Wizards (1977) Review

Nothing Else Like It

Wizards is one of the weirdest animated films I love. It’s uneven, underfunded and occasionally incoherent, and there’s nothing else like it. A children’s fairy tale collides with a war film and a propaganda documentary, and the collision is what the film is about. It looks like three different films stitched together by someone who ran out of time and money, and in a sense that’s exactly what happened, and the seams are where it becomes interesting.

Ralph Bakshi wrote and directed it after Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic and Coonskin, three adult animated films that had made him the most controversial animator in America. Twentieth Century Fox released it in February 1977, a few months before Star Wars, on a tiny budget. It made a healthy profit and became a cult film. I give it an 8.

The World After

The film opens with narration over still paintings. Millions of years after a nuclear war, the world has split in two. The elves, fairies and gentle creatures live in green, magical lands. The mutants, twisted by radiation, live in the scorched wastes of Scortch. Technology has been forgotten, and magic has returned.

The fairy queen gives birth to twin wizards. Avatar is kind, lazy and fond of his comforts. Blackwolf is cruel, ambitious and certain. When their mother dies, Blackwolf is driven out, and he goes to Scortch to build an empire. Susan Tyrrell narrates the opening in a slightly wry voice, and the picture-book paintings give it the feel of an old story being read aloud.

The Propaganda Reels

Blackwolf digs up the machinery of the old world, and his armies start winning because he’s found a projector and a stock of Nazi propaganda films. He screens the footage in the sky above the battlefield. His own mutant soldiers are whipped into a frenzy, and his enemies, faced with images they’ve never seen and can’t understand, are paralysed with terror.

It’s the boldest idea in the film. Blackwolf doesn’t need better weapons. He needs better pictures. For a cheap cartoon in 1977, it’s a sharp point about what propaganda does and why it works, and it’s the image everyone who has seen the film remembers.

Bakshi grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants, and he’s said Wizards came partly from his anger about fascism. The film is simplistic, and it’s sincere, and the image of an army made fearless by old footage on a screen still lands.

The Rotoscoped Battles

Bakshi ran out of money, and he turned the shortage into a style. The big battle scenes are rotoscoped: traced over live-action footage from older war and epic films, including Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, and printed in harsh red and black. The Nazi newsreels Blackwolf screens are real footage.

Next to the soft, round, cartoonish main characters, the effect is jarring. That’s exactly what the film needs. It looks like history’s violence breaking into a fairy tale. It was a cheap solution to an expensive problem, and it became the film’s signature.

Bakshi would push rotoscoping much further in The Lord of the Rings the following year, and there it drew real criticism. In Wizards, used in shorter bursts and printed in stark colors, it works better, because it’s meant to look alien. The roughness is deliberate.

The Title Change

The film was going to be called War Wizards. Star Wars was in production at the same studio, and George Lucas asked Bakshi to drop the word War so the titles wouldn’t be confused. Bakshi agreed, and in return Lucas lent him Mark Hamill, who voices a small role.

Two films about good against evil technology came out a few months apart from the same studio in 1977. One changed cinema forever. The other became a cult favorite. It’s a strange footnote in both men’s careers, and a reminder of how close together very different visions of fantasy were being made. Lucas went bright, clean and optimistic. Bakshi went grimy, political and strange, and the two films are almost perfect opposites in what they believe technology will do to us.

Bakshi has told the story many times, and without bitterness. Lucas asked politely, Bakshi agreed, and both films went out into the world. Only one became a phenomenon, but Wizards found a loyal audience of its own.

The Voices

Bob Holt plays Avatar with an obvious Peter Falk impression, so the good wizard sounds like Columbo: rumpled, unhurried and funnier than he looks. Jesse Welles plays Elinore, the fairy princess, Richard Romanus plays Peace, a former assassin robot reprogrammed by Avatar, and David Proval plays Weehawk, an elf warrior.

The voice work is uneven, like everything else in the film, but it has personality. Avatar in particular is a likeable hero, a wizard who would much rather be having a drink than saving the world, and who does it anyway. Peace, the reformed killer, gets the film’s most interesting arc, and the scenes of him learning to be something other than a machine are among its best.

Peace in particular deserves more attention than he gets. A machine built to kill, now choosing to protect, he’s the film’s quiet argument that technology isn’t evil in itself. It’s a thoughtful idea buried in a very noisy film.

The Art

The backgrounds and designs came partly from Ian Miller, whose dense, spiky pen drawings give Scortch its twisted, nightmarish look, and from Mike Ploog, a comics artist who designed many of the characters. The two styles never quite match, and the film doesn’t try to make them.

It’s a patchwork, and the patchwork is part of its charm. Every sequence looks a little different from the one before, depending on who drew it and how much money was left. The result feels less like a studio film and more like a sketchbook come to life. Miller’s work in particular, all spikes and towers and crowded detail, has influenced fantasy illustration ever since, and freezing the film on a background will show you why.

Avatar and Blackwolf

The twin brothers are the film’s real subject. The film treats their rivalry like a family quarrel that grew into a world war, and the brief flashback to their mother’s death and their first fight is one of the few moments where Bakshi lets the cartoon become sad.

Avatar’s trip toward Scortch, with Elinore, Peace and Weehawk, is a quest with a personal cost. He’s going to face his brother, and he knows it. The film never lets you forget that the war is, at bottom, two boys who hated each other as children. Every army, every propaganda reel and every ruined city grows from that old family wound, and the final confrontation is as much a sibling argument as a battle for the world.

That’s what gives the film its odd, personal weight. Bakshi made it in the shadow of the Vietnam War, and the idea that great wars start with small, private hatreds between people who should know better runs underneath all the fantasy.

The Pistol

After a whole film of magic, propaganda and battles, Avatar finally reaches Blackwolf, and the world expects a great duel between wizards. Avatar reaches into his robe, pulls out a pistol and shoots his brother dead.

It’s played as a joke, the kind of anticlimax a film makes when it wants to laugh at its own genre, and it’s also the film’s argument in miniature. Old technology has become magic, and the only answer the good wizard has is the same weapon. Whether that’s cynical or clever depends on the day you watch it. It’s certainly the most memorable ending of any animated fantasy of its era.

Animation has few endings as memorable, because it refuses the payoff the genre promises. After eighty minutes of spells and speeches, the good wizard ends the war with a gun, and the audience is left to decide what that says about him and about us.

Where It Went Wrong

The script is the weak point. The story lurches from jokes to battles to fairy tale, the pacing sags in the middle as the heroes wander between set pieces, and Elinore is written as little more than a cartoon pin-up. Some of the humour hasn’t aged well at all.

It’s also rated PG and shouldn’t be by modern standards. Characters are shot and blown up, the battles are brutal and the Nazi imagery is meant to disturb. It’s not a film for young children, whatever the fairy-tale opening suggests. Older children who like fantasy and don’t mind strangeness often love it, because it treats them as capable of handling something serious, but parents should watch it first.

Bakshi’s Career

Ralph Bakshi was the great outsider of American animation. His first feature, Fritz the Cat in 1972, was the first animated film to receive an X rating in the United States, and his next two, Heavy Traffic and Coonskin, were adult, angry and controversial. Coonskin in particular drew protests over its racial imagery before it was even released, and it’s still rarely shown.

Wizards was his attempt to make something younger audiences could see and enjoy. It’s still unmistakably his: rough, political, strange and personal. It was followed by his animated The Lord of the Rings in 1978, then American Pop, a history of American music told through four generations of one family, and Fire and Ice, a sword-and-sorcery film made with the fantasy artist Frank Frazetta.

His later career was uneven, and his studio-backed Cool World in 1992, mixing animation and live action, was a notorious failure. His influence has lasted far longer than his box office. A generation of animators who wanted to make films for adults, and who wanted animation to be personal, looked to Bakshi as proof that it could be done.

Wizards sits in the middle of that career, gentler than the adult films that came before it and rougher than The Lord of the Rings. It’s the one where his personal obsessions, war, propaganda, technology and the loss of innocence, come through most clearly, in a form that younger viewers could still share. It’s the purest distillation of what he cared about, made with more heart than money.

Where It Sits

It found its audience on midnight screenings and home video. It’s now a cult favorite, especially among people who grew up with it and with the fantasy art of the seventies. Its influence is felt more in underground animation and heavy metal album covers than in mainstream film.

The next year Bakshi made his animated The Lord of the Rings, using the same rotoscoping at enormous scale, for better and worse. Wizards is the rough draft, and in some ways it’s the more personal of the two, because it knows exactly what it wants to say. Watch it for the ideas and the images, and forgive the rest.

Craft Note

The Verdict on Wizards

Mostly. It’s an 8. The pacing sags, some of the humour is dated and the animation is all over the place, but the ideas and the images stay with you. Anyone interested in animation outside the Disney mould should see it, and anyone who loves Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings should see where it came from.

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