A New Cinematic Universe of Rankin, Bass, and Bakshi
being an illuminating history bearing on the everlasting struggle for world supremacy fought between the powers of TECHNOLOGY and MAGIC
There’s no such “cinematic universe” of course—their movies are not connected at all. But putting the Rankin and Bass animation The Flight of Dragons (1982) on for my older boy and listening to Ommadon’s evil plotting once again, I was struck by the surprising unity of that movie’s vision with what Ralph Bakshi presented in Wizards (1977).
Rankin and Bass are probably best known for their holiday specials, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) in particular, which get shown ad nauseum around the holidays. But to me their studio is better remembered for its animated production of The Hobbit (1977) and The Return of the King (1980)—both more faithful to Tolkien’s works than Peter Jackson, in my opinion.
Likewise, I would think Bakshi was better known for his X-rated cartoons like Fritz the Cat (1972), at least back when he was generally producing animated works. And yet his studio created the work that forms the unofficial “middle section” of the animated Tolkien adaptations, in The Lord of the Rings (1978), which covers approximately the first two books of that trilogy—the Rankin and Bass movie adapting the eponymous final book. And again, despite the weird rotoscoping and some of the hilariously bold animations—Sam Gamgee and the Balrog in particular—Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings is again the version I much prefer to Peter Jackson’s versions.
The Flight of Dragons is (very) loosely inspired by the book of the same name by Peter Dickinson, as well as the story The Dragon and the George by Gordon Dickson. It mixes Dickinson’s fantasy-naturalism—in descriptions of dragons flying by digesting limestone into hydrogen, and breathing fire by expelling the gas and lighting it with a naturally electrical organ in their mouths—with characters and the loose plot of Dickson’s narrative.
But it is its own story as well.
It opens with a scene of a swan, ridden by a bevy of fairies, half-drowned by the wheel of a water mill. Carolinus, the green wizard of the natural world, is incensed, but his attempt to “disappear” the mill with his magic literally falls short as his magic fails. Realizing that humankind have begun to abandon magic in preference for logic and science—and that this rejection is destroying magic—Carolinus calls for a council of the four brothers of magic, who together oversee the different magical realms.
Carolinus proposes to create a separate magical realm where dragons, fairies, wizards, and other magical beings can exist outside the realm of man, unaffected by his turn to logic and scientism—but Ommadon, the red wizard, master of evil and black magic, refuses this compromise with the development of science. Instead, he proposes his own solution—to inspire man with the evils of his own magical sphere. If man wants to fly, Ommadon will assist him with the use of airplanes for killing his fellows; if man wants to master the world, Ommadon will show him the secret of atoms, and the use of such science in the development of nuclear fire.
Thus is the quest initiated—the other three brothers, Carolinus, Solarius the blue wizard, and Lo Tae Zhao the gold wizard, agree to inspire champions to invade Ommadon’s dark land and to take the Red Crown from which he derives his dark magical powers. This is the main thrust of the movie—the adventures of the champions in their attempt to infiltrate Ommadon’s land and defeat the red wizard—but it ends with another confrontation between science and logic against magic.
Sir Peter is the champion that Carolinus ultimately finds—Peter Dickinson, a man of the twentieth century and a man of science—and he is the one who ultimately confronts Ommadon and defeats the red wizard’s evil magic with his powers of logical thought, which save him from the illogicism of Ommadon’s magic, and allow him ultimately to humiliate Ommadon into nothing.
This movie was a favorite of mine as a kid. I don’t know how many times I asked my parents to rent it at Hastings, but I feel like it was dozens, to watch it multiple times with every renting.
Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards is sui generis as far as I know—one of the most creative fantasy epics ever animated, with Elves like Weehawk vaguely resembling Amerindians—yet it definitely appears to be a dress rehearsal for the later-created The Lord of the Rings (1978), which used many of the same techniques as Wizards, but to higher standards.
In particular, Bakshi included many battle scenes using rotoscoping to animate at a budget in Wizards, which would later be used more artistically in his version of The Lord of the Rings. Because of the use of older footage for rotoscoping the battle scenes, Wizards can be a real treat to watch. It’s always amusing to see scenes out of Zulu, El Cid, or the old Russian medieval epic Alexander Nevsky touched up as fantasy battles.
The central conflict of Wizards is between two wizardly brothers, Avatar (the good guy) and Blackwolf (the bad guy, couldn’t you tell from his name?). They were born into a strange world, both post-apocalyptic and magical; for, as the opening narration tells, human beings had abused their scientific knowledge in self destruction: “The world blew up in a thousand atomic fireballs. The first blast was set off by five terrorists. It took two million years for some of the radioactive clouds to allow some sun in … then, in the good lands they came back, arising from their long sleep. Fairies, elves, dwarves—the true ancestors of man—they lived happily in the good areas.”
Avatar and Blackwolf were born of the same mother, but followed different paths of magic in this new world where magic has returned, after the final self-destruction of human science. After a battle in their youth, Blackwolf’s black magic was defeated and he was cast out to dwell with the mutants in the bad (radioactive) lands, while Avatar and his good magic helped oversee life in the good lands of fairies and elves.
But the story of Wizards properly begins with Blackwolf’s new acquisition of ancient human magic—specifically a projector that can show the propaganda and atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich. With this piece of technology, Blackwolf believes he can begin a conquest of the good lands, and he enacts a campaign of assassinations and invasions that prove that the evils of man are timeless, and that his technology can indeed overcome the magic of the elves.
With the good lands of the elves overrun by Blackwolf’s mutant armies and ancient technologies and ideologies, Avatar and certain companions embark on a quest to enter the badlands and to defeat Blackwolf and his technology themselves.
In an ending peculiarly rhyming with The Flight of Dragons, Wizards also ends with evil magic actually defeated by science—Avatar, performing a simple “magician’s trick” pulls a gun out of his sleeve and shoots Blackwolf, destroying him and his reign.
Both of these works obviously owe much to Tolkien, especially in their premise—an evil wizard, whose invincible magic is derived from some evil artifact, threatens the realm of elves and must be defeated. All three—The Lord of the Rings, The Flight of Dragons, and Wizards—involve themes of disenchantment, of the world of men and logic and science leaving behind the realms of enchantment, and the conflict between technology and magic (Blackwolf seems to me more to resemble Saruman, for instance, while Ommadon seems more clearly like Sauron).
Yet they are their own works, separate from Tolkien’s vision.
And it struck me, as I listened to Ommadon’s speech rejecting Carolinus’ vision of a separate magical realm, that they can be viewed as existing together in one (decidedly curious) continuum. A far more interesting “cinematic universe” than the drivel that’s been served at theaters and through streaming of late. Blackwolf is Ommadon, as Avatar is Carolinus, and Wizards’ post-apocalypse is the fulfilment of destiny if Sir Peter should fail in his quest to defeat Ommadon and prevent man’s descent into the ultimate madness of scientism and nuclear war.
In response to Carolinus’ proposal, Ommadon declares, “I will not concede defeat by this modern world. I will not retire to this fool’s paradise. … I have weapons you would not dare use. Fear rules men. By summoning all the dark powers, I will invest the spirit of man so that he uses his science and logic to destroy himself. … Turn brother against brother … I’ll teach man to use his machines. I’ll show him what distorted science can give birth to. I’ll teach him to fly like a fairy. And I’ll give the ultimate answer to all his science can ask. And the world will be free for my magic again. …”
He is literally calling the atom bomb an example of his magic, and is directly compared to the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion by the animation.
The rest of the movie tends to be less explicit in the conflict between evil technology and magic, until Peter emerges at the climax to chide Ommadon’s magical nonsense with scientific facts that “any schoolboy” should know, for instance what the speed of light is, and how that means the sun is not where it appears to be and cannot be directly plucked down from the sky where it seems to be. “I deny all magic!” Peter declares in a final refutation of Ommadon that calls to mind the destruction of the Ring in the Cracks of Doom, which also destroys the magic of the Elves in Middle Earth.
Meanwhile, Blackwolf is “literally Hitler”, with a swastika painted on the floor of his magical sanctum (including a lizard serpent who eats a carcass tattooed with a star of David), his use of Hitler’s propaganda to inspire his own troops and demoralize the elves, and the imagery of Blackwolf’s mutants occupying and abusing the people of the good lands like the Nazis in occupied Europe. The Nazis make sense when trying to pick out an embodiment of the technologization of evil and death, the Nazis make an obvious choice—they literally industrialized death. Of course Bakshi had a further personal reason for equating an evil wizard with Hitler and the Nazis’ atrocities, as Bakshi is Jewish.
But Blackwolf is not just a one-to-one clone of the evil of the twentieth century—he and his reign and wars are the fulfillment of Ommadon’s speech. Two million years after the apocalypse of a nuclear war, Blackwolf continues to personify the very evil that brought about that apocalypse (within the fiction). He revels in visuals of Stuka dive bombers, swastikas, and conquering prowess of the Nazi regime. His realm is one of tank and aircraft factories and occupation by hostile armies, while the realms of the good lands are idyllic.
The imagery of Wizards is strangely mixed—literal World War Two footage, rotoscoped cuts from various historical epics, tank and machinegun wielding demons, and elves armed with swords and shields in barbed-wire trenches obviously inspired by the Great War. It’s fantastic, in both meanings of the words. There’s a similar element in The Flight of Dragons, less visually, but in the plot of a twentieth-century man of science being juxtaposed against the otherwise faux-medieval setting of fantasy.
These movies are of distinctly different visual traditions, from studios with wildly different philosophies. I don’t even think they’re supposed to hold the same audiences, exactly, given that Rankin and Bass made children’s films, while Bakshi innovated with X-rated cartoons. Yet they hold together somewhat in the way that the Alien movies do—the same conflict, the same themes, but each of the three told by a different director with a different plot and palette of visuals (yes, there are only three Alien movies).
Perhaps if I were to add a middle third movie to the “cinematic universe” of The Flight of Dragons and Wizards it would be The NeverEnding Story (1984). The Gmork and the Nothing that he serves are clearly in line with the wider themes of Ommadon and Blackwolf. As the Gmork explains when Atreyu asks him about Fantasia and the Nothing: “… Fantasia [is] the world of human fantasy. Every part, every creature, is a piece of the dreams and hopes of mankind. … [It’s dying because] people have begun to lose their hopes and forget their dreams, so the Nothing grows stronger. … [the Nothing is] the emptiness that’s left. It is like a despair, destroying this world. And I have been trying to help it … Because people who have no hopes are easy to control, and whoever has the control has the power.”
These movies are all obviously quite different. There is no shared “universe” within which they exist—they’re the creations of different teams, different visions, inspired as they may be by different writings. The NeverEnding Story has the least debt to Tolkien, but all, indebted as they may be, are their own unique stories nevertheless.
Yet it seems to me that they hold together thematically with more coherence than much of what gets lumped together in the same “universe” in film these days. And I would prefer works like these—independent, different, building off of each other only incidentally as each is interested in a perennial theme, and all visually distinct—to what is now often presented in the theater or on the “TV” of streaming platforms. The various Star Wars products, for instance, seem generally tied together by a visual cohesion, while lacking any kind of thematic adherence to the vision of the original films as a continuation of the old adventure serials and World War Two films to which the original Star Wars of 1977 was an homage.
I know these films are oddballs—my own particular predilections, and not necessarily general audiences’ favorites. Wizards in particular, and Bakshi more generally, I expect only “cult” audiences might really enjoy. But there is something that is really timeless and universal about the themes and material they’re engaging with.
Perhaps the shared “universe” that I’m seeing them as part of is really just the deeper shared collective unconscious, instead of just a “cinematic universe” of incidental characters and mere plotpoints.
Did somebody mention a plate of shrimp?