Fargo Guerra (user-230-106275) In a crazy age for animation Wizards delivers a crazy story where radio-decayed mutants fueled by footage of Nazi propaganda and other artifacts of the earths aggressive past attempt to take over the future. The only thing that can stop domination is a party of forest creatures, a derelict assassin, the old wizard himself, and one psychedelic trip of a movie.The film can get preachy, and sometimes maybe too blunt. But hey, something rare and cool to come out of '77, stop messing around and watch Wizards.

Donald F Ralph Bakshi is one of those animators I never grew to like. His films are adult, but not necessarily mature. Some find social commentary in his work - I just find him raunchy for the sake of edge.Wizards is one of his tamer works (It was released as a PG film). Is it a parody of high fantasy tales? Is it a violent, sexy take of the genre? Kinda both, kinda neither. Wizards is surprisingly uninteresting, plain and average. If it weren't for some adult themes, it would be forgettable, only remembered as a childhood classic by the middle aged. The characters are stock, and the plot offers little innovation. Bakshi states its about technology, and the plight of the Jewish people. Those were the last things on my mind during this movie.Yeah, people get shot. There are fairies in skimpy clothing. But outside a scene here and there, the plot itself is borderline family friendly. Its actually not adult enough, not so outrageous to have a guilty fun time. And fantasy fans won't have much to take away from it, besides the odd point of Nazi propaganda used to as mind control. Its a dumb plot device - those tapes mean nothing without the context of the culture and time.It does get credit for doing what few films do. There aren't many adult animated films in the west, especially in fantasy. The animation's quality is alright, considering the budget and the time. The use of rotoscope is pretty bad in a few scenes.Some thought the ending was clever. Let's just say I didn't. >:I If you adore fantasy and animation, you could watch this. If not, I wouldn't recommend it.

noizyme Before I begin, I give huge respect to Ralph Bakshi to release this experimental animation to the public and going against the family- friendly-grain of most animated films from Disney and other studios. I loved everything that the film swings for (anti-establishment, questioning technology taking over our humanity, trying to tell an actual story instead of animating "horses eating apples"), but its delivery is a bit askew. I understand that they had a rather lax attitude to hiring animators off the street, which is interesting, but you can definitely see the results in this film. The emotions of the characters don't match how they're drawn, and this film suffers from "over-animation" if anything...back then, its as if every wrinkle in the characters' clothing had to move in every frame, and it gets a bit absurd. I LOVED THE ROTOSCOPING...it was my favorite thing (aside from the wonderfully intricate background paintings) to watch, and the DVD has a wonderful "making of" video with Bakshi describing what the process was like. There's a commentary track, too, which I didn't listen to, but I got a lot of information from the "making of" video. The story was confusing a lot of times, and why certain characters ran off with different groups of faeries and elves and got captured almost seemed without reason. Having Bakshi describe the story in the "making of" video almost sounds like a completely difficult thing to capture, and I think the film needed to be worked on for a few more years. The thing that dates the movie the most is the funk music that plays during certain action sequences, as if it were a blaxploitation film or something...the breathy, airy singing of their "theme" for the movie is another 70's throwback that needs to go (and had nothing to do with the film). The Nazi thing...confusing as hell. I'm not sure why this was added in the movie or even the story...maybe to show that how dumb the bad guys were because they really dug war propaganda (?). As a fan of animation, I really liked it, but not enough to watch it over and over. It's crude, somewhat hastily-made, and could've been refined to be a lot more if given the time, but the studio's attitude was not in agreement to do that, so this is what you get.

Michael A. Martinez I first watched this film at the tender age of 9 and even then found it awfully sloppy and crude by animation or narrative standards. Bakshi claims that this movie is aimed at kids, and while I have to admit it's a lot more kid-friendly than something like COONSKIN or HEAVY TRAFFIC, there ain't a lot here for kids to like.Truly, this film doesn't hold up too well with a lot of unsuccessful blending of animation with rotoscoped footage, which, to be honest is more often just processed film than it is truly "rotoscoped", which would imply actual work went into it. The final battle scene is actually pretty hard to tell what in the Hades is going on with so many reused cells and ugly roto'd stock footage. I'm happy to see that his techniques in this area blended together much more beautifully in his next 3-4 films, the high point of which would be FIRE AND ICE.Too much of the script feels awfully first drafty. For instance the villains of the piece don't really seem to have much motivation for their desire to destroy the world beyond just the usual "oh, they're evil" mentality. Similarly, none of the heroes are likable or even the slightest bit interesting aside from the criminally underused Peace, the red uniform wearing android from the cover.However, I have to hand it to Bakshi for making up for his lack of resources with a lot of heart and a lot of love in rampant abundance. The most successful portions of this film are the side-vignettes showcasing the ridiculous villains. The scenes in "Skortch" are wonderfully gloomy and campy, complemented quite well by Andrew Belling's excellent (though at times quite dated) score. A lot of the vignettes are quite funny, though the success and amount of humor follows with the rest of the film's elements as being quite inconsistent.WIZARDS is a film with a lot of little things in it to appreciate even though the film as a whole is disjointed, cruddy, and rather tedious. I can say though that I'm glad I own it and watch it once every few years just because at the very least it's a great mood piece and has a much more personal & creative feel to it than most more recent animated features.