Ralph Bakshi's Wizards
Sep. 6th, 2022 05:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeMy flatmate Evelyn wanted to return the serve of Malignant, so we just watched Ralph Bakshi's Wizards, and yes, it had the wtf quotient, the inexplicable choices, the high production values in service of a weird vision... I'm glad to have seen Wizards, but hope nothing like it ever comes to exist again.
On the one hand this was genuinely entertaining and provided a nearly continuous experience of being wrongfooted by whatever the hell was happening next, starting from the first moment when a little cartoon globe of the earth appeared spinning on the screen before exploding in a wall of actual fire. Thousands of years after a nuclear war, half of humanity are mutants - generally evil or at least hapless, living in toxic waste areas - and the other half are elves and fairies (who I guess are just as much mutants, but think they're what humans used to be like). To each is born a destined wizard child, one good, one evil. (This is not due to their upbringing, they are, from the get-go, the evilest and the goodest baby that ever lay sneering/giggling in a mother's arms). War must surely ensue. Well, four thousand years later, at any rate, after the evil wizard has regathered himself from their initial clash, fostering his strength and building up his fortress over the centuries, while the good wizard (named Avatar) has... really been enjoying his days on this beautiful flower-filled earth.
The visual style is various and weird. Backgrounds are often footage of shifting cloud or explosions, or incredibly beautiful and detailed drawings of towers and cityscapes, or silhouetted WWII footage.
Much of the film is genuinely and intentionally hilarious, like... the scene where two priests spend five hours ineffectually praying using religious icons from many poorly-remembered faiths before getting all their people killed? Some wild tonal shifts going on here.
This is, at times, a serious war movie, with the massacre of cartoon civilians and children weeping in the ashes. There are also intermittent comic-relief enemy soldiers, who shoot each other amusingly. These enemy soldiers are also literally nazis. The evil wizard's secret weapon is a projector from the old world containing Nazi propaganda footage. It took us more than half the movie to realize that this did not merely inspire the forces of evil while disheartening elf armies tiny enough to make it weird that they needed any further disheartening (who, by the way, are standing in trenches lined with barbed wire despite being armed with nothing but swords), it literally conjured Nazi armies, planes, and tanks - because everyone in this movie is a cartoon, and so images can fight them. This, while poorly explained, was quite cool. It also lead to the longest time I have ever spent watching an army charge toward another army: it kept seeming like they'd arrive, but no, the charging would just ratchet up another notch, three or four times in succession.
Actually this movie's pacing was deeply weird in general. A little dragon would spend about five more seconds scuttling away to safety across a bridge than there was any reason for him to. There's a sequence in which an elf prince fights an invisible monster on a background of blackness and lights which mostly just looks like him standing on a blank background for two minutes waving a sword sometimes.
And the dialogue and background narration are so earnest! Despite having lines like 'Hitler was dead, again.'
(Moments after someone has screamed 'Thus are we avenged and the safety of the world secured!')
The whole movie is also sleazily sexist. The main female character, Elinore, seems to be going to have an arc of learning to use magic. She does not. Her contribution to the plot consists of causing things to go wrong and wearing very few clothes. Then, at the end, she gets to marry her teacher, the four thousand year old wizard.
(My flatmate R has said that it's sad how what'll stick with her from the movie is the moment when someone catches sight of Elinore from a walkway and instantly leaps down toward her shouting 'Slut!' This was hilarious in its suddenness, given that there'd been almost no reference to sex or sexual morality in the film before that: I guess they needed to make sure viewers understood that yes, they really did intend the full sexist implications of the 'Women are naked and men are gnomes' binary).
On the one hand this was genuinely entertaining and provided a nearly continuous experience of being wrongfooted by whatever the hell was happening next, starting from the first moment when a little cartoon globe of the earth appeared spinning on the screen before exploding in a wall of actual fire. Thousands of years after a nuclear war, half of humanity are mutants - generally evil or at least hapless, living in toxic waste areas - and the other half are elves and fairies (who I guess are just as much mutants, but think they're what humans used to be like). To each is born a destined wizard child, one good, one evil. (This is not due to their upbringing, they are, from the get-go, the evilest and the goodest baby that ever lay sneering/giggling in a mother's arms). War must surely ensue. Well, four thousand years later, at any rate, after the evil wizard has regathered himself from their initial clash, fostering his strength and building up his fortress over the centuries, while the good wizard (named Avatar) has... really been enjoying his days on this beautiful flower-filled earth.
The visual style is various and weird. Backgrounds are often footage of shifting cloud or explosions, or incredibly beautiful and detailed drawings of towers and cityscapes, or silhouetted WWII footage.
Much of the film is genuinely and intentionally hilarious, like... the scene where two priests spend five hours ineffectually praying using religious icons from many poorly-remembered faiths before getting all their people killed? Some wild tonal shifts going on here.
This is, at times, a serious war movie, with the massacre of cartoon civilians and children weeping in the ashes. There are also intermittent comic-relief enemy soldiers, who shoot each other amusingly. These enemy soldiers are also literally nazis. The evil wizard's secret weapon is a projector from the old world containing Nazi propaganda footage. It took us more than half the movie to realize that this did not merely inspire the forces of evil while disheartening elf armies tiny enough to make it weird that they needed any further disheartening (who, by the way, are standing in trenches lined with barbed wire despite being armed with nothing but swords), it literally conjured Nazi armies, planes, and tanks - because everyone in this movie is a cartoon, and so images can fight them. This, while poorly explained, was quite cool. It also lead to the longest time I have ever spent watching an army charge toward another army: it kept seeming like they'd arrive, but no, the charging would just ratchet up another notch, three or four times in succession.
Actually this movie's pacing was deeply weird in general. A little dragon would spend about five more seconds scuttling away to safety across a bridge than there was any reason for him to. There's a sequence in which an elf prince fights an invisible monster on a background of blackness and lights which mostly just looks like him standing on a blank background for two minutes waving a sword sometimes.
And the dialogue and background narration are so earnest! Despite having lines like 'Hitler was dead, again.'
(Moments after someone has screamed 'Thus are we avenged and the safety of the world secured!')
The whole movie is also sleazily sexist. The main female character, Elinore, seems to be going to have an arc of learning to use magic. She does not. Her contribution to the plot consists of causing things to go wrong and wearing very few clothes. Then, at the end, she gets to marry her teacher, the four thousand year old wizard.
(My flatmate R has said that it's sad how what'll stick with her from the movie is the moment when someone catches sight of Elinore from a walkway and instantly leaps down toward her shouting 'Slut!' This was hilarious in its suddenness, given that there'd been almost no reference to sex or sexual morality in the film before that: I guess they needed to make sure viewers understood that yes, they really did intend the full sexist implications of the 'Women are naked and men are gnomes' binary).
no subject
Date: 2022-09-06 10:04 pm (UTC)Mostly I just remember being bored.
no subject
Date: 2022-09-11 01:46 pm (UTC)I am now being threatened with a collection of Bakshi short s.f. films. I am told they are 'more sexual.' I am resisting.
no subject
Date: 2022-09-16 09:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-09-17 03:59 am (UTC)