Animation Defenestration: The one with fairies and machine guns

 

Title: Wizards

What Year?: 1977

Classification: Mashup/ Improbable Experiment

Rating: What the Hell??? (2/4)

 

With this review, I’m back with yet another new feature that I’m starting now because several other options required more time than I had or flat-out fell through. And this time, I feel like I’m going down to the DNA of this blog, as I come back to just about the first thing I tried when I tried moving beyond self-published fiction and disability/ self-advocacy rants. This is my true return to animation with an actual feature for animated feature films. It was probably inevitable that the one movie at hand (at least besides Hotel Transylvania 3) would be the one movie from the one filmmaker that just about kept me away from reviewing animation. Here is Wizards, the most famous film not rated X by Ralph Bakshi, and I feel like this is the trailer for Wrath of Kahn. Bakshi! Baaakshiii!!! BAAAAKSHIIII!!!!

Our story begins with an opening narration, introducing a post-apocalyptic world where magic has replaced technology and two brothers become its greatest wizards and mortal enemies. Fast forward a few centuries, and the defeated evil wizard Blackwolf has returned, now aided by the rediscovered technology of guns and war machines, plus a projector that can energize his forces and terrify their fairy enemies with images of Nazis on the warpath. As Blackwolf’s motley armies rout the forces of good (tanks against swords would do that well enough), the good wizard Avatar reemerges after narrowly escaping an assassination. He joins up with a beautiful or at least buxom fairy named Ellinore, a hot-tempered elven warrior Weehawk and a turncoat minion of Blackwolf to go on a quest to find Blackwolf and destroy his magic. They will find possible allies and new enemies at every turn, and the greatest threat will lie in their own ranks. But it all comes down to a duel between dark magic and… a Luger pistol?

Wizards was the fourth animated feature film by Ralph Bakshi, and his first inarguable success after the X-rated 1972 film Fritz The Cat. The production was backed by 20^th Century Fox, with the original title “War Wizards”, as a collaboration between Bakshi and artists Ian Miller and Mark Ploog. The film was made with a combination of traditional animation, live-action and rotoscoping. The voice cast included Bob Holt as Avatar, character actor David Proval as the defector Peace, and Susan Tyrrell (see… the Dawn of the Dead documentary?) as the narrator. The film was immediately successful on release, reportedly (per Bakshi) outperforming a re-release of Fantasia (see… Allegro Non Troppo???),  but lost revenue after the release of Star Wars (maybe coincidence). Bakshi went on to make Lord of the Rings the following year, using the same techniques and technology, and later Fire And Ice. In a further convergence, Miller contributed heavily to A Tolkien Bestiary, originally published in 1979. Wizards was released on DVD in 2004, following an online petition. It has been out of print in recent years, but remains available through digital streaming.

For my experiences, this is a movie that I came to by a long trail. First, I practically grew up with the Tolkien Bestiary, well before I got a personal copy I consulted for this review. Along the way, I also saw the animated Lord of the Rings, which I can’t recall in full before college but definitely encountered by the early 1990s. It was probably sometime in the prolonged gridlock of unemployment that I finally looked this one up. It was like seeing all my memories sliced, diced and blendered, and it wasn’t lost on me that this actually came first. It went a long way to seal my further conflicted opinion of Bakshi’s work. Notwithstanding my comments above, I don’t dislike his work from what I know of it. But a big part of that is that it fails to connect with me on a more fundamental level than movies I hate. I know I don’t “get” it; what I’m not convinced of is whether that can be all on me.

What’s front and center in this movie is Bakshi’s gleeful disregard for boundaries. This is very significant, because most movies that mix animation and live-action still adhere to the “rules” of both mediums. Roger Rabbit look like he could be drawn by the same hands as Jessica and the weasels, and Eddie Valiant would really die if he got hit by the steam roller. Here, the only consistency is that nothing is consistent, not genre, not tone, not visual style, not even the medium, and the result is mixed at best. Having elves and fairies duking it out with marauders with machine guns is all good fun, up to a point. But the hodgepodge of near-incompatible characters, settings and backgrounds quickly becomes even more strange and distracting than the further mixing with stock footage and rotoscoping. (The female characters,  even more grotesquely overendowed than in Heavy Metal, don’t help.) Overall, there’s simply nothing like this outside Bakshi’s work except Toho’s hallucinogenic House, which I personally described as “The Shining made by the creators of South Park”, and there can be no question there’s a reason nobody followed in their footsteps.

With all that said, the question still remains, are the story, the characters, and the movie itself any good? This is where it’s easy to feel overwhelmed enough to punt, as I effectively did with House. But this is a case where I find the strangeness to be more a diversion than a fundamental part of the thing itself (shades of Zardoz?). Underneath all the weirdness, what we have are some moderately interesting characters going on an adventure that’s boilerplate even by sword-and-sorcery standards. Even then, the main characters hardly do anything until the very end, which is so deliberately abrupt that it feels like a throwaway gag from another story. (Wait a minute… did Raiders of the Lost Ark rip off this movie???) Then one more thing that bothers me is the whole Nazi angle, and this is where I can allow the film simply reflects conditions we can no longer understand. Now, we can see the Tigers, Stukas and goosestepping Nazis as propaganda for a side that was probably always going to lose, but this is with the movie further into the past than World War 2 was in the 1970s. Yet, we have always known animation can transcend time and context. The final verdict, as with the still far better Allegro Non Troppo, is that this movie does not.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and there is indeed one that is far and away my favorite. It is also one that has long stirred up a strong sense of déjà vu, to the point that I’m sure I must somehow have seen it long before the movie as a whole. Early in the film, we find one of Blackwolf’s stormtroopers peering down at a fallen companion. At first, he shakes his comrade, trying to wake him up. There’s comical overstatement but also real pathos as he finally cries out, “They’ve killed Fritz! They’ve killed Fritz!” He begins cursing the fairies and firing wildly, without initially noticing that the fallen trooper is back on his feet. The following dialogue is too priceless to recount, with Bakshi himself voicing Fritz. It all culminates in the inevitable but not entirely predictable ironic twist, with the tragedy of all war being that the living still learn nothing.

In closing, my usual self-defense on the rating will serve here mainly to introduce the rating scale. I am staying with the scale I first developed for the Revenant Review, simply because the only animation bad enough to justify my old Space 1979 scale wasn’t going into theatrical films. For further comparison, I would say that this movie is better than Rock And Rule (the closest I’ve previously come to covering Bakshi in an actual animation review), and perhaps equal to the Transformers movie, which somehow comes out as possibly less weird. Against other animation I have reviewed, however, it falls well behind, even compared to The Plague Dogs, the only animated feature I ever thought I might have been too hard on. In the proverbial light of day, it’s the kind of film that’s “overrated” simply because too many people elevated it far beyond what its creators were trying to do. It’s well-made, influential, and by any standard worth watching, but the best to said is that it laid the way for better things.