Ralph Bakshi’s work is, well, interesting to look at. He’s a pioneer in the field of animation, particularly with the idea that animation can be for adults too, and many of his best known works are not all that kid friendly. His Fritz the Cat famously go an X rating, and while that doesn’t mean today what it meant back then, from what I understand, the movie earned it. His characters would alternate between rotoscoped, realistic animation that was traced over footage of live actors to more traditional, goofy-looking characters that might not look out of place in a more adult version of the Loony Toons. And his work is known for being trippy, going back to some of the crazier episodes of the 60s animated Spider-Man cartoon series.
But he did try to do something a bit more family friendly, at least comparatively speaking, back in the late 70s with Wizards. That got a PG rating, but that meant something different back then too. Regardless, I found it on Hulu and probably wouldn’t recommend it for kids, but this was Bakshi’s attempt at more family-friendly animation.
Despite appearances, Wizards doesn’t take place in the past. No, it’s set a few million years in the future after an atomic war largely eliminated the human race, leaving behind mostly mutants of one form or another. It was long after the atomic dust started to clear that the elves and fairies decided to return to Earth and claim it as their own. A fairy queen gave to twin sons, both powerful sorcerers in their own right. Avatar was the good twin who sought to entertain his dying mother and do right by others. Blackwolf, born with skeleton arms, was off using his magic to twist small animals to his own pleasure, and when the twins’ mother died, the two had a magical duel. Avatar prevailed, and Blackwolf slunk off to the land of Scortch, there to build armies of mutants, demons, and other undesirables, but these creatures were often easily distracted and uninterested in fighting the elf or fairy armies, allowing them to be easily defeated time and again even as Blackwolf relied more and more on science and technology while Avatar’s side went more for magic and the power of nature.
By the way, that’s all the prologue. The story picks up after all that with both twins as old men. Blackwolf may have found the ultimate weapon in the form of (no joke) Nazi propaganda that fires up his people while demoralizing the other side. Avatar, who almost seems like he’d rather not be bothered, has to go on a final quest to stop his brother, his only companions the fairy princess Elinore, the elf warrior Weehawk, and Peace, formerly a robot assassin of Blackwolf’s named Necron 99. Can these unlikely heroes travel across the lands and defeat Blackwolf once and for all? That may be tricky since before his reprogramming, Peace murdered Elinore’s father and Weehawk’s partner.
Now, if you’ve gotten this far, you probably picked up on a couple things that might make this “family friendly” thing a bit questionable. I mean, there is Nazi imagery and some rather violent death on display, and that’s not getting into things like Elinore’s general appearance that suggests, um, she was perpetually cold and leave it at that. Plus, there are what look an awful lot like fairy prostitutes living in Scortch. This may be a lot more family-friendly than Bakshi’s other work, but that doesn’t make this a kids movie.
In point of fact, it’s kind of a mess. Bakshi mixed and matched animation styles throughout the movie. Repainted live action characters and vehicles appear in backgrounds while the more comedic-looking cartoonish people may have looked like something out of, say, Hanna-Barbera or some other conventional animation studio, but Bakshi wasn’t afraid to let characters die violent deaths. The main characters seem to possess a decent amount of plot armor (for the most part), but background characters were shot, stabbed, and otherwise killed almost at will. One battle sequence between elf forces and Blackwolf’s troops might not have looked too out of place in Braveheart. That in an of itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the plot meanders, the final battle with Blackwolf is somewhere between hypocritical and anticlimactic in terms of execution, and even things like character consistency seems more like a novel idea than anything else. Bakshi has certainly earned his place in the pantheon of great animation innovators and directors, but for projects like this, I wouldn’t call myself a fan.
Grade: C
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