Well, let me start with the positives that come to mind. First of all, kudos to Ralph Bakshi for venturing into the realm of adult-oriented animation, especially as early as 1977. "Wizards" may be a miserable specimen of a cartoon, but it had the guts to stretch the bounds of the genre, which is more than most animations can say, even thirty years later. Also, -some- of the character animation is well done, and many of the character designs resemble horribly twisted caricatures of Dr. Seuss ideas...which is kinda cool in a dark and creepy way. The majority of the characters, however, are nothing short of awful. And then I suppose I should also mention that the song during the ending credits was kinda nice...and I almost actually felt emotion when Avatar cried, considering he is portrayed as a ridiculous goof in the rest of the movie. Almost.

You may be wondering how it is that I have anything good to say about an animation to which I have given the lowest possible rating. Well, "Wizards" is absolutely unlike anything I've seen before, in that it has a few brilliantly shining, microscopic qualities, and the rest of it is unimaginably, incomprehensibly, unfathomably, horrendously, excruciatingly bad. So let's get to that part.

The story is just an excuse to show a World War II, "Nazi's-vs.-goodguys" scenario, with fantasy creatures. I'm not making a comparison. I mean it is ACTUALLY about a battle between Nazi goblins and ghouls, who watch actual Hitler footage from their evil wizard's projector, and the "Allies" of elves, dwarves, and faeries. I don't know why there are no humans, or for that matter, why this movie was ever made. Bakshi even had the nerve to rotoscope broken, shadowy footage of WWII and cheesy, live-action actors dressed in costumes into the battle scenes, complete with swirling, nonsensical rainbow backgrounds, apparently thinking they would somehow fit into his otherwise animated feature. I almost felt insulted by this...my eyes, at least, were.

Did I say "otherwise animated?" I almost forgot to mention that about half of the movie consists of black and white still frames, with a voice-over narrator describing to you what is happening. Now...I've always had a pet peeve for movies that tell you - rather than show you - the setting in the beginning, as well as movies that say things like, "3,000 years later." Not only does "Wizards" do both of these things, but continues to do them throughout the film!

Then you have the character Elinore, who was undoubtedly created so that Bakshi could sit next to another male viewer in the audience, nudge him in the side, and say, "Ehh? That one's pretty hot, isn't she?" You've also got a nice little scene of awful and shameless anti-semitism, which seems ironic in a movie that is meant to portray the Nazis in a bad light. The only remotely interesting characters are the two wizards and a magical robot named "Peace" who walks around with a gun and a sword. By "remotely interesting" I mean, "still bad."

No, wait, I'm not finished ranting. Several animated scenes, including the rotoscoped ones, were recycled later in the film. Guys with swords were somehow managing to kill guys with guns. The bad guys were driving tanks. Tanks??!! Every female in the movie was scantily clad. The voice acting was amateur at best. Why did the characters get randomly teleported into the mountains? How did Weehawk and Peace get out of the caves? Why do some people consider this a "family film??"

Let me end this obscenely long review by saying that, at least, Bakshi was essentially forced to use rotoscoping when Fox refused to give him adequate budget to animate the battle scenes. But of course you can only blame Fox so much, considering that Bakshi is quoted as saying, "Why bother animating all of this?" and, "It also was the way that showed me how to do Lord of the Rings, so it worked two ways." (ref. Wikipedia) The reader may note that Bakshi's "The Lord of the Rings" has long held the title of being Keyframe's vote for the worst animated film of all time.

And it was inspired...inspired...by "Wizards."

Wizards comes from the mind of Ralph Bakshi, who somehow managed to create an X-rated cartoon - Fritz the Cat (if you are interested). I guess the next logical career choice was to go into family films, for that is what Wizards is intended to be -- though it is questionable how many parents would enjoy a nice evening with their children viewing Nazi propaganda and the slaughtering of elves with machine guns. I am getting ahead of myself. Wizards graced the theatre houses in 1977, and was originally titled Wizard Wars. The distributor, 20th Century Fox, concerned about overdosing audiences on wars with Star Wars coming out later in the year, had the title shortened to simply Wizards. Fox's Wizards earned $9 million in the box office compared to $29 million earned by the Disney's larger budgeted The Rescuers in the same year, which I must assume made Wizards a moderate success. Other non X -Rated films later created by Bakshi include the animated and sequelless Lord of the Rings Part I, a film to be reviewed in a couple of weeks, Fire & Ice, and a seemingly Roger Rabbit ripoff Cool World.

Wizards features a war between two... er um, wizards. The evil Blackheart has been banished to the land Scortch, a land of mutants and technology. His brother Avatar lives in a land of fairies, elves and magic. The setting of the film is millions of years in Earth's future after most of humanity has been wiped out. Blackheart begins to excavate old German war technology (tanks, planes, and machine guns) to use in a battle with the good folk who through a harmony with nature and an abandonment of technology, have harnessed the powers of magic. Blackheart is kept fairly well in check until he finds a secret weapon, a projector which shows Nazi propaganda films in the sky during battle to terrify his enemies and inspire his loathsome troops. Avatar goes on a quest with his buxom fairy friend Eleanor, and an elf buddy Weehawk, guided by a terminator robot he has reprogrammed to lead him ironically named Peace. In the end, Avatar relies on "a trick his mom taught him." To say more would spoil the fun. =)

The movies is ok, though Avatar's quest is a meandering tale of side stories including a run in with a Mark Hamill voiced Sprite (1977 was a good year for Mark). Supposedly, Bakshi ran out of money to animate the battle scenes, so he relied on rotoscoping old WWII stock film footage. Basically, it looks like black and white films have been penciled over leaving realistic outlines of soldiers and war instruments, without too many details. Its quite an interesting technique, especially when coupled with the sub-Saturday morning cartoon level animation of the rest of the film. But I will say one thing, it really makes you realize the 'toon' elves are in for it, when realistic looking machine gunners start marching towards them.

Its hard to claim this is family friendly when Hitler himself shows up, leading a violent and bloody mowing down of cartoony creatures. This is really a love it or hate it move. While I appreciate the artistic style and I liked the designs of the wizards and Peace, I did not love the story or the overall animation quality. Balancing art and story elements, and considering that this film is, if anything, unique, Wizards earns a C-.

"Wizards" had the pontential to be one of the greatest animated features all time,but it fails miserably due to poor character development and shotty execution.The story itslef sounds good,Avatar the wizard and his allies must destroy a film projector that fuels rage of demons commanded by Avatar's evil brother Blackwolf.The biggest gripe I have with Wizards is that you really don't care about any of the characters,the film never goes into depth about any of them. Avatar and his allies are simply just there and that's about it. The film itself is also just a huge mess, it goes back and forth between poorly animated battle sequences then to boring and barely coherent situations Avatar and the gang get into.They are small attempts at humor here and there which overall fail and just doesn't make any sense.I think Ralph Bakshi should stick to what he knows, cold hard street life like in "Heavy Traffic" because fantasy is definetly not his area of expertise.

Edit:Actually the film dose go into Avatar's life but his characterization as one of those old 1950's cigar chomping brooklyn types dosen't work at all in this type of film.

'Wizards' is a criminally underrated movie. It is not only my favourite Ralph Bakshi movie, but one of my favourite movies, period. I saw it when it came out. I was 14, but I've seen it plenty of times since, and I still love. it.

The whole movie is clearly, in hindsight, a tribute to the underground cartoons of the 70's - the great Vaughn Bode, who had died two years previously, Frazetta, Morrow, but it would be misleading to insist that this is some sort of rip-off of Bode.

Wizards is set in a distant, post-holocaust future where technology has largely been replaced by magic. Avatar, a cigar-smoking, retired good guy wizard whose voice is modelled on Peter Falk, has to save the world from the mutant armies of his techno-freak brother Blackwolf a skeletal nutcase who has uncovered a lot of old Nazi propoganda films and recreated himself as the new Hitler.

Avatar's last comment before reluctantly setting out on this mission with a motley crue of other characters on their roly-poly two-legged horses is "I hope I remembered to pack my scotch." Have you gathered yet that this isn't a kid's movie?

I can't put my finger on what it is that I love about this film. Many of the criticisms levelled at it over the years are valid. Yes, there are budget saving animation techniques like rotoscoping they do use the same footage several times he does use footage from 'Ivan the Terrible', he does simplify the conflict between nature and technology, and gets Zionism mixed up in it somehow, bla bla bla. I don't care. The guy was making this film on a budget which Pixar would use up on the caterers for one of their movies. It was virtually backyard stuff, and it has great heart, AFAIC. It has HEART.

The soundtrack is great, too. I've always been amazed that so little has ever been said about this, and I was pleased to see that Bakshi was in awe of Andrew Belling's score, on the DVD interview. I honestly think 'Wizards' is about my favourite animated musical score. There's just one song in it, but it's folky, melancholy and very beautiful. It's one of two songs from animated films that I went straight home and taught myselfon the piano (the other was 'Flying Dreams' from 'Secret of NIMH')

Bakshi is said to have regarded this is a prelude to his favourite movie, 'Fire and Ice'. In my opinion, 'Wizards' is head and shoulders over that peurile rubbish. It was, in fact, the last really good movie he ever made, before he lost too much of his underground ethos and became too mainstream. It was a shame. His early movies were unique, for all their faults. His later ones are just dull.

When I saw 'Wizards' in the cinema in 1978, the audience stood up and cheered at the climax. In fact it broke the box office record for the Hobart Film Festival that year. And this was an audience of film buffs. I'm pretty sure that at least some of them were straight at the time.

I openly admit that most people are going to hate this movie, and a small number will always love it. I'm in the latter group.

Postscript: my DVD of 'Wizards' arrived in the mail the other day. I immediately noticed that the back cover blurb tried to pitch it as a kid's film. This is in stark contrast to the original publicity, whcih emphasised that it was for adults. This is doubtless going to lead to some false expectations. Take note: it may not be a sexy and subversive R-rated movie like 'Fritz the Cat', but it's definately NOT a family film, with its Nazi newsreels and faeries being machine-gunned.

edit: I forgot to mention the first time around, how much I enjoyed the fantastic drawings by Mike Ploog which are used as backgrounds in some of the narrated sections, and the even more amazing backgrounds by Ian Miller, which are used in the Scorch scenes, and also at various other points such as the invasion fleet. Miller's artowrok is just incredible. Very dark and surreal, and incredibly detailed. I don't know whether he ever did backgrounds for any other movie.

After I watched this film on DVD, I flipped to the behind-the-scenes featurette with Ralph Bakshi. He describes Wizards as his first foray into the 'family entertainment' genre. I admit, I shuddered rather violently at the thought of anyone's family sitting down and watching this film.

What's it got?
Well, let's see... a fair amount of graphic violence--nothing says family fun like dead faeries lying in their own blood... a bad guy who is really keen on Hitler--complete with swastikas, a reference to anti-Semitism and of course film footage of Hitler himself... scantily clad 'hooker' faeries and a heroine who comes across as being just shy of a sex kitten.

Now, I have nothing against mature animation, but c'mon, let's just call it what it is and not pretend that the fact it has warm and fuzzy elves as its heroes suddenly makes it a family movie.

Target audience aside, this movie is poorly animated by almost any standard... is only slightly less difficult to follow plot-wise than Bakshi's "Lord of the Rings"... and was generally so dull and heavy-handed that I ended up watching most of it with the fast-forward button firmly pressed.