Wizards (1977)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

From my favorite movies..

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

While I haven't seen everything by the man, I have nothing but the up most respect for animation auteur, Ralph Bakshi. Had it not been for this man and his influential work, independent, adult and even television animation would not have prospered up to the point of The Simpsons, the works of Don Hertzfeldt, anything good on adult swim, and a lot of creator driven cartoons on Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, or even Disney. So let's go back to the late 70s, when Bakshi decided to take a break from adult animation to give us his first "family" film, Wizards. The result is a flawed albeit thought provoking and intriguing fantasy film that still remains in tact after 40 years.The story is about two wizard brothers named Avatar (the peaceful wizard who rules with wisdom and magic) and Blackwolf (The evil ruler of the dark land Scortch with technology under his belt to wage war). What we get is a great social commentary of an evil sorcerer trying to let science and technology rule over peace and prosperity for his own selfish needs, kinda like old dictators who used whatever they could to take over. The characters themselves, while not the most developed, definitely shine with their roles. Avatar is the good hearted wizard who struggles whether to use his powers for good or bad reasons, the robot Peace also struggles with siding between killing those who are good or preserving them, Weehawk is definitely a bad ass you don't want to mess with, and while Eleanor and Blackwolf are the least memorable characters, the savagery that Blackwolf inflicts on his creatures is just gut wrenching and Eleanor is pretty decent eye candy if nothing else.The animation shows that it was made cheap, yet it still retains itself with it's own style, whether it be the cartoonish designs, the mystic colorful backgrounds, the comic book style storyboards, and especially usage of the rotoscoping that really gives the film an old school feel to it. This is one of the grimmest and vibrantly colorful films I've seen in quite some time, and it looks so unique that it's worthy viewing to gain a sense of 70s animation.The movie isn't without it's flaws though. The editing can come off as a little uneven and choppy at times, some of the voice-acting is kinda wooden, , and let's just say the final confrontation isn't as epic as the rotoscoped battle scenes. Otherwise, if you're looking for a time capsule to the 70s that takes a great approach to the fight between peace and technology, then find Wizards any way you can. It's certainly worth a watch if you're into post apocalyptic films as much as the next guy.

Note: Most of my reviews contain some spoilers, but I always try that none of them "can actually spoil" any important surprise in the plot, so you can read without worrying.I am going to say first the things that I think that the movie did wrong...that actually are the less and then only say a pair of words about what the did right so you can enjoy those last ones directly in the movie if you haven't seen it before.What did they do wrong? Well, they portrait technology as something bad "per se" at the beginning, even when the plot corrects that a little, I must admit that that made me upset at the beginning. Also, the story is too slow, or at least that is the way in which we see it nowadays when things go faster each time. What else? well, in my opinion, there are too many actual sequences of WWII, I must admit that using actual war images of the most violent conflicts of all time was original but I think they used them too much...and then after such a long start and warm-up and ups and downs, in my opinion it ends too fast, abruptly.That said, you still have a very good animation (that as I have read helped to revitalize the general interest in animation at the end of the 70's) a decent story and two or three memorable characters.I don't want to say too many good things because I rather you to see the movie if you haven't yet, but before going I want to make some remark: I see that reviewers in general are divided in two: 1)those who like animation and love brave animation to take form and who generally rate animation favorably and 2) those that really don't like animation and they normally never give more than a 7 to any animation movie or series no matter what. I want to tell you that I am among the first ones, and even when this movie , in my opinion, is not like a "Giant diamond", I do believe its a small jewel of fantasy animation.Thanks for reading.IMDb Review by David del Real. Ciudad de México. México. October 2017.

The man (Bakshi) clearly holds no regard for the standard fare of his profession: he'll cut scenes of low-budget fighting faeries(?) and slap them next to low-budget rotoscopes, he'll juice up pulp fantasy with pulp Nazi affection and pulp gunplay because he'll feel swords uninteresting to draw, he'll slap fat tits onto a main character faerie and slap off her clothes because he wants to draw things that would be fun to slap in real life, he slap his screenwriter if a scene requires more than five lines of dialogue without the slap-faerie with slap-tits slapping some slappable robot with a slapped in gun.It's a movie of slapping in doodles. The movie is just a bunch of doodles in a high school boy's notebook. That's fine, and the eclecticism forced by the low budget and high aspirations makes those doodles captivating. But they're just doodles, lacking entirely the vague and social quirks of "Fritz The Cat" or "Heavy Traffic".

I first watched this film at the tender age of 9 and even then found it awfully sloppy and crude by animation or narrative standards. Bakshi claims that this movie is aimed at kids, and while I have to admit it's a lot more kid-friendly than something like COONSKIN or HEAVY TRAFFIC, there ain't a lot here for kids to like.Truly, this film doesn't hold up too well with a lot of unsuccessful blending of animation with rotoscoped footage, which, to be honest is more often just processed film than it is truly "rotoscoped", which would imply actual work went into it. The final battle scene is actually pretty hard to tell what in the Hades is going on with so many reused cells and ugly roto'd stock footage. I'm happy to see that his techniques in this area blended together much more beautifully in his next 3-4 films, the high point of which would be FIRE AND ICE.Too much of the script feels awfully first drafty. For instance the villains of the piece don't really seem to have much motivation for their desire to destroy the world beyond just the usual "oh, they're evil" mentality. Similarly, none of the heroes are likable or even the slightest bit interesting aside from the criminally underused Peace, the red uniform wearing android from the cover.However, I have to hand it to Bakshi for making up for his lack of resources with a lot of heart and a lot of love in rampant abundance. The most successful portions of this film are the side-vignettes showcasing the ridiculous villains. The scenes in "Skortch" are wonderfully gloomy and campy, complemented quite well by Andrew Belling's excellent (though at times quite dated) score. A lot of the vignettes are quite funny, though the success and amount of humor follows with the rest of the film's elements as being quite inconsistent.WIZARDS is a film with a lot of little things in it to appreciate even though the film as a whole is disjointed, cruddy, and rather tedious. I can say though that I'm glad I own it and watch it once every few years just because at the very least it's a great mood piece and has a much more personal & creative feel to it than most more recent animated features.