In the wake of a catastrophic nuclear war, the remnants of humanity abandon technology and evolve into standard fantasy stereotypes -- fairies, elves, goblins, demons, and so on. After some time, two twin brothers are born, each destined to become a powerful wizard. One (who grows up good) banishes the other (who grows up evil), and the stage is set for an epic contest between unambiguous moral forces.
The evil wizard begins his assault by embracing the long lost technology and sending robot assassins to dispatch the greatest heroes of the good fantasy people. One of those assassins switches sides and sets out with the good twin (now aged well past his prime), a fairy princess, and an elf warrior to eliminate the secret weapon of the evil forces: old Nazi footage that incites them into berserker rampages.
Is it any good?
Going through the years for this blog, I’ve been watching a lot of sci-fi movies that I’ve never seen before. Yet I usually have some idea of what I think the movies will be like before I see them -- either based on reputation or pedigree or even just the paragraph description that comes on the Netflix jacket. Sometimes I’m excited about movies (which often just sets me up for disappointment) and sometimes I’m halfway dreading them (which just as often creates the low expectations needed to make a movie seem great). WIZARDS is one that I was actually looking forward to.
Here’s what I knew going in. WIZARDS is an animated flick directed by Ralph Bakshi, who is probably most famous for his adaptations of FRITZ THE CAT (1972) and THE LORD OF THE RINGS (1978). I have never seen FRITZ THE CAT, but it was the very first X-rated cartoon in the United States, so you can draw your own conclusions from that. I did somehow see THE LORD OF THE RINGS as a young Tolkien nerd -- and though I don’t remember liking the movie much, it definitely made an impression on me which I have not forgotten to this day.
The most unusual thing I remembered from THE LORD OF THE RINGS were the rotoscoped battle scenes. Although most of the movie was animated by hand, Bakshi also often resorted to high-contrast tracings of live action footage (usually for scenes with lots of orcs). It wasn’t like anything I had ever seen before at the time, but folks today be more familiar with it thanks to Richard Linklater’s WAKING LIFE (2001) and A SCANNER DARKLY (2006). Bakshi’s approach, however, is much more impressionistic and aggressive.
So I was at least interested to see if WIZARDS would have the same kind of unusual animation processes. If anything, the mixture of styles was even more wild than I expected -- in addition to cel animation and rotoscoping, there are also detailed still pencil illustrations and live action stock footage. Bakshi apparently believes in changing the animation style to suit the emotion of the scene -- which makes for some very interesting images, but can also be jarring at times.
The plot of WIZARDS is simultaneously epic and simple. It’s epic in the sense that the fate of the world is at stake, but it’s simple in the sense that the outcome hinges on the destruction of some reels of old war footage. (The unconvincing explanation for this secret weapon, by the way, is that the evil forces have nothing to fight for. They do it simply because they’re told to, but they quickly get bored or distracted. So, despite their superior numbers and firepower, they don’t make any progress -- until the Nazi films galvanize them into a focused fighting unit.) The parallels to THE LORD OF THE RINGS are pretty obvious here -- that’s another world-spanning epic that hinged on the destruction of a seemingly insignificant object. But there’s a big difference in the epic feeling between a 1,500 page 3-volume novel and an 80 minute movie. WIZARDS consequently never really feels epic, despite the movie’s attempt to paint the conflict as a global one.
The fact that the secret weapon is related to Nazism is also pretty disappointing. I don’t know if there was some kind of Nazi taboo back in 1977 (though its doubtful, considering all the WWII movies that were made during the previous forty years), but these days at least Nazis make an incredibly boring bugaboo. It seems like there was an opportunity to take a dig at something less obvious in modern society. Possibly I’m holding WIZARDS to a standard it was never intended to meet -- after all, Bakshi refers to the movie several times in the commentary and accompanying interviews as a “kids’ movie” and claims it was his attempt to show folks that he could make a movie that didn’t rely on shock and offensiveness. (This despite the fact that WIZARDS contains quite a bit of graphic violence and makes no attempt to disguise the sexuality of its characters. But I suppose that these things wouldn’t necessarily be out of place in an unorthodox understanding of what makes a “kids’ movie”.)
Anyway, I mostly just feel that the staunch “Nazis are bad” stance is pretty boring. It’s especially disappointing in contrast to a scathing scene in which religion is mercilessly skewered. It occurs when a platoon of the bad guys offers to leave a group of prisoners under the care of a pair of priests. First, the priests are mocked for the devotion to collecting ancient junk -- in this case, signs and logos of corporations like CBS and Coca-Cola. Next, they delay addressing the question of the prisoners so they can engage in caricatures of worship and oblations. After waiting for hours for the priests to finish, the soldiers simply slaughter the prisoners.
I actually think organized religion is a positive force in the world, and I also think Bakshi’s depiction is pretty unfair and inaccurate. But the scene is also exactly the kind of idiosyncratic and sour satire that I love whenever I encounter it in sci-fi. You can trace the lineage of this kind of thing back to Jonathan Swift and beyond, and one of the earliest uses of fantastic worlds was to allow more latitude for this kind of otherwise-unacceptable criticism. Satire is not the only function of science fiction, but it certainly helps answer the question “Why is this sci-fi?” when it does show up. So, compared to this scene, the Nazi bits are just tame and stale. Imagine, for example, if the footage that inspired the evil armies turned out to be speeches given by Winston Churchill or John F. Kennedy. That would be something you don’t see in kids’ movies every day!
On the other hand, goblins carrying machine guns and marching under Nazi banners are also something you don’t see in kids’ movies every day either. WIZARDS has an awful lot of crazy images, and I’d say as a collection of things you might want to airbrush on the side of your van it’s a resounding success. (Other examples: a robot assassin riding an alien horse, a hyper-sexualized fairy princess riding in a tank, one wizard shooting another wizard with a six-shooter. You get the idea.) As a movie it’s not bad either, but I think I’d definitely like to see some of Bakshi’s earlier movies now where he presumably wasn’t pulling any punches at all. (Sadly, none of them are science fiction so far as I know.)
This movie sounds pretty badass in... maybe a way similar to Heavy Metal? That's the closest thing I have watched to this, so maybe it isn't accurate.
ReplyDeleteI would say that's a fairly good comparison -- they both have a lot in common in terms of mixing sci-fi and fantasy, and being edgy about it. There were even some images in HEAVY METAL that I think were likely inspired by WIZARDS, or at least look an awful lot like they were.
ReplyDeleteWIZARDS is more experimental in its use of animation. But it's also theoretically supposed to be a kids' movie, so it doesn't have anything near the level of gore and sex that HEAVY METAL does. On the other hand, HEAVY METAL also sometimes feels like it's trying to be gross or titillating for its own sake, so it has its own juvenile elements too.