I spent most of this morning going in circles, and I don’t mean wasting time in my powerchair. I wasted about two hours looking for one of my early university essays, so I couldn’t find it anywhere: not in my documents, my external hard drive, or my old emails. I wanted to find a review of The Lord Of The Rings films I wrote in my first year at university. It was the first thing I wrote for my Film Studies course and I remember feeling quite proud of it, but I have no clue where it went.

This came about when, earlier today, I came across a Facebook post about Ralph Bakshi’s earlier animated adaptation of Lord Of The Rings. I remember watching that adaptation once or twice as a child, but I don’t know much about it. However, it struck me that it might be interesting to compare the Bakshi version with the later, live action Peter Jackson adaptation. That was the version my uni review was about of course, so I reasoned that a good starting point might be to refresh my memory with what I had already written all those years ago, before proceeding any further and rewatching both films. Naturally I still have my 2012 blog entry on the trilogy to go back to, but my review was far longer and more detailed.

My inability to find the document I want aside, it still strikes me as a very interesting idea: how might the two adaptations of Tolkien’s epic novel compare? They are obviously very different works: Jackson’s ten hour, three film version was a smash hit, famously winning about twenty Oscars; whereas Bakshi’s was – or is now – relatively unknown. Obviously, one is animation and one is live action, and they seem to have had vastly different budgets. Even so, being based on the same book(s), there might be a few correlations which it may be interesting to analyse. I wonder how much has already been written about this, and whether anyone has already tried to contrast the two adaptations. Time, then, to stop going in circles trying to find long lost documents and get down to some actual research.