Word: frodo
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...amplitude, the Tolkien story embraces both pipe and slippers and Armageddon. Hence the saga's surge in popularity during the 1960s, when so many people craved the conviction that the Apocalypse rested in their hands. The hobbit Frodo Baggins is an ordinary creature with hairy toes suddenly charged with a task that will decide the battle between good and evil in his world. This elemental quest is what the whole fantasy boils down to and percolates up from. Bakshi tries to strike the same balance between the personal and universal, but in a fraction of the time at Tolkien...
Some of Bakshi's spectacle is truly opulent. In the opening sequence, the forging of the evil ring that Frodo must return and destroy is an abstract symphony of blacks and blazing reds. The ring-wraiths who pursue Frodo are inky phantoms on horseback and lurching deformities on foot. The action flows across backdrops that are both eye-boggling and wildly diverse. Bakshi has suggested the range and variety of Middle-earth geography by displaying a scrapbook filled with conflicting styles. Those who enjoy humming the scenery can forget the plot and go on a spree of influence hunting...
Worse, this technique turns Frodo, the wizard Gandalf and the other main characters into simplified humans. Their personalities do not come from within but from behind, and they rarely seem anything other than what they are: acrylic images superimposed on something more real. Only occasionally does the action flower into independent life: when Frodo and a friend try to row the same boat in different directions; when the intrepid hobbits meet up with Gollum, a creature reduced by his former possession of the evil ring into broad, burlesque servility...
Middle-earth is very nearly as large as the United States east of the Mississippi. Frodo and some true-hearted companions endure Ringwraiths and Barrow-wights, hordes of Ores, who are Sauron's shock troops, and much cloak-and-daggering. When Frodo triumphs, finally, and destroys the ring, it is only with the perverse collaboration of Gollum, a pitiably evil creature with froglike feet who sounds a bit like Oliver Twist's Fagin and is one of the memorable minor characters in English literature...
...readership spread from a handful of literate Anglophiles who savored The Lord of the Rings much as they do Grahame's The Wind in the Willows or T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone, to hundreds of thousands of U.S. college kids who made Frodo a national figure and turned the lore of Middle-earth into a way of life. In 1966, the first paperback edition of the three volumes of the Ring sold close to 500,000 copies in the U.S. Scholars and critics had at first admired his books, while tracing down literary influences that...