FANTASIA OBSCURA: An Enchanting Fantasy Or a Not So Magical Animation?
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, it’s hard not to draw the wrong conclusions if they don’t draw enough themselves…
Wizards (1977)
Distributed by: Twentieth Century Fox
Directed by: Ralph Bakshi
When last we took a look at 1977, when Fox released Star Wars (for which a tie-in film just opened), it was hard not to wonder about the studio’s devotion to Damnation Alley, the genre film that Fox felt would be superior to Lucas’ release.
It’s a bit more complicated than that when you look again and find, to quote Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, “There is another…”
We’re told in an opening exposition overfilled with static images and expositive narration (provided by an uncredited Susan Tyrell) that the Earth blew up in a nuclear war started by terrorists some two million years ago. Said war turned most humans into mutants who roamed the wastes, while at the same time in the non-radioactive areas “the true ancestors of man” as they call them, fairies, elves, and dwarves, reclaim the surface of the world.
It’s in the midst of this scarred/blessed world that one of the leaders of the fairies, Delia, gives almost instant birth to two wizards, the beautiful looking and good-hearted Avatar (voiced once the movie finishes this sequence and gets started already by Bob Holt) and the monstrous and evil Blackwolf (likewise voiced by Steve Gravers). The two grow up to fulfill their looks-based-determined destinies, and on Delia’s death there’s an inevitable contest for control. Avatar banishes Blackwolf to the charred land of Scortch, Blackwolf plots revenge, and the animation finally starts when it isn’t interrupted from time to time for reasons discussed later on.
As the narration finally ends, after we’re told of Blackwolf’s last invasion of the elves with mutants not going so well when his army dies, we see him sending out robotic assassins to kill the leaders of the lands he wishes to conquer. One of them, Necron 99 (voiced by David Proval), kills the president of Montagar, where Avatar was residing, tutoring the president’s daughter Elinore (voiced by Jesse Welles) in the ways of magic.
Avatar examines Necron 99, which he renames “Peace”, and learns through the former assassin that Blackwolf has a secret weapon(s). In addition to rediscovering the use of machine guns and tanks, he has an intact Nazi propaganda film, complete with the “Horst Wessel Song” blaring on the soundtrack, with which he intends to inspire his mutants to victory.
Which, considering how well it works when first tried, may well be the key to victory…
Stirred to action, Avatar and Elinore, along with Peace and the former head of security for Montagar, the elf Weehawk (voiced by Richard Romanus), start a quest to go to Scortch to put an end to Blackwolf’s plans of conquest. It’s a perilous journey, which includes a fateful meeting with a group of fairies led by Sean (voiced by Mark Hamill) and the forces of their enemy amassed against them.
Which makes it all the harder as the Fellowship tries to make its way to drop the One Ring into Mount Doom-
Before you scream, “But that’s The Lord of the Rings!” let’s keep in mind that Bakshi does his own version of that story a year later for Warner Brothers, reusing some of the footage from Wizards. Which, because Fox refused to give more money to the film at the same time they were making Damnation Alley add shots of the Landmaster, gets reused there too.
Bakshi’s solution to having to animate a large battle for two theatrical movies? Rotoscope the hell out of the classic Alexander Nevsky and hope the audience is too stoned to care.
Sure, it’s cost effective, and drawing over each cell of this Soviet masterpiece along with Nazi propaganda film can give your piece a distinct feel. But no matter how much you claim otherwise, redrawing over the work of Sergei Eisenstein and Leni Riefenstahl does not make you a major animation talent. It feels cheap and derivative, which considering how the film was originally going to be an adaptation of Vaughn Bode’s work with his characters from his Cheech Wizard strips but ended up here, was probably inevitable.
If anything, this feels like it’s a continuation of Bakshi’s campaign to shock audiences into compliance, much like Blackwolf’s use of the Nazi footage to cow his enemies. Bakshi endured some horrific production experiences while doing animated TV in the late ’60s on such projects as The Mighty Heroes, Rocket Robin Hood, and the second season of Spider-Man (on which, to save money, Bakshi once rotoscoped Spidey’s adventures over an episode of Rocket Robin to mind-numbing effect). Out of that crucible came such projects as Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic, and Coonskin, pieces of animation that used outrage and taboo to cover a lack of craft.
His approach is on full display in Wizards in a scene where the forces of Scortch try and give their prisoners to some priests to care for:
With limited inspiration and an even more limited budget, Bakshi has only shock to make his work click and stick. Having to settle on his second choice for subject, to retell the story of the Second World War in a ham-fisted manner, by evoking tons of outrage to keep people watching through static tableaus and overdrawing existing footage, doesn’t allow for non-fans of the animator much to find their way to appreciate him. The fact that after this film, his limitations became stylistic choices for all his work following this (especially in the musical-ish American Pop) makes it hard to fathom the long term appeal Bakshi enjoys today.
Other than the suggested target audience mentioned earlier (yes, this film did get wide play on the “midnight movie” circuit), the closest answer one gets to imagining how this achieved any sympathy, may have been a sense then, that animation was no longer a vibrant art form. With Walt Disney’s successors using xerographic scene fills in films like Robin Hood and The Rescuers and the declining quality of Hannah-Barbera output during the 1970s, the average audience might have assumed that no one was bothering to put in the work to do good animation anymore, and that even low quality work was better than nothing new to watch.
Unbeknownst to most of them, while this film was playing in theaters, Hayao Miyazaki was wrapping production on his first theatrical release, The Castle of Cagliostro, which gave us a much brighter future than what was being shown on screen…
NEXT TIME: What a happy couple they make, when they’re not trying to kill each other…
