Trivia for
The Lord of the Rings (1978) More at IMDbPro »

• Filmed with live actors in black-and-white and rotoscoped, each animation cel drawn over a film frame of an actor. This was the first entirely rotoscoped animated feature.
  
  
• Many of the actors portraying the physical parts of the characters in this movie provided the voices. Other characters, such as the hobbits were portrayed by animators and by Billy Barty in the live-action footage, and then voiced by other actors. The actors who play physical parts but not voices are credited as "Character Actors."
  
  
• Used battle footage from Aleksandr Nevskiy (1938) for some rotoscoped animation scenes.
  
  
• Rotoscoped action scenes were filmed in Spain.
  
  
• Peter Woodthorpe (Gollum) and Michael Graham Cox (Boromir) played the same roles in the BBC radio dramatization in 1981.
  
  
• Director John Boorman originally envisioned making the entire trilogy as a single 100 minute film. Ralph Bakshi heard that he was going to do this, and, as a fan of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and J.R.R. Tolkien, was horrified. When Boorman's plans to bring Tolkien's novels to the screen fell apart, Bakshi approached J.R.R. Tolkein's daughter to do the novels as a trilogy of animated films. Tolkein's daughter loved Bakshi's fantasy Wizards (1977), so she gave him the rights to The Lord of the Rings. Bakshi filmed "The Fellowship of the Rings" and "The Two Towers" (which were collapsed into a single two-and-a-half hour film), and had planned to film "The Return of the King", but the trilogy was never completed.
  
  
• Director Ralph Bakshi had originally planned to use music by Led Zeppelin in the film, but was unable to get the rights. Led Zeppelin were known as being fans of the books, with several of their songs - "Misty Mountain Hop," "Over The Hills And Far Away," "The Battle Of Evermore," "Ramble On" - referencing imagery and characters from Tolkien's books.
  
  
• Cel animation was produced and shot for this film, but was cut out at the last minute. Only a few brief segments of the film were drawn from scratch, with much of the film rotoscoped, and some sequences combining non-rotoscoped live-action footage with animation.
  
  
• Tim Burton worked as an animator on this film. He was not credited, but worked as an "inbetween" artist. It was his first job on a film.
  
  
• At one point in the film's development, studio executives thought that the names "Saruman" and "Sauron" were too similar, and would confuse the audience, and decided that Saruman should be renamed "Aruman". This decision was eventually reversed, but some references to "Aruman" remain in the finished film.
  
  
• During the battle of Helm's Deep, a song with non-English lyrics is heard on the soundtrack. The words Isengard and Mordor can be clearly discerned. The song is not in any of Tolkien's invented languages, instead composer Leonard Rosenman had his choir sing nonsense lyrics to get the desired effect. According to the liner notes of the CD soundtrack, part of the lyrics also include the composer's name backwards.
  
  
• Credited as a rotoscoped character actor, Angelo Rossitto is easily recognizable as the midget in the tavern during the Prancing Pony scene early in the film.
  
  
• At two hours and twelve minutes, this is the longest feature-length animated film made up to that time. Only Disney's Fantasia (1940) (in its uncut, original roadshow release) was nearly as long.
  
  

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