The Animated Return of the King: Sadly, Nostalgia Has Its Limits - Reactor

In this column, we’re looking back at the 1980s as their own particular age of fantasy movies—a legacy that largely disappeared in the ’90s only to resurface in the 2000s, though in many ways, the fantasy films of the Eighties are far weirder and less polished than what we got in the aughts. In each of these articles, we’ll explore a canonical fantasy movie released between 1980 and 1989 and discuss whatever enduring legacy the film has maintained in the decades since.

For a more in-depth introduction to this series of articles, you can find the first installment here, focusing on 1981’s Dragonslayer. Last time, we talked about Ralph Bakshi’s gorgeous and problematic animated feature Fire and Ice. This time, we look to a fulfillment of a story Bakshi left unfinished with the 1980 Rankin/Bass animated adaptation of The Return of the King.

I was raised with a battered VHS copy of the 1977 animated film The Hobbit, produced by stop-motion animation aficionados Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, as a staple of my early life. Between that movie and their 1985 The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, Rankin/Bass might well be the creative team most responsible for shaping me into my adult self and determining my fantasy sensibilities. I watched The Hobbit repeatedly, memorized its songs, and still feel a ridiculous amount of affection for it. While I also read Tolkien’s original book (and had it read to me by my father), I did not attempt to read The Lord of the Rings until I was a teenager. My knowledge of the trilogy came, primarily, from the BBC radio drama (which starred the Jackson trilogy’s Bilbo actor, Ian Holm, as Frodo) and from this follow-up film.

Contrary to popular belief (including mine), the film we know as The Return of the King was not, in fact, intended to be a completion of Ralph Bakshi’s disastrous 1978 version of The Lord of the Rings (which covers all of Fellowship of the Ring and large swaths of The Two Towers). It was originally (and cumbersomely) titled The Hobbit II: Frodo and was a follow-up to the ’77 Rankin/Bass film. However, when the company was dissolved in 1987 and Warner Bros. acquired the rights, they decided to market The Hobbit, Bakshi’s film, and this version of The Return of the King as a de facto trilogy, thereby creating the widespread misconception that this was always its intent. 

The movie roughly follows the plot of the final novel in Tolkien’s trilogy, with Frodo (Orson Bean—who also voiced Bilbo in The Hobbit) and Sam (camp royalty Roddy McDowall) making the trek from Cirith Ungol to Mount Doom, while Gandalf (legendary actor/director John Huston reprising his earlier role) and Pippin contend with Denethor during Sauron’s siege of Minas Tirith. The cast is rounded out by versatile stage and screen actor Theodore Bikel as Aragorn and mid-century stand-up comic Brother Theodore reprising his role as Gollum. 

Because of the truncated format, Legolas, Gimli, Éomer, and Faramir have all been excised completely, while Théoden, Éowyn, and the Witch King of Angmar have all had their roles reduced to just about a single scene. Much like Jackson’s films, the movie also cuts the scouring of the Shire, and unlike Jackson’s films, it severely cuts down the Grey Havens, instead using Bilbo’s 129th birthday (where Bilbo, Gandalf, and Elrond announce their intention to depart Middle-earth) as a frame story. 

Like any good Rankin/Bass production, it is a musical, with folk singer Glenn Yarbrough providing a number of new songs. In The Hobbit, most of Yarbrough’s song lyrics were taken from Tolkien’s own diegetic poems and songs. In RoTK they are largely original compositions, leading to… well, let’s call them “mixed” results.

This film is steeped in nostalgia for me but also is—I need to face it—not particularly good. Unlike some of the other deeply nostalgic revisitations I’ve under taken in this series, this rewatch was a tough one. It felt so much longer than its 97-minute runtime. Part of the problem lies in Rankin/Bass’ relatively limited capacity for handling darker and more adult themes; it’s simply not a good fit, here. You can feel the moments in which the film’s scribe, Romeo Muller, struggles to inject some kid-friendly levity into the proceedings. The scene in which Pippin’s warning, as he rushes to alert Gandalf of Denethor’s self-immolating madness, is rendered as “He’s gone loony, I tell you!” springs ignominiously to mind. 

This also sits at odds with a film where much of the dialogue, no doubt in an effort to sound more like Tolkien’s prose, is full of faux-Shakespearean language—with Merry, especially, peppering his lines with “nay!” and “‘tis.” This gets particularly strange when the actors are called upon to deliver an especially dramatic line reading. If you have ever wanted to hear famed radio DJ/voice of Shaggy Rogers Casey Kasem, as Merry, scream “Hear me, O Darkness: I will avenge my lord!” before collapsing into sobs, this is your chance. 

If that seems terribly overwritten, well—it’s almost all like that. Sam, at the Cracks of Doom, shouts, “Do what you have come all this distance to do!” to which Frodo replies, without trace of humor or irony, “I have come but I do not choose to do now what I have come to do!” 

The gloppy, pudgy depictions of orcs that felt charming in the more child-friendly Hobbit now feel out of place when they are being called upon to represent the end of the Age of Men. Similarly strange is the choice to use the same odd death rattle noise whenever Bilbo vanquishes a goblin or spider (a sort of keening “eeee-wawawa”) in the course of battle. When the Witch King shows up sounding almost exactly like Skeletor, we really start to feel the story running up against Rankin and Bass’ limitations as purveyors of serious drama.

The plot is not only truncated but filled with awkward exposition to set up plot points that cannot hope to carry the emotional heft they might have in an adaptation of all three books. Take, for instance, Éowyn’s arrival at the Pelennor Fields. In the moment where she reveals that she is a woman and therefore not subject to the Witch King’s prophetic invulnerability, Merry must leap in and hurriedly explain to Pippin (and the audience): (A) that she is Theoden’s niece, (B) that she was forbidden from riding to war with the Rohan host and, (C) that she has disguised herself as a man in order to do so. All of that set-up so that she can kill the Witch King, tearfully proclaim “Uncle, I have avenged thee!” and never reappear again afterwards. 

This is all without acknowledging that the first half hour of the film is basically a giant recap. John Huston must explain that the One Ring is bad (which is, of course, not how we’d encountered it in The Hobbit), that Frodo has been kidnapped by the Orcs at Cirith Ungol, that Minas Tirith both exists and is under siege, and that the Riders of Rohan are on their way. We have to get through all this and four interminable songs before we even really get to the plot of the film.

There are strange mischaracterizations as well. In the limited time we have with Sam, for example, he is not depicted as the lovable, devoted gardener that the novels and other adaptations have given us—rather, John Huston, narrating as Gandalf, tells us that “a sane being would have given up. But Samwise burned with a magnificent madness, a glowing obsession to surmount every obstacle.” It might fit for the specific moment we meet Sam—resisting the power of the Ring and refusing to become “Samwise the Strong,” but even so, the initial impression never fully leaves us and he is played as a weirdly aggressive and bloodlust-filled heavy. In Roddy McDowall’s sniveling, nasal delivery—here saddled with an awkward Cockney accent—he might as well start singing about the Seven Deadly Virtues or waxing grandiloquent about how “the beast, Man, is the Devil’s pawn.” The character actor, so often typecast in villainous roles, is a weirdly great choice for Sam, but only in a film this misguided. 

But more than the general darkness and awkwardness of the abridged plot, the film also looks profoundly ugly. This is not entirely Rankin/Bass’ fault. RoTK is a book that mostly covers Mordor and the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. The fact that the film is heavy on dark browns, bloody reds, and livid oranges is in keeping with the subject matter, but it feels like a relief anytime there is a flashback or fantasy sequence in Rivendell or the Shire and we see a little green or blue on screen. 

And then there is the music. I’ve mentioned the mixed results, and the bad ones are dire. Glenn Yarorough warbles a song, set to the same tune as The Hobbit’s “The Road Goes Ever On and On” (a Rankin/Bass classic) about how “it’s so easy not to try.” It’s a song about giving up. It plays more than once. While it is meant to be ironic, it doesn’t provide a counterpoint in verse and, as Frodo and Sam slog miserably across the plateau of Gorgoroth, one begins to consider taking Glenn’s advice. 

So, given that I’ve spent all this time warning about the pitfalls of revisiting the film, are there any bright spots in the miasma of dull ochres and lurid violets? Turns out, there are!

Continuing down the musical path, there are a few certified bangers in the mix. The most obvious of these is likely the one you’ve been thinking of if you’ve seen the film—the spectacularly campy Orc marching number, “Where There’s a Whip, There’s a Way.” Set to a singularly funky beat and containing such perfect lines as “we don’t wanna go to war today/ but the lord of the lash says nay nay nay,” it’s profoundly silly but undeniably catchy. Similarly, the Thurl Ravenscroft-helmed choral number “Retreat,” in which the Orcs attempt to dissuade Aragorn and his army from approaching the Towers of the Teeth, is a lot of fun if only because it doesn’t have Yarbrough’s folksy moralizing at its heart. 

There are also a few elements in this version of RotK that are not represented in Jackson’s films. The most important of these is the episode with the Two Watchers of Cirith Ungol (always a personal favorite of mine) where Samwise confronts the ancient stone vultures carved into the gates of the fortress and only passes through using the Phial of Galadriel. While Jackson’s version does work the Watchers into the design of Cirith Ungol’s main gates, no version draws any attention to them. On this latest rewatch, the unnerving menace of the silent Watchers, the echoing scream of their alarm, and the reminder that some of the evil of Middle-earth need not be animate in order to be terrifying—all were as potent as remembered. 

Similarly, Jackson’s extended version of RoTK features the Mouth of Sauron but the theatrical release elided it, making this version of the character the canonical visual adaptation in my head for years. I recognize that these scenes, alongside the fact that Old Bilbo looks uncannily like my grandmother, may be the most personal of reasons to celebrate the film, but listen, I had to take my pleasures where I could. 

Perhaps the saddest thing about rewatching the film is how little impact it seems to have had in the years since its release. Rankin/Bass’ Hobbit is rightly beloved and remains a classic. Bakshi’s hideous and misguided Lord of the Rings remains a subject of fascination and derision in a way that has given it a robust if not exactly positive afterlife. But this movie feels like something both forgotten and now unnecessary. Even its most charming elements (John Huston and Orson Bean’s comforting voicework) and its most memorable eccentricities (Brother Theodore’s proto-Andy Kaufman-as-Latka performance as Gollum, and the odd meshing of Rankin/Bass’ designs with the sensibilities of Japanese animation studio Topcraft) were all better showcased in The Hobbit. This Return of the King feels like a strange fever dream—only truly worth rewatching in order to remind oneself that it still exists. At least it’s available for free online. 

But what do you think? Is it still worth revisiting this weird little cul-de-sac of Tolkieniana? Did you, similarly, grow up on this movie, along with The Hobbit? Are there ways in which you think it compares favorably to Jackson’s version? Did you find it laudatory or laughable when Gandalf points out that the hobbits keep getting larger in stature and then turns to the screen and asks, “Is there a little hobbit in you?” Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Also, be sure to join us next time when we climb out of this forgotten nadir to the dizzying heights of ’80s high fantasy with the Tom Cruise-starring, Ridley Scott-directed, Tim Curry-inspired-sexual-awakenings-certified unicorn lovefest, Legend!