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DVD Wizards
Far from the masterful treatment that groundbreaking animator Ralph Bakshi gave the similarly themed The Lord of the Rings just a year later, Wizards feels amateurish. A simplistic distillation of fantasy tropes, the scenario is millions of years after nuclear war wipes out civilization. Middle Earth fairies, elves, and magic emerge from the "good lands," while dimwitted mutants with poor comic timing emerge from the nuclear wastes. In the ultimate confrontation between good and evil, a hippie-ish wizard named Avatar defends his utopia against the technological and neo-Nazi revival of his bad-seed twin, Blackwolf. With volleys of jokes that couldn't hit a barn door, elves with Brooklyn accents, and the dubious climax that sees the kindly old wizard using one of the hated machines of war to triumph over evil, Wizards is one of fantasy animation's least successful examples. --Alan E. Rapp
I got this along with the movie I wanted Heavy Metal, If you are also buying them together and are not hip to the "genius" of this mediocre movie, then watch it 1st before heavy metal and it will be less disappointing. the story is typical. Some of the animation is very cool but it is mixed in with a bunch of crap. some of the sound effects reminded me of scooby-doo, like when someone would fall down you would hear "boing". Some of the clips that were used to did not seem to fit, it seemed as if there only purpose was to fill time.
The interview with Bakshi is actualy more entertaining than the movie, in it He calls this a "Family movie" Trust me, anyone under the age of 14 will most likely be bored to tears. I guess for him it would count as a "family" offering. Most kids of today might not get the whole nazi propaganda thing and may even find it a bit off-putting.
To me, this is a leftover dated movie that is interesting enough to watch for free but not worth $10.00
I'm not saying Bakshi is not an artist. I'm just saying he has done better, and to buy his other movies instead.
A Flawed Gem
In the late 1970s animation meant Disney, and Disney meant cute, sappy musicals aimed at small children. A rare few films tried to break that mold. Heavy Metal is the most well-known, but Wizards should be ranked right alongside it. One might almost think of these as American proto-anime films. If Wizards was made today and imported from Japan, it would probably be a hit with the anime crowd. But, it wouldn't be revolutionary today as it was in 1977.
Wizards is a movie that I have to love, and yet also weep for it. The visual style is like nothing else out there. Much of what we see presented on screen is so imaginative, artistic, and so original that I can't help wondering how this movie sank so far into obscurity. Don't fret about the tired themes, thin plot and shallow characters -- other movies with great visual style (re: Star Wars) have succeeded in spite of similar shortcomings. Wizards is great in a more impressionistic sense.
And yet I weep. Bakshi clearly didn't have the time or money needed to do this film justice, and the short-cuts needed simply to push it out the door are all too visible. We have a scene with characters stumbling around in a blizzard, so drawing backgrounds wouldn't be necessary. We have some scenes where the characters are sloppily drawn. We have battle scenes that run too long and with too much rotoscoping, because it's cheaper than real animation. There are even a few scenes that (in my opinion) didn't work and should have been left on the cutting-room floor -- but they couldn't be cut: every scrap of footage was needed to fill out the required running time for a theatrical release.
So. . . What we get is a flawed gem. It's a singular vision marred by the economic realities of cel animation -- easily the most expensive way to make a movie. I give it three stars not because it's mediocre or forgettable; it definitely is not. I give it three stars because it contains about 3/5ths of what should have been a five-star movie, if the budget had been there to fill it out properly.
A true psychadelic classic
If you don't know what a psychadelic classic is, you probably won't care much for this. For those of us who remember the original Heavy Metal, Disney's Fantasia, and other "trippy" animated movies, this is another of those movies that we would kick back and relax with our favorite blend and watch on a Saturday night with our best friends.
The animation isn't much, by today's standards, but the story is great and the memories are even better. I'm glad that I have it for my collection.....
As long as there is a need for adolescent male sexual fantasy, there will be an audience for Heavy Metal. Released in 1981 and based on stories from the graphic magazine of the same name (possibly the greatest publication to simultaneously provoke imagination and masturbation), the film has since become the most popular single title in Columbia/TriStar's entire film library. That's an amazing fact considering just how silly and senseless the movie really is--an aimless, juvenile amalgam of disjointed stories and clashing visual styles, employing hundreds of animators from around the world with a near-total absence of creative cohesion. It remains, for better and worse, a midnight-movie favorite for the stoner crowd--a movie best enjoyed by randy adolescents or near-adults in an... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Richard Romanus - Joe Flaherty Director(s): Gerald Potterton - Jimmy T. Murakami DVD Release Date: Released the 23 November 1999 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Advertised as "X-rated and Animated," Fritz the Cat earned an impressive $25 million in 1972. Screenwriter-director Ralph Bakshi based the film on three of Robert Crumb's stories about a superficial college student who tried to seduce anything in a skirt. The gritty, often gross film shocked U.S. audiences accustomed to innocent flirtations and slapstick comedy in cartoons. Thirty years later, Fritz looks less shocking than puerile. The violence grafted onto Crumb's innocent stories feels gratuitous, and the racial imagery tasteless. As dated as a Nehru jacket, the film will interest students of animation history and American pop culture. Crumb detested the film: he drew Fritz as a decadent Hollywood star, who was exploited by caricatures of Bakshi and producer Steve... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Ralph Bakshi DVD Release Date: Released the 11 December 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Heavy Traffic is writer-director Ralph Bakshi's follow-up to Fritz the Cat, so if you're looking for a little something to watch with the kids, you might want to search elsewhere. It's an odd little movie, one that seems to both condemn and celebrate depravity at the same time. The hero is Michael, an artist who still lives with his battling parents. Michael is far too sensitive for the cruel city, though he sure seems to draw an awful lot of pictures of it. Michael hooks up with cool bartender Carole and the two of them set off to... well, they plan to do something. More engaging than the story are Bakshi's visual techniques, which include blending animated and live-action sequences and layering old film clips into cartoon backgrounds. Though interesting as a piece... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Ralph Bakshi DVD Release Date: Released the 05 September 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Based on French science fiction novelist Stefan Wul's Oms en Serie ("Oms by the Dozen"), René Laloux's La Planète Sauvage (its title changed to Fantastic Planet for the U.S. release) paints an animated tale of humans kept as domesticated pets by an alien race of blue humanoid giants called Traags. The story takes place on the Traags' planet Ygam, where we follow our narrator, an Om called Terr, from infancy to adulthood, when he escapes his subjugation with a Traag learning device with which to educate the savage Oms and incite them to revolt. As a French-Czech coproduction, this story had much resonance for its makers as an allegory of Czechoslovakia's invasion by Soviet troops in the late '60s, and had to be completed in Paris due to political... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Barry Bostwick Director(s): René Laloux DVD Release Date: Released the 19 November 2002 This item is currently not available.
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Animator-director-screenwriter Ralph Bakshi audaciously tries to chronicle the history of 20th-century American popular music, while also placing each period into historical and social context--all in 97 minutes! Its animated, episodic narrative follows four generations of Jewish-American musicians as each painfully seeks fame through changing musical eras. Starting at the turn of the century with a piano-playing immigrant in New York, the film moves swiftly, following his offspring through such movements as Gershwin-era pop, jazz, folk music, '60s psychedelia, and punk--and only pauses for elaborate, energized musical numbers designed to showcase the work of Benny Goodman, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Lou Reed, the Jefferson Airplane, and numerous others. However, these electric set... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Mews Small Director(s): Ralph Bakshi DVD Release Date: Released the 16 June 1998 Usually ships in 24 hours
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