Animated Lord of the Rings

I've recently been reading a bunch of hysterical critiques of Bakshi's Lord of the Rings and the Rankin/Bass Return of the King. I loved the reviews because they pointed out all the idiosyncratic and idiotic elements of the movies, that my sister and I have been laughing at for the past ten years. I do have a soft spot in my heart for them, however. Farmor showed them to us when I was 8, and I was so enthralled that I tracked down the trilogy (hiding in Daddy's garage) and read it in a week (and then read it again). So, I had to think of something good about them, and here it is:

The Rankin/Bass Return of the King is filled with sappy songs that can be quite annoying. One that comes up more than once is "It's so easy not to try / let the world go drifting by. / If you never say hello, / you won't have to say goodbye." Silly. Sappy. Sorry.

HOWEVER

I think that this song alone gets closer to the heart of Tolkien's trilogy than anything Jackson made. Peter Jackson got so excited about the special effects and action, that he lost the beautiful wistfulness of the books. Tolkien is always talking about beauty passing away and being lost. Elf women give up their immortality, and Frodo Baggins give up the Shire that he suffered to protect. Yet Tolkien shows that it is better to have these beautiful things and lose them, than it is to just protect yourself.

This reminds me of a quote by C.S. Lewis: "Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."

Lewis states eloquently what Tolkien showed in his book: To love is to be vulnerable, but obviously worth it. Rankin/Bass's song may not have been very eloquent. The movie may have missed plot details and hopelessly confused what it added. But it made the same point, through the song, and the bits of the Sam/Frodo story that they portrayed (admittedly, they did not preserve the point in the other half of the story as well, but then Sam and Frodo get the most screen time in this movie).

Doesn't that make the movie seem so much nicer!