Wizards

Wizards is an animated film that is as old as I am. Mark Hamil lends his vocal skills, along with Richard Romanus, who was also in Heavy Metal (1981) as well as in Martin Scorcese's iconic American gangster pic Mean Streets *(1973), alongside Robert Deniro and Harvey Keitel. Before he died, Romanus, in other words, was in some classic films. Wizards is one of them, although we don't say it isn't a troubled ordeal fitting that term "classic" to it. Here's why.

It isn't that Wizards is not good--you couldn't really apply the term "bad" to anything that Ralph Bakshi did in his career--at least, not in our opinion. The film gives us the iconic image of Necron99 (renamed "Peace," and voiced by David Proval, who was also in Mean Streets), the robot assassin sent out to eighty-six wizard Avatar (sent by bone-armed brother and global menace Blackwolf), who lives in Scortch, the land of mutants--but not, of course, in the Cursed Earth. (That's an entirely different saga.)

Avatar (voiced by Bob Holt), who seems a lot like the late George Carlin in voice and temperment, is born from the same mother as Blackwulf after the ascendancy of Elves, Fairies, magic, and all other manner of fantastical critter you might roll up on a random table while playing AD&D. They replaced the mutant humans who are mutants in part because the world got nuked by unspecified "terrorists," who apparently had the Mother of All Dirty Bombs. After that, it was all downhill for the human race--but not for the non-human races.

The Secret Commonwealth (to borrow an old term for such magical folk) reside in the hobbit holes and hamlets of the nice, verdant lands reserved before for their human hosts, who now are forced to scrub in the grub and lurk in the menacing Mordor (I mean, in the figurative sense).

Avatar, and his curvaceous fairy girlfriend (who has anatomically prominent breasts and erect nipples), Elinore, voiced by Jesse Welles, set out with Weehawk (Romanus) to stop Blackwolf from initiating a Fourth (Fifth?) Reich by hypnotizing with fear the people of the enchanted and of Montagar. To do this, he employs a projector and plays old propaganda films of Hitler and the Wehrmacht.

The images of Wizards are cartoonish in the traditional sense--most of them are employed for humor. They are juxtaposed against a frightening backdrop of violence and war, and Bakshi also employs the same rotoscope technique he would use a short time later on his adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. This is especially effective, and also quite frightening, the colors are fiery crimsons and blacks. Rotoscoped tanks and spear-carrying warriors have the mien of ghostly cobatantas at a supernatural war. The dichotomy of these styles--cartoonish and deeply unnerving, side by side, beggars the question: to what audience is Wizards aspiring? On one hand its deceptively naive. On the other, it has enough adult nods and suggestiveness, and violent, frightening content, to make even some adults take note.

Shazam. Might want to rethink letting the kiddies watch this one.

Presto! And I'm gone.

One final note: The central thesis of Wizards also bothers me: Technology is bad. It's the stuff of Hitlerian monsters out to control the world. We should all be struggling to bring magic back into the world. Okay. But as Arthur C. Clark once said, "Any suffiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Here, an old-fashioned movie projector, the kind the teacher used to wheel out for science class, where the film was always getting chewed up in the sprockets (for those of us old enough to remember such things), becomes the psychic projector of a world of fear and annihilation. I find that a strange, anachronistic plot device, paired with the sword and sorcery high technology implicit in the story of Wizards. But everything Bakshi has done is damn near fantastic, so all of these are minor quibbles.

The movie is vastly entertaining. And there's no trick up my sleeve affirming that.

WIZARDS Official Trailer [1977]

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