Before you think I’ve put one of the greatest movie series ever at number 231 I need you to appreciate that this is the cartoon made in 1978. Not the epic Mr Jackson put together over 3 movies of 3 hours which gives you an epic 9 hours of story to get through. This one was long enough at 2 hours and 13 minutes. This animation of the epic story cost a reported $4m to produce and I always believed that the plan was to use the profits to support finishing the story off in the next movie. It went on to make $30.5m but the sequel was never to be made it was not liked by the critics but this went on to be loved on a cult level. The film had a host of names appearing as the voices for you which I’ve cut down to Christopher Guard, William Squire, Michael Scholes, John Hurt, Simon Chandler, Dominic Guard, Michael Graham Cox, Anthony Daniels & David Buck. I will struggle with a full plot though wont I?
For those who haven’t read the book and I would recommend that you give it a go. It is very long and epic and it was split into three books that you can read at your leisure. The story is about a ring that holds the most power over all the other rings of middle earth. It was rediscovered by a hobbit (or sometimes called a halfling which is a miniature human like creature) that likes smoking pipes and drinking beer and live in the fields of the shire. The Hobbit is leaving for Rivendell an elf city. A famous grey wizards Gandolf suspects this ring is the one ring to rule the others and suggests he leaves it for his nephew Frodo Baggins if it is the ring then it would be safer in the middle of the shire. The humans own 9 rings and they have all been caught and converted into Ring wraths. They find out that the ring is in the possession of a Baggins. Gandalf hearing this new rapidly heads to the shire to tell Frodo to leave and take the ring with him. Frodo is joined by three other Hobbits two cousins and his gardener Sam. The four head off chased by the red glowing eyes of the Ring wraths. They journey to a human’s pub and meet a ranger called Strider who saves them again from the Ring wraths but Frodo gets hurt by one of the wraths and they all head to Rivendell where Frodo is healed. There is a meeting and there is a decision made for the four hobbits to be joined by Strider plus another human, an elf, a dwarf and the wizard Gandalf to journey across middle earth to Mordor to be able to finally destroy the ring forever.
I have realised that I went into one about the plot there as I have basically told you the whole of this film as it is an epic story that rolls on and on but this movie does a really good job of trying to convey that and then it just feels like they get bored of it. It just stops. There is a voice over that says they win a battle with the orcs and then a voiceover says and then they went on to have many other battles and adventures and boom its done. This is my criticism of the movie it just feels like the drive of the movie wasn’t there to complete the story. It was really well put together but it just stops. I am sure they released it with the story of we will finish it off once we get the money together. Well it never happened and the opportunity to make more money and please more people was lost. Looking at the full cast list it may have been an impossible task to get them all back to finish the story but it is a great movie produced in a great way and it’s just doesn’t conclude as well as it should. Which might explain the scores given in review with IMDb 6.2/10 and Rotten Tomatoes of 52%. Personally, I think this version deserves a much better score than either of those scores.
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