Here is a film that boasts some of the freshest ideas concerning the fantasy genre that I have ever encountered. Here's the set-up: millions of years after the world had been destroyed by nuclear weapons, mankind had evolved into two groups, grotesque mutants and beautiful creatures like fairies and elves. The mutants use technology salvaged from the ruins of the old world. The fairy-like creatures have developed magic. One day an evil wizard named Blackwolf created an army to take over the world. In order to motivate his troops he showed them Nazi propaganda. After being worked into a brain-washed frenzy, his forces began a reign of terror against all other living creatures. To stop him, another wizard named Avatar (who happens to also be Blackwolf's brother) must team up with a half-fairy named Elinore, a reformed assassin named Peace, and an elvish spy known as Weehawk. In hindsight, the plot of Ralph Bakshi's Wizards closely resembles the central story of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy (which is apt considering that Bakshi would later go on to adapt that story to film): a rag-tag team of heroes must sneak behind enemy lines and defeat an evil foe hellbent on world domination. But despite its creativity and inventiveness, Wizards fails as a film. The film's tone is maddeningly uneven: one shot will consist of light-hearted comedy, the next of disturbingly graphic war carnage, the next of political commentary, and the next of Looney Tunes-esque pratfalls. The film stalls and lurches from one plot point to the next with all of the subtlety of an A-bomb. In some of Bakshi's other films like Heavy Traffic (1973) and Coonskin (1975), his atonal, erratic pacing and plotting accentuated the story. Why? Because the plots dealt with urban and racial decay and how people from different walks of life perceive the world. But I have yet to see such an avant-garde approach to storytelling work within the context of high fantasy. It certainly doesn't work here in Wizards.
5/10
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