The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings (1978) is Ralph Bakshi's animated fantasy you can watch online on iFILM. It was the first major screen version of J. R. R. Tolkien's epic, arriving a full quarter-century before Peter Jackson's trilogy.

Hobbit Frodo Baggins inherits the One Ring, forged by the dark lord Sauron. The only way to unmake it is to drop it into the fires of Mount Doom, deep inside Mordor, and Frodo does not go alone: Gandalf, the ranger Aragorn, the elf Legolas, the dwarf Gimli, and his friends from the Shire set out with him. The film covers The Fellowship of the Ring and roughly half of The Two Towers, ending at the battle of Helm's Deep. A young John Hurt voices Aragorn.

Bakshi shot it using rotoscope: live actors in costume were filmed first, then traced frame by frame, which gives the marching orc hordes their eerie, lurching motion. The picture underperformed and was left unfinished, yet it pushed a whole generation of animators toward Middle-earth. Stream The Lord of the Rings (1978) online on iFILM.