex Avery Warner Brothers cartoons, the good women are buxom and quasi realistic, everyone else is super deformed, and with frame rates for cell animation approaching er… 5 frames per second… Wizards looks like a really long Saturday morning cartoon, and not a really good one at that. He uses plain colors and indiscinct shapes for movement over very detailed and complex backgrounds further emphasizing the simplified movement and design of his characters. He never tries to even approach the animation quality of Disney, instead almost reaches the quality of Yogi Bear. Almost.

For all I’ve said about Bakshi, there’s something I left out; I don’t like his style; I never have. I’ve always found his storytelling derivative, Wizards is like Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings is well… like Lord of the Rings, Cool World, his last feature length work is a hell of a lot like Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The only title of his I really enjoyed was American Pop because it was so different than anything that came before or since.

20th Centure Fox released Wizards with some interesting extras; a commentary track with Bakshi that provides some insight into the story and animation process, Ralph Bakshi the wizard of animation featurette, a stills gallery, TV spots and theatrical trailers.

If you are a current animation fan and want to see one of the cornerstones of American adult themed feature length animation, and can get past the super deformed characters and lousy animation, then Wizards provides an interesting view if only for historical purposes. If you are a fan of quest fantasy, then Wizards offers an animated take on nothing new. If you are none of the above, you’ll probably find Wizards as annoying and predictable as I did.