The Weird-Enough Wizard of Odds

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 51
Ralph Bakshi (writer/director), Wizards

In a post-nuclear future, humanity has become a visitor on a fairy-covered Earth. But that hardly means everything has become peaceful. The wizard Avatar serves as advisor to the president of Montagar, a bucolic forest nation where citizens teach children to husband the soil and distrust technology. But Avatar’s twin brother Blackwolf rules an autocratic kingdom and yearns to conquer his brother’s lands. He’s discovered a tool which may make that possible: literal Nazi propaganda.

Animator and writer Ralph Bakshi made his name in the 1960s and 1970s creating films that pinched the Disney aesthetic, but were adamantly not intended for children. His 1972 comedy Fritz the Cat became the first animated feature to be rated X. But he always dreamed of returning to the science fiction and fantasy themes which first propelled his interest in drawing. 20^th Century Fox shared his vision, at least hypothetically, but flinched upon release.

Blackwolf sends robots to invade Montagar, causing chaos and destruction throughout the forest. Avatar and his bodyguard, Weehawk, capture one robot and recondition it to serve the interests of peace. Because Montagar has neither army nor weapons, Avatar and Weehawk commence a quest to find and stop Blackwolf inside his own lair. Accompanied by Avatar’s apprentice and love interest Elinore, they must seek an enemy who has learned how to bend masses to his will.

Bakshi worked mostly without support from mainstream studios. Though he regularly got distribution deals with companies like Fox or Warner, he assiduously avoided working for them directly. He especially hated Disney’s influence which, after Walt’s passing, had become ingrown and moribund. (Disney’s decline wouldn’t reverse until the middle 1980s.) This gave him remarkable creative freedom, like fellow indie animator and Disney refugee Don Bluth, but forced him to work within shoestring budgets.

This freedom results in a big, sloppy product which revels in its excesses. Bakshi’s team clearly had oodles of fun creating this movie. Its disco-era morality is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, and shows distrust not only of the nuclear weapons looming over the Cold War, but also the technology which made such weapons possible. It also emphasizes that, no matter how enlightened True Believers think their society has become, violence always looms around the horizon.

Perhaps Bakshi’s upbringing contributes to this. Born in Mandatory Palestine, he grew up mostly in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and Foggy Bottom, Washington. These East Coast cities were rife with bigotry, including both antisemitism and legal segregation. Though Bakshi’s family made it to America in time to avoid the bloody excesses of World War II, he grew up seeing the ideology that had been crushed in Europe, making its nest and laying its eggs over in America.

left to right: Weehawk, Elinore, Avatar, and the robot Peace in Ralph Bakshi's Wizards

Bakshi’s world reeks of moral binaries. He depicts the forests of Montagar as bucolic, lush, and stranger to violence. Blackwolf’s kingdom of Scortch is sooty and industrialized, occupied by orcs and trolls. (If this sounds familiar, well spotted: Bakshi would direct the first big-screen Lord of the Rings adaptation in 1978, a failure upon release.) When Blackwolf’s modernity forces a confrontation with Montagar, only Avatar’s small adventuring party upholds Montagar’s deep anti-modernist conscience.

20^th Century Fox gave Bakshi a distribution deal for this movie at the same time it bankrolled an ambitious young director named George Lucas. Struggling after a string of bad decisions, Fox was willing, post-1975, to support riskier ventures. But it kept both Bakshi and Lucas on tight budgets, forcing both to pay out-of-pocket to complete their projects. Bakshi created fantasy crowd scenes by rotoscoping vintage Swedish historical epics, and intercutting snippets of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.

The finished produce horrified Fox and drew lukewarm responses from critics; Fox accorded Wizards a limited release. Unlike Star Wars, Wizards never overcame this limitation, and though it returned a profit, the outcome was small enough to sour Fox’s relationship with Bakshi. This movie never found its real audience until home video, when college-aged audiences started getting high and gawping at the movie’s Technicolor spectacle. It was, in that sense, a product of its time.

Sadly, Bakshi’s lurid adult style never found its mainstream breakthrough. His only big-studio production, Cool World, died so horribly, it ended his career; he mostly does illustrations and comix now. Yet periodically, new audiences discover this forgotten gem, and seemingly admire how unashamed it is. Wizards is overblown, messy, unsubtle, and garish. It’s also dated fun, and audiences apparently never get tired of its unapologetic energy. This movie embodies everything Bakshi ever did right.