Lord of the Rings : 2 of 5

I decided to rent Ralph Bashki's animated Lord of the Rings as a visit to my childhood memories of the story, back when I was playing D&D at the library and reading the Monster Manual every day. I remember really loving this movie, because it was my first image imprinting of what this amazing story might actually look like. It was no problem for my high school brain to stay interested in this long, long movie, which covers the first two books of the trilogy. Unfortunately, that's not the case today - I think the live action masterpieces have spoiled me. It was fun to see how the same scenes were handled in animation versus the recent movies, but other than that it wasn't that exciting. Most of all, looking at the movie with my animation critic eyes, I can't believe how much of the film was rotoscoped (filming a scene in live action and then tracing over the film to transform it into animation). Most of it is painfully obvious and distracting. This movie was certainly an amazing effort, but it's time has come and gone, I'm afraid.