Watch The Return of the King For Free

Waste of time

Great Film overall

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

I would like to preface this review by saying that this disaster of a movie is not just awful by comparison to the Peter Jackson CGI epic made decades later, but is indeed awful in its own right. In fact, I am a big fan of the cartoon masterpiece that was the rendering of "The Hobbit," this movie's much more worthy prequel. However, this movie falls under its own merits without the need for comparison.The script, to begin with, is a twisted cluster of overlapping narratives layered so deeply that it becomes impossible to decide if it is the minstrel, or Gandalf, or Frodo or Samwise who is telling each scene. From moment to moment, the narration tells the story rather than letting the film itself provide its own visual rendering. It feels as though the writers had the need to tell everything as it happens, much like a small child narrating his actions as he plays "kitchen," calling out "stir, stir, stir" to ensure nobody mistakes his pretend hand gestures for another kitchen task. But the overwrought narrative is far from necessary, as anyone who saw "The Hobbit" can tell you, visuals and dialog could be more than enough to tell the story on its own, though you would never know it given the distrust the script has for the viewer's ability to figure anything out without direct explanation. Now, I understand that cutting a many-hundred page novel down to an hour-and-a-half cartoon is rough going for any writer, but the bungled job of pacing created by the need to explain even the fact that the characters are walking makes the movie feel like nothing that deserves time receives it and everything that doesn't is overwhelmed by it. It's almost as if the movie doesn't want to be watched, but rather, be an audio book with supplementary visuals.The voice acting is painful at its best, though I can't completely fault the players given the lousy script. Hyper-severity of tone and lack of intentional comic relief make the movie exhausting to watch. Though it is always worth a laugh to listen to marching orcs sing the disco in a round "Where There's a Whip, There's a Way," the bizarre juxtaposition with a more classical movie score and the folksy vibrato of Glenn Yarborough just contribute to a sense of sonic chaos. Even thematically this movie gets everything wrong. The strange efforts to humanize the orcs simply confounds the epic sense of confrontation between good and evil crafted by Tolkien in his novels.This movie is awful, one of the worst ever made. If you're hankering for a cartoon venture into J.R.R. Tolkien's masterpiece, go back and watch "The Hobbit," because this movie is guaranteed to disappoint.

Having recently seen this version for the first time in a number of years, I can see its faults, but many of the reviewers here are way too hard on it. Tolkien's masterful trilogy was unfilmable in live action before the advent of CGI, but fans were clamoring for film versions anyway, and then hated them when they arrived. Oy veh! While this Rankin/Bass version was not as good as their THE HOBBIT, I still found it to be quite entertaining on its own level, as long as you don't compare it to Peter Jackson's impeccable epics. The voice cast was great, and it was quite ambitious for Rankin/Bass, known chiefly for their animated Christmas specials.This film's haters should listen to the lyrics of one of Glenn Yarbrough's---It Is So Easy Not To Try. Rankin/Bass tried, and Tolkien fans who have expressed outrage over this would have been angrier if no one had tried back then. Everyone here needs to take a chill pill.

I never thought I would be forced to rate anything this low, but my respect for the book compels me to just that. This is the worst crap I have ever seen. The makers should be crucified. J. R. R. Tolkien, rest his soul, would cry in the view of this utter destruction of his phenomenal work. I weep while I force my self to watch it to the end. Why it was made in the firs place one can only wonder. Characters personalities are warped, they are used in wrong context and even left out. The meaning and point is lost. What is left is a dish without texture and taste which should never have been. There is but one reason to watch this and that is to know how it was utterly destroyed.

It was the first time that Rankin/Bass had dared to take on a two-hour special. But, having plunged into Tolkien's Middle-earth once before, it was a challenge they could pull off with the expertise R/B fans had always expected of them. Hence, The Return of the King: A Story of the Hobbits, to give the film its full title.One wonders, I'm sure, what inspired Romeo Muller to change Bilbo's age from "eleventy-one," as Tolkien wrote the number, to one hundred and twenty-nine. Still, it was a thrill having most of "The Hobbit"'s vocal contributors back: Orson Bean, John Huston, Theodore, Paul Frees, Don Messick, Glenn Yarbrough --- and adding Casey Kasem, Theodore Bikel and Sonny Melendrez to the mix, too --- to take us on the journey that Ralph Bakshi should have finished, but didn't.Many are the tales told about how Bakshi was only given enough financing to see us through most of The Fellowship of the Ring and approximately the first half of The Two Towers. When it became apparent, though, that the second Bakshi Ring movie would never come to pass, that made it possible for the folks at Rankin/Bass to seize a golden opportunity. And this they did, as we know by now, with a vengeance. Playing the story straight, as they did with "The Hobbit," the R/B team set out to take all the best elements from Return of the King and begin the film in flashback, with Bilbo's 129th birthday party, as he, Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Gandalf and Elrond look back at the good times and excellent adventures that culminated in the end of the Third Age of Middle-earth ..... and with it, in Gandalf's words, "the beginning of the New Age of Man." Again, as I did with Peter Jackson's version, I will dispense with a plot synopsis, assuming that you are already familiar with the legend without having to hear me tell it to you. Among the several strange moments that one does not notice about Rankin/Bass' Return of the King occurs during the sequence in which Gollum battles Frodo for control of the One Ring of Power. In a move considered unprecedented at the time of its original showing, Rankin/Bass decided to depict this climactic showdown graphically. The closeup of Frodo's just bitten hand shaking as though it were an earthquake monitor was, for its time, the most horrifying scene R/B's animators had ever attempted. To this day, one shudders in surprise that this scene was even cleared by ABC's censors! In place of Tolkien's original songs, Maury Laws and Jules Bass save the day again (assisted partially by Bernard Hoffer, who would later write the score cues and theme songs for R/B's classic 80s series, Thundercats, Silverhawks and The Comic Strip). "It's So Easy Not to Try," "Small Things," "Retreat!", "Where There's a Whip, There's a Way" and "The Ballad of Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom" are all singable, they help the story along (indeed, in the case of "Where There's a Whip, There's a Way," it has the proverbial great beat you can dance to --- or, one presumes, torture your enemies with!) .... and they're songs you can believe in! But no one sequence in the film is as deeply powerful visually as Aragorn's Coronation Procession, set to the film's title song. Here's something you didn't know: For one short panning scene, the animators went to Jerusalem, where they shot live-action footage of people cheering. The footage was then studied and brilliantly rotoscoped, so that it actually looks like there are citizens of Minas Tirith cheering on the coming of their King! Once again, we see that the Rankin/Bass team were second to none in their constant efforts to share with their audiences adventures unlike anything they had previously experienced. And because they were the only production entity that had pioneered the "dramatic animated television special," they could take this type of story and put it into the context that was its rightful due.This, then, was the power behind The Return of the King --- a simple, straightforward saga that would not bow to the attitudes of so-called sensationalism, but would nevertheless be the only Tolkien adventure that one could truly believe in.And then, as the world knows by now, came a man named Peter Jackson. But that, again as they say, is another story.........