From the far reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy, It's Retro Nerd Girl with a film review for you.
Today I'll be reviewing the movie Wizards released in 1977.
Starring:
Bob Holt, Jesse Welles, Richard Romanus
Directed by:
Ralph Bakshi
Genre:
Animation, Adventure, Fantasy
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) Rating:
PG
Budget:
$1,200,000 (estimated)
Current IMDb Rating When Reviewed:
6.5
The Synopsis is:
On a post-apocalyptic Earth, a wizard and his comrades fight against his twin brother who is an evil wizard using Nazi propaganda to rule the planet.
This film is the brainchild of a revolutionary American director of animated and live-action films and television projects, Ralph Bakshi. He worked in the business as an animator and director from 1956 until the late 1990’s. Some of his most notable work was on 4 episodes of Mighty Heroes (TV Series) in 1966 and 25 episodes of the Spider-Man (TV Series) in 1970. After that he blew the minds of audiences with his debut feature animated film of an adult-oriented theme, Fritz the Cat in 1972 which had an X-rating, he followed it up with Heavy Traffic in 1973 and Coonskin in 1974 which were both equally controversial for mainstream audiences.
These films were mostly about urban life with social commentary, but his next project would be fantasy based which was a little surprising to his growing fan base. The concept began as an idea Ralph was working on for an unproduced television series that he pitched to CBS in 1967 based on fantasy drawings he had created in high school. Nine years later he pitched it as a "family picture" called War Wizards to 20th Century Fox about the same time George Lucas was pitching Star Wars. They both got the green light to make their films. George received $11 million dollars to make his film. Ralph received $1.2 Million dollars for War Wizards.
The story begins with an uncredited narration from Susan Tyrrell famous for playing in the cult classic movie, Forbidden Zone in 1979. I know that exposition is a storytelling feature that not many people enjoy, but I just gobble it up like pie. To me, it brings a deep sense of history and lore which I thought was well used in this film, similar to a child listening to a well read bedtime story. Susan's voice in particular was a special feature, fleshing out the lore with a sense of gravity and drama. I loved it so very much.
So just to catch up on the details I am just going to set up the story for you and there is a lot of story to cover.
The narrator begins the story as, “An Illuminating history bearing on the Everlasting struggle for World Supremacy fought between the powers of technology and magic.” Immediately you may get the notion that the story is placing an emphasis on the theory that technology is bad and magic, replacing the word nature, is good. And indeed it seems so as we learn that the earth was destroyed “in a thousand atomic fireballs”.
Only a handful of humans survived, the rest changed into hideous mutants who were left in radioactive lands that never allowed them to become human again. Two million years later the Earth began to heal and fairies, elves, dwarves returned to the restored lands. One of those lands is Montagar ruled by the Queen of the fairies, Delia. After 3000 years of peace, she gave birth to a pair of baby wizard twins. Black Wolf was the evil one and Avatar was the good wizard. It's the classic good versus evil story.
So far so good, I love the idea of opposing twins and the magical elements going on in the story. They don’t look anything alike. I suppose they are fraternal twins. Black wolf in particular has a unique design, with unique non human bones for arms. Very cool and original.
When Delia died somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 years later, Black Wolf fought Avatar for power, but lost vowing to return. 3,000 years later after gathering up an army of mutants, Black Wolf waged war every now and then. His armies never won the war because in the middle of fighting many of them would forget why they were fighting and abandon the battle.
Black Wolf hatches an effective plan, sending robots to assassinate many of the world's leaders of elves, fairies and dwarves, which leaves them ununified. He strikes again but this time his army is brainwashed with Nazi propaganda films of Earth’s ancient past and uses a projector to project the propaganda in the skies on the field of battle to scare the enemy. Black Wolf finally has the lead he wants.
The concept is pretty good with room for lots of opportunities to build up more lore and expand the world. This part of the story is all done with broad strokes, but then the story narrows down to follow a small band of heroes. Necron 99 is a robot who is instructed to kill the world’s president. He is very successful in doing so, but he gets captured by Avatar. Avatar reprograms him with magic and he becomes Peace, helping the wizard, the president's daughter Elinore and an elven warrior, Weehawk get to Black Wolf’s stronghold, Scortch One (this is how the production spells it) to destroy the projector.
Our hero of the film Avatar is not a typical hero. In fact he rejects his title all the way through the film and wants to avoid conflict of any kind. He even says, “Wake me up when the Earth is destroyed. He only faces his brother when he sees no other choice to save the world.
For the voice of Avatar, Bakshi cast Bob Holt because he liked his impression of one of Bakshi’s favorite actors, Peter Falk. Bob does that impression throughout the film as he played Avatar but managed to change it just enough that it was more endearing than comical. I think that was because Avatar is supposed to be a lovable older hippie that has a more of a carefree attitude about life to oppose his brother who is restless, domineering and war mongering.
Avatar gets a love interest in the form of Elinore, a highly sexualized young princess training to be a fairy. It’s a little jarring because it is expected that the love story would be with the young elven warrior and they do mention the age difference quite a few times during the film, or rather, Avatar says something about how old he is compared to Elinore. Elinore brings a lighter tone to the film and I actually appreciated the character. By the way, Princess Elinore was named after Ralph Bakshi's first girlfriend.
Weehawk is a warrior and leader of his village and besides being a great fighter, he’s also incredibly brave and at some points in the film acts as the hero archetype although he is only a supporting character.
Peace or Necron 99, was featured on the poster riding his two legged horse, so I thought he was going to be a major character, but he isn’t. In fact, we do spend a good chunk of time just watching him travel and I loved those moments as we get to see the sprawling visuals of this post-apocalyptic world. He was the one character I wished we had a bit more time with in the story. Visually he’s interesting, we bond with him a bit and he even makes a swift transformation, but unfortunately he’s out of the film by the last third.
Bakshi’s idea for creating Necron 99 came from and was heavily influenced by his friend underground comic artist Vaughn Bode's post-apocalyptic character Cobalt 60. In fact looking at Vauhn’s work you can see his influence on the film.
The visuals in this film is where the film receives its greatest deal of praise and criticism. The inconsistency of animation is the reason why. A great deal of that was Ralph Bakshi’s natural inclination to experiment on screen with his films and for me this is the joy of watching his work.
He toyed with different styles of hand drawn animation with the characters. Some images weren’t animated at all, but just drawings zoomed in for drama. There were still images sliding across the screen to animate the scene with little difficulty. Most of these things anyone can do on their computer today with ease. Because the budget was so squeezed the horse-like animals had two feet instead of four because it was easier and cheaper to animate. These creatures went on to inspire the Tauntauns in "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980).
The art ranged from kiddie lighthearted line drawn cartoon characters to intense beasts. None of them seemed to match the dark brooding backgrounds of the post-apocalypse. I believe that they were meant to clash with the characters to stand out and be noticed as if to say, this is what the Earth could look like if mankind does not pay attention and heed the story’s warning. There is even a point in the film where Avatar calls out the environment and magically conjures up flowers to brighten up the scene. I loved that self aware touch to the narrative.
Comic book artist Mike Ploog created the landscape of Montagar. British illustrator Ian Miller illustrated wonderful backgrounds of Scortch which were in particular very intriguing with many varying themes and tones to tell the tale. I loved them so much. What a treat that was for me.
One of the biggest differences is using rotoscoping, by film live action actors or using live action stock footage to create Black Wolf’s army and action sequences from the movies Alexander Nevsky (1938), El Cid (1961), Zulu (1964), Battle of the Bulge (1965), and Patton (1970). Much of the footage was repeated as well to stretch out the pacing of the battle. Some of it worked and some of it was hard to make out. I think that was because it was done quickly and did not have the budget behind it to smooth out the edges.
The studio declined Bakshi's requests for salary increases and $50,000 to complete the battle sequence in the film so he funded what he could himself. Rotoscoping battle sequences was his best solution to do that. He said, "I thought that if we dropped all the detail, it would look very artistic, and very beautiful” “I'm looking for a way to get realism into my film and get real emotion." "It also was the way that showed me how to do Lord of the Rings." Lord of the Rings was released a year later.
On top of that there was the live action film placed in the background of cartoon animation. This to me is definitely a Bakshi fingerprint. Although Cool World released in 1992 got a lot of grief for trying to be a copy of Roger Rabbit, Bakshi was trying to do this much before and this kind of experimentation is the kind of thing that helps to push film technology forward.
The music was another fascinating element that lends to the tone of the film which was done by Andrew Belling. It was magical with an old world sound using lovey flutes and guitar. Then at a moment's notice there was a crescendo of sounds clashing together to depict the sounds of war with psychedelic electric guitars and organs. It set the mood wonderfully. Elinore's singing voice was provided by Susan Anton for the song.
Close to release, George Lucas kindly requested that Bakshi dropped the “War” part of the title of his film to avoid confusion with Star Wars. Bakshi agreed to change the title of the film, from War Wizards to Wizards. It was also agreed that Mark Hamill, who wanted more work in the industry, could take time off from Star Wars to record his voice for a small character in Wizards. His voice matched the character but it was hardly how we know his voice today. This kicked off a long repertoire of voice acting parts for Hamill.
Although you may ask around, “have you seen Wizards?” you may get a lot of shrugged shoulders, but for a film that cost only 1.2 million it made $9,000,000 at the Box Office. In 1977 that was an incredible profit.
Bakshi said that he intended Wizards to be seen as a trilogy. One of the sequels elaborated on the relationship between Avatar, Elinore and Weehawk. Let’s just say Weehawk “gets in the way". The film never came about, but even as late as 2015, Bakshi teased that he had a script finished.
I only learned about this film while I was doing research for one of Bakshi’s other films, Fire and Ice released in 1983. I was surprised that I hadn’t heard of it and I was indeed glad to have had the opportunity to see it. I feel that the film is definitely a warning to the audience about the influence of propaganda and how it was used in the past in our own history.
Propaganda feeds lies to the aimless and gives them a false purpose. It is exceedingly effective on those without self motivation. The most powerful tactic of propaganda feeds fear, compelling the masses to react in favor of the propagandist’s plans. For others it distracts and paralyses especially the mild hearted who cannot fathom such lies or evil.
Ultimately, it leads to the person or group controlling the propaganda keeping or gaining power over the masses. In the hands of a government or political cause, this could usher in fascism. At least that was what messages I could see from this film.
Within the story there is also a commentary about organized religion, the apathy of death during times of war, and the possible doom of history repeating itself. It’s very anti-war. This is very easy to see this message when we understand that America was only two years post the Vietnam war. Anti-war protests raged from 1953 to 1975 for the Vietnam war in which American drafted troops suffered about 58,220 deaths, 150,000 wounded, 21,000 disabled, and those alive left with some degree of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The message along with Bakshi’s unique visual techniques resulted in a pulsating psychedelic swirl of war and gore. Even though this is a heavy tone and the film is quite intense in many areas, it does take a few scenes to insert some levity and comedy. There is a famously funny scene referred to as, “They killed Fritz” which is hilarious!
This film and many of Ralph Bakshi’s works are considered precursors to MTV’s Liquid Television and Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. In particular it was said to have directly influenced the television show Adventure Time (2010).
The ending is also one of those comedic moments that take you by surprise, a lot like that moment in Indiana Jones The Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy shoots a swordsman preparing for an epic sword fight. Avatar doesn’t duel it out with Black Wolf with magic, but he simply shoots him with a gun. He uses technology? He uses technology, the thing that the film says is bad. The argument of technology being evil that is not one of the more refined arguments in the film because although Blackwolf uses an ancient projector, tanks and guns, Avatar uses a robot as his guide, conjured up a jukebox at one time during the film, and uses a gun to vanquish the enemy.
So the message is not that technology is bad, but it’s how you use it, and sometimes you use it because you have to. Again, that is my interpretation of the message. Please share your take in the comments.
There are so many themes and messages in the film from the mind of Bakshi. It may not be quite suitable for kids as Bakshi originally intended, but this was a big hit with young adults in the 1970’s and in many cases the wild visuals added to the experience if some of the audience dabbling with, uhm... certain substances.
In my opinion this is definitely an art film experimenting with mixing different styles of animation and mediums of film in a way that fascinates me. I love when artists try different techniques and I feel that Bakshi was really playing with all of this. He even got to explore this a lot more in his later movies.
Not every image works for everyone, but I enjoyed it a lot because no matter what Ralph Bakshi did creatively and what it ended up looking like it was still tied into his unique storytelling.
My Rating:
6.8
That sums up my review. I hope you liked it. This is Retro Nerd Girl signing off!
Take care movie lovers! I'm off to the next review!
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