1978 - THE LORD OF THE RINGS, the animated version

Before the Peter Jackson's epic there was this oddball animated film version of the Tolkien book.

This The Lord of the Rings is essentially the same as  the other Lord of the Rings with the main virtue of this film being that it gets through 1.5 of the books in roughly 2 hours, something that Peter Jackson probably couldn't have begun to contemplate doing.

Ralph Bakshi, the director struggles with the usual Tolkien adaptation issues, the unwieldy number of characters, some with 2 or 3 different names and the desire to stay faithful to Tolkien's very long story.  Bakshi's other problem is with his mix of the cartoon characters representing the Hobbits and Golem and the live action characters who are rotoscoped.  It all blends together very uncomfortably,

Frankly the film is kind of ugly looking.

132 minutes, written by Chris Conkling and Peter S. Beagle.