My first review, and it upsets me to think I have been moved to bin this film ahead of writing praise for more worthy work.So why is it so bad? The first half an hour is a disjointed mess of flip-flopping flashback events with no appearance of conforming to the order of events as they happened in either the book, film, or would make sense in the absence of both. Imagine the story-board was toppled and hastily picked up by the cleaner one fated day, and you're about there. On the promise of a bards tale being sung to Bilbo on his birthday, the film is littered with song interludes accompanying the many cutaways and back-story set-pieces, many of which are repeated and all of which are annoying. The animation is average for the period (1980) but the voice-overs are a dreadful mixture of soft yokel voices and newsreader RP. I watched the whole thing hoping for the appearance of the Wild Men. When the opportunity had passed I had only 10 minutes left and the disturbing feeling that, once again, I should have re-read the book or watched the Jackson version again. If this had but any other title, 5 minutes would have been enough.Why is it so good? It isn't (see above)

One word - awful. The terrible animation ,wooden voice acting and cheap feel make this movie one of the worst of all time. Bakshi the dolt should have finished what he started. Even now it wold still be nice to finish it, with modern technology could give it a nice send-off. Rankin Bass- home of the syrupy sweet kiddie holiday stop motion garbage should have never been given the rights to do this movie. What were they thinking ,and look at how bad the characters are animated - Pippin looks like a hot dog and Gandalf looks much worse then he should. Oh well,total bomb. Hear that Bakshi , you left a lot of fans disappointed ,you owe it to em to finish it your way.

This was a great adaptation of the book. The songs and poems translated very well into the cartoon. People often like to put these movies up against the Peter Jackson films made decades later and of course movies made in the late 70s and early 80 with budgets under 4 million dollars wont be as good as live action films with budgets in the 100 million dollar range. That said for the time period it was a very good animated film that was enjoyable for kids and adults. The animation was good even by a lot of todays standards. This movie has also inspired a lot of people to go out and read the LOTR books. If you enjoy the books or even the Newer films you should check this movie out.

Ten minutes less singing replaced with actual development of the story would have made this mediocre animated version of Tolkien's classic at least somewhat similar to the actual story. As it is, we get a lot of tired, dull hippy tunes and a story that moves slower than molases, and a neglect of a number of critical events from the book. Generally inferior to the Bakshi "Lord of the Rings" and definitely inferior to Peter Jackson's stunning special editions. ("Do you not know death when you see it?!") Still, mildly amusing, and there's always that groovy "Where there's a whip..." Calypso-disco may yet be the strongest weapon in Mordor's arsenal!