Trailer
Plot summary
Elven smiths forge Rings of Power for the Elves, the Dwarves and Men, and the Dark Lord Sauron forges the One Ring to rule them, using it to try to conquer Middle-earth. The Ring passes to Prince Isildur and later lies in the river Anduin, and the creature Gollum keeps it in the Misty Mountains, where the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins finds it and carries it home to the Shire. Decades later the Wizard Gandalf urges Bilbo to leave it to his nephew Frodo, and Frodo keeps it while Gandalf learns that enemies know a Baggins holds it.
Cast
- Michael Scholesas Samwise 'Sam' Gamgee (voice)
- Fraser Kerras Saruman The White Sorcerer / Narrator (segment "Epilogue") (voice)
Show all 20 cast
- Michael Deaconas Grima Wormtongue - Saruman's Spy / Grishnákh - Mordor Orc Captain (voice)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Lord of the Rings (1978)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Mick Jagger approached Bakshi wanting to play Frodo, but the roles were already cast and recorded. David Carradine also approached him offering to play Aragorn, and even suggested doing it in live-action; Bakshi's contract allowed this, but he said he had "always seen it as animation".
- Ralph Bakshi on the fate of John Boorman's script for the film: "The Boorman script cost $3 million, so Boorman was happy by the pool, screaming and laughing and drinking, 'cause he got $3 million for his script to be thrown out."
- During the middle of a large shoot, union bosses called for a lunch break, so Bakshi secretly shot footage of actors in Orc costumes moving toward the craft service table and used the footage in the film.
- The Spanish film development lab found telephone lines, helicopters and cars in the footage Bakshi had shot and tried to incinerate it, telling his first assistant director that "if that kind of sloppy cinematography got out, no one from Hollywood would ever come back to Spain to shoot again".
- Bakshi wanted to include music by Led Zeppelin, but producer Saul Zaentz insisted upon an orchestral score, because he would not be able to release the band's music on his Fantasy Records label.
- Peter Jackson says Bakshi's film introduced him to The Lord of the Rings and "inspired me to read the book". On the DVD commentary for The Fellowship of the Ring he calls one shot, a low angle of a hobbit at Bilbo's birthday party shouting "Proudfeet!", an intentional homage to what he thought was "a brilliant angle".
- Conceptual artist John Howe unwittingly copied a scene from Bakshi's film in a painting of the four Hobbits hiding under a branch from a Ringwraith, used in the 1987 J. R. R. Tolkien Calendar. Jackson turned the painting into a scene in his own film.
