The Return of the King (1980)

Two Hobbits struggle to destroy the Ring while their friends desperately Sauron's forces in a final battle.In amongst an over complicated exposition opening accompanied by some folk music Return of the King is a direct sequel to The Hobbit (1977) which loosely follows the Lord of The Rings (1978) - all complicated stuff. Between these three animated features they haphazardly form Hobbit through to The Return of the King. The animation and artistry has improved since the 1977 outing but the pacing is choppy. There's some great background plates and swordplay even if a bit skimmed over and brief. There's flashbacks, dreams and visions that are unnecessary, adding nothing to the already wishy-washy narrative.Roddy McDowall is the perfect voice of Samwise Gamgee and a great talent. John Huston's Gandalf (voice) serves for the most part as narrator purely for exposition. Gollum voice is once again Brother Theodore.Ultimately, it's all a little haphazard. There's lots missing as you'd expect for screen adaptation, but music at times doesn't fit and harks back to the The Hobbit's hippie/folk music which would be fine if it fit the on screen going-ons. Also if the great dramatic score wasn't included it may have faired better being one or the other.Overall, like it's predecessor and source material it's a little to dark for young children, nevertheless, it's good introduction to Tolkien even if somewhat disjointed.

Because I felt that the Ralph Bakshi adaptation wasn't as entertaining as I thought it would be, I wonder what ABC and Warner Bros were thinking when they decided to adopt one of the most beloved books in the whole galaxy into a cartoon that starts its main story late into the book. By the time the cartoon starts the main story, so many important events that the viewers may not know about have seemingly passed. The Bakshi cartoon ends with Frodo and Sam capturing Gollum. This take on The Return of the King starts with Sam searching for Frodo in Cirth Ungol causing the story to skip about half of The Two Towers. They also skipped over the parts with The Witch King of Angmar which include very important parts of the book. Another portion of the story that was skipped, was where Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli go into a cave to search for the Undead Army of Rohirrim that was cursed by Isildor, an ancestor of Aragorn, for not helping him in The Battle of Mount Doom at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. Each part that I just mentioned takes up about an hour or more of movie that could have made the cartoon easier to understand. This cartoon is so awful I don't think even deserves a 1 out of 10 and it makes the other one, which is based on the first two books look like Godfather or Pulp Fiction. If you want to watch The Lord of the Rings movies without reading the books and enjoy them, I highly recommend skipping this cartoon that is not even at home video quality and watch the Peter Jackson films.

My first review, and it upsets me to think I have been moved to bin this film ahead of writing praise for more worthy work.So why is it so bad? The first half an hour is a disjointed mess of flip-flopping flashback events with no appearance of conforming to the order of events as they happened in either the book, film, or would make sense in the absence of both. Imagine the story-board was toppled and hastily picked up by the cleaner one fated day, and you're about there. On the promise of a bards tale being sung to Bilbo on his birthday, the film is littered with song interludes accompanying the many cutaways and back-story set-pieces, many of which are repeated and all of which are annoying. The animation is average for the period (1980) but the voice-overs are a dreadful mixture of soft yokel voices and newsreader RP. I watched the whole thing hoping for the appearance of the Wild Men. When the opportunity had passed I had only 10 minutes left and the disturbing feeling that, once again, I should have re-read the book or watched the Jackson version again. If this had but any other title, 5 minutes would have been enough.Why is it so good? It isn't (see above)

The Hobbit gave a brief glimpse at what could be expected for this version of The Return of the King. What it really is, is one of the worst adaptations laid upon one's eyes. Absolutely dreadful.The thing's that lost me were the asides made by some of the characters, especially the vision Sam has with and without the Ring -- he has a vision of playing with the Orcs in a merrier time than the current predicaments at hand... dear me, seriously?! Also, the time-line of this film is ALL OVER THE PLACE. Frodo's capturing is so rushed, that they had to reduce it to a few lines of dialogue voiced by Sam. The dialogue itself is cringe-worthy. For an example of complete over the top lines would be "Eowyn am I" or "You lost the very finger upon which it rode?!" As much as it is an interesting idea to use the events of the War of the Ring in flashback, its execution literally is execution. It's terrible the way they utilized the story into such a lackluster and unfaithful version of Tolkien's tale.The acting is wretched. Credit which can go to the screenplay.The music... makes one want to put a gun to their ear. It's completely sleep-inducing.Overall, this is one terrible adaptation. Rivaling the equivalent of what the Sci-Fi Channel would've done had they adapted The Return of the King into an animated feature, Rankin Bass's version is one many people wish they could get out of their heads. This is one HUGE disappointment.