Review: The Return of the King (1980)
Friendly orcs? Robot noises? Must be Rankin-Bass.
Best known for holiday specials like Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), Frosty the Snowman (1969), and A Year Without A Santa Claus (1974), Rankin-Bass permeates my generation’s 1980s stop-action nightmare-scape, when we were old enough to absorb these much loved yet deeply disturbing offerings and our parents left us alone a lot and let the TV babysit (just me?). The directorial duo of Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass also released quite a few medieval-ish movies: The Last Unicorn and The Flight of Dragons (both 1982), as well as their polarizing takes on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1977) and The Return of the King (1980) (hereafter RotK).
Animation for both films was by Topcraft, then a successful Tokyo-based animation studio, which would go on after its 1985 collapse to become Studio Ghibli under the management of Topcraft’s founder, Toru Hara. Both films therefore have a distinctive look that anticipated later films like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), the last the studio made before their transition to Ghibli; Nausicaä and others like it helped anime enter mainstream pop cultural consciousness in the US. Contemporary reviewers like the LA Times’ Charles Solomon found that the animation had “a distinctly Japanese look that clashes with the Celtic sources on which Tolkien drew,” though what “Celtic” animation would have looked like in 1980 is anyone’s guess (Secret of Kells, anyone?).1 It’s interesting that 40-odd years later War of the Rohirrim (2024), directed by Kenji Kamiyama but produced by Peter Jackson, pretty successfully manages to blend Japanese animation with soundscapes (including some actual actors like Miranda Otto, Dominic Monaghan, and the AI summoned spirit of Christopher Lee) from the Jackson films; it wasn’t perfect, but I really enjoyed it.
With folksy yet epic soundtracks by Maury Laws (with occasional robot/ laser noises thrown in for good measure), lyrics by Jules Bass, and songs performed by warbly former Limeliter Glenn Yarborough, Hobbit and RotK do feel at once like a cohesive unit, a logical addition to the Rankin-Bass oeuvre, and a culmination of Tolkien’s immense 1960s-era countercultural popularity, all packaged and marketed for the kids from Stranger Things. What could go wrong?
Contemporary critics were not impressed by RotK. A range of Boomer-aged fans interviewed for the Tolkien fandom documentary Ringers: Lord of the Fans (dir. Carlene Cardova, 2005) suggest that RotK was singlehandedly responsible for making it uncool to admit you liked Tolkien in the early 1980s.2 Indeed, even Rankin knew it wasn’t his best work. In a 2003 interview (recorded just before the release of Peter Jackson’s Return of the King), he admitted: “I said before I didn’t think Return of the King was a very good film, and I don’t…I’d like to recall that.”
The Background: Tolkien, Fans, and Fandom
In the Year of our Lord 2025, after two Peter Jackson trilogies and two seasons of Rings of Power that is trying very hard to look and sound like the Peter Jackson trilogies (and whose most compelling character by far is the horse), it is easy to forget that there have been other Tolkien adaptations that looked, well, different. From the 1967 cartoon version of The Hobbit that replaces the dwarves with a princess (because why the heck not) to the 1985 Soviet made-for-TV children’s film with “The Professor” narrating large sections to gloss over the fact that they only had like three sets, to the nine-part 1993 Finnish TV miniseries Hobitit that makes me wish I knew Finnish, to never-made versions by the Stanley Kubrick/ the Beatles and John Boorman, the desire to bring Tolkien’s work to the screen has been strong almost from its publication.3
Tolkien, however, was not optimistic about film. The Hobbit was published in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings in 1954, and his work found early popularity in the US through science fiction fan clubs and the college campuses where they recruited.4 Tolkien-centric fanzines run by clubs proliferated during the 1950s and 1960s, and even came directly to Tolkien’s notice, as when Eric (alias Bilbo) Bentcliffe sent him two issues of his zine Triode and Tolkien responded with a letter including some reflections on film. Tolkien acknowledged that while producers had approached him, “only an overwhelming financial reward could compensate an author for the horrors of the conversion of such a tale into film. Even when the pictorial part is very good.”5
The possessiveness Tolkien felt toward his creation is understandable. But even contemporary reviews of the Rankin-Bass films were full of authoritative pronouncements, not just about the films as films, but about their failure to correctly portray their source material. Solomon, commenting on several (admittedly bizarre) scenes in RotK that present honestly pretty cute orcs, remarks in a categorical and almost comically militant manner that “Orcs are not a misguided people eager to return to their peacetime pleasures - they are bloodthirsty monsters whose existence no virtuous being can suffer.”6 And in a 1978 review of Rankin-Bass’ Hobbit adaptation for Cinefantastique, David Hutchison takes exception to the depiction of Gandalf, who in the film is a “rather nebulously defined figure of sour disposition,” while “the real Gandalf warms, as a fire.”7
Fans are an occupational hazard for adapters of Tolkien. Rankin commented that “you can’t deviate from these books or somebody will wait on the street for you.”8 Peter Jackson, a Tolkien fan, understood this, and his production team actively engaged with fans during filming via the existing fan community at TheOneRing.net.9 And Rings of Power’s inclusion of non-white actors as elves and Harfoots (proto-hobbits, another good band name) drew howls of outrage from certain corners of the internet, along with accusations that showrunners had gotten Tolkien fundamentally wrong (maybe, though that’s definitely not the reason).
Historian Norman Cantor noted that Tolkien’s achievement in the 600,000-word Lord of the Rings was “a triple decker work of imagination” made possible by the Oxford don’s philological expertise in ancient British languages - the work entailed first an invented language, including different dialects; then an epic narrative supposed to have been written in the language; and finally, the invented translation of that narrative into modern English.10 For Tolkien, what he called sub-creation and the practice of fantasy was the fundamental human act. In his 1947 essay “On Fairy Stories,” he argued that good fantasy required commitment to realism, the illusion of a multilayered reality that lay below the surface. Tolkien argued that “the story-maker…makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter,” which should feel so real that it amounts, as Tolkien scholar Carl Phelpstead put it, “an involuntary suspension of disbelief.”11
So Tolkien might have been delighted that Hutchison thought he knew “the real Gandalf” or that Solomon could make such a pronouncement about what the orcs truly were or were not (though who knows whether Tolkien would have agreed with any of it). Which brings me right back to RotK, because fan’s prerogative aside, even I think there’s still probably no universe in which an orc becomes a janky coatimundi. (I bet you’ve never seen all those words in the same sentence before.)
My Review
In case you couldn’t tell, I have a real soft spot for the Rankin-Bass Tolkien films. I first encountered Tolkien through the Rankin-Bass cartoons as a pretty young child in the late 1980s. Afterwards, I often checked Tolkien’s books out from my local library, but I only encountered the texts in the first place because I had seen the cartoons. I know intellectually and artistically that RotK is not a good movie. But I’m still not ashamed to say that these movies color my sense of who the “real” Gandalf/ orcs/ hobbits are, and not Tolkien’s books.
WHAT HAPPENS: In Rivendell for Bilbo’s 129th birthday party, Gandalf (John Huston), with musical backup from the Minstrel of Gondor (Glenn Yarborough), narrates for the sundowning Bilbo (Orson Bean) the tale of the hobbits Frodo (confusingly also Orson Bean) and Sam (Roddy McDowall) as they creep across Mordor to destroy the Ring of Power, accompanied by Gandalf’s narration and more musical numbers than you might think given the circumstances.
NOT SO GREAT:
Structural problems. If this movie were a building it would be condemned and bulldozed. Charles Solomon, who is full of quotable quotes! likened it to “doing Gone with the Wind by starting with the burning of Atlanta.”12 Character development, especially of non-hobbit characters, is limited. The titular king, Aragorn (Theodore Bikel), is introduced in a voiceover and in his only substantial bits of dialogue (with Gandalf and then with the Mouth of Sauron) he just sounds like a jerk. Eowyn (Nellie Bellflower) is introduced via awkward exposition between Merry and Pippin after she takes her helmet off and right before she kills the Witch King; her one scene is still one of the more striking.
Robot noises. This bothered me more than it does now until I remembered that Skeletor also had computers. Frodo’s sword, Sting, when unsheathed, as well as the Ring when in use sound not at all like unchecked power but quite like tinnitus, which is perhaps entertaining for a child but unsettling for someone approaching middle age whose concert days are mostly behind her, thank you. The phial of Galadriel [sic] makes a computer-y sound, with accompanying visual kaleidoscope effect. And there’s a similar weird robot beep-beep-boop-boop basso continuo under “Towers of the Teeth (Win the Battle, Lose the War),” which I rank as only the second best song in the movie.
Gandalf’s fourth wall violation. I didn’t remember this and may have actually yelped out loud.
YELLOW CARD
Sir Not Appearing in this Film. Not having Faramir in the movie makes Denethor make way less sense as a character (who is this old person demanding to be set on fire?). But Faramir does show up for 10 seconds during Aragorn’s march into Minas Tirith on a horse next to Eowyn, which is kind of nice.
Adorable orcs. I couldn’t remember if I hallucinated the part of the “Samwise the Strong” sequence where orcs turn into various (fantastical? actually can’t tell) mammals and birds or not. I did not. I don’t mind it, though. My childhood self always suspected a bond of kinship between Rankin-Bass orcs and Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things - sometimes those orcs even as orcs are downright adorable, and I like them that way.
STAMP OF APPROVAL
Workers of the World Unite. 1980 saw the release of not one but two of the best working-person’s anthems ever composed. One is “Nine to Five,” sung by Dolly Parton and released alongside the film of the same name, featuring musically timed typewriters. The other is “Where There’s a Whip There’s a Way,” sung by a chorus of orcs and featuring musically timed whip cracks. There’s an Amazon warehouse joke in here somewhere but I refuse to make it.
Poor little fella Standup Tragedy. Self-described “standup tragedian” Brother Theodore is, as in The Hobbit, the MVP voice actor of the bunch, and does a lot with only about 5 minutes of screen time as Gollum. My childhood self was always terrified of Gollum (pretty sure he lived under my bed/ was going to grab my ankles if I got up at night, etc.), but watching now as an adult he’s so sad! He sounds soul-weary and also kind of hungover. He’s a way less energetic Gollum than Andy Serkis, but he’s also very effective.
Final Thoughts
Who, and what, was this movie for? How do I reconcile my sincere affection for a movie that I know perfectly well is not a good movie?
I keep coming back to the criticism that RotK doesn’t make sense if you haven’t read the book. But for me anyway, as a kid, not a lot made sense? And its apparent lack of coherence did give me the feeling that there was a larger history behind the story on screen, one that I could investigate and know more about, that would illuminate the striking images and the silly but honestly very catchy songs - that was deeply appealing to me (not for nothing did I grow up to be a professional historian). I think it’s also the same reason why Jackson’s trilogy had extended editions, and all those hours of special features. I think it’s why Rings of Power, while beautiful, felt so hollow to me - it’s nothing but highly produced surface, the appendices made depressingly concrete. And this, I think, is what Tolkien meant about the power of sub-creation - the very existence of gaps in fandom provide a catalyst to further action/ thinking/ fantasy, and not an ending. So to me anyway, the fact that RotK doesn’t make a lick of sense turned out to be a feature, not a bug.
Charles Solomon (May 10, 1980), “Lawsuit threatened showing of ‘Return of the King’,” Los Angeles Times pp. 5, 10. Critics seem mainly to have been traumatized enough by The Hobbit not to have attempted reviews of RotK; see confused to terrible reviews by John J. O’Connor, “TV Weekend: The Hobbit,” New York Times November 28, 1977; John Culhane, “Will the Video Version of Tolkien be Hobbit-Forming?” New York Times November 27, 1977; Baird Searles, "'Baggins! We hates it, we hates it!'" The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction April 1978; David Hutchison, “The Hobbit,” Cinefantastique 7.2 (1978), p. 28.
I feel like they may be overstating the case for how cool it ever has been to admit you like Tolkien.
On these, see especially Kristin Thompson, “Film Adaptations, Theatrical, and Television Versions” in A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien 2nd ed., ed. Stuart D. Lee (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022), pp. 497-510.
See for example Douglas Anderson, “The Mainstreaming of Fantasy and the Legacy of The Lord of the Rings,” in The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder ed. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull (Marquette, 2006), pp. 305-315; Cait Coker, “Fandom” in Companion ed. Lee, pp. 525-535.
If you are so inclined and have some time to kill, may I recommend a deep dive through Marquette University Raynor Library’s amazing digitized collection of Tolkien fanzines. There’s also an incredibly useful online finding aid compiled by Sumner Gary Hunnewell.
Solomon p. 10.
Hutchison, p. 28.
@12:48
Later documented in Erica Challis, ed., The People’s Guide to J.R.R. Tolkien (Cold Spring Press, 2003) and in the Ringers documentary film.
Norman Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, (Lutterworth, 1991), p. 226.
Carl Phelpstead, “Myth-making, Sub-creation, and World-building,” in Companion ed. Lee, pp. 67-78, 74; J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” in Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, (Harper-Collins, 1997), p. 144.
Solomon, p. 10.