Wizards Like Ralph

70s Fantasy on Blu-ray

Apr. 15, 2012

1:44 p.m.

Watching the 35th anniversary edition of Ralph Bakshi's Wizards on Blu-ray is like peering into a time capsule of an era long gone. The animated feature was considered a technical achievement in 1977a mind blower (especially if you saw it after sharing a bowl or two). And now it just seems odd, yet not uninteresting. Released just ahead of Star Wars and featuring the voice of Mark Hammill, Wizards has been overlooked by pop culture chroniclers in favor of the more enduringly popular fantasy/science-fiction sagas to follow. But Wizards was a manifestation of Tolkien's gathering influence over the world's imagination and drew from some of the same sources as George Lucas. Both directors visualized evil under the spell of Sergei Eisenstein's classic Russian film Alexander Nevsky. What's prescient in Bakshi's story is its assertion that terrorists will destroy the Earth as we know it with nukes. Anxiety over nuclear terrorism (as opposed to superpower Armageddon) was rare in the '70s. After the introductory bang, we enter Bakshi's version of Mordor and Middle Earth, where mutants and demons flock to the banner of the evil wizard Black Wolf while elves and fairies (who resurface after their long slumber) accord respect to the good wizard Avatar (a generation before the word entered everyday speech). Bakshi's perspective runs entirely counter to the commonplace assumptions of the 21st century. Wizards concerned a world war between magic and technology, the latter deemed an evil influence. “The only true technology is nature… The ancient dictators used technology to enslave the masses,” a wise old elf declares. Nowadays, most people piously believe the oppositethat technology will free us. Magic has receded in the face of Facebook. Still best remembered for his X-rated cartoon Fritz the Cat, Bakshi worked up Wizards from a '60s counterculture “back to the Garden” worldview. And yet, always the brash contrarian, his rather befuddled hero Avatar ends the war with a Lugar, not a love mantra. For the hardboiled Bakshi, flower power could only go so far. There are preposterous elements to the plot, particularly Black Wolf's successful deployment of Nazi propaganda films to mesmerize his troops and cause utter paralysis in his enemies. And stylistically, Wizards was a hodge-podge designed by Bakshi to convey different moods and characters The IBM-enhanced rotoscoping looks weak from the hindsight of CGI but the hand-drawn animation is often beautiful and striking with its collision of Betty Boop and Walt Disney and intimations of Japanese watercolors and Art Nouveau.