The Lord of the Rings

Details

Release year: 1978

Storyline

The Fellowship of the Ring embark on a journey to destroy the One Ring and end Sauron's reign over Middle-earth.

Top credits

Did you know

• Tim Burton's first job in the animation industry was working on this film. However, sources disagree on what exactly he did. Director Ralph Bakshi said that Burton only cleaned the dust off animation cels and did not animate any sequences in the film, while layout artist Mike Ploog says that Burton animated the Nazgûl horseback sequences and that Burton aggravated Ploog because Burton's animations of the horses' hooves did not match Ploog's backgrounds.

• Peter Jackson first encountered The Lord of the Rings via this movie, and some shots in his live-action trilogy were influenced by it. One such shot features Frodo and the other Hobbits hiding from a Black Rider under a big tree root, while the Black Rider stalks above them. In his version of the sequence, Jackson uses a similar shot, although he filmed it from a different angle (in the book, Frodo hid separately from the other Hobbits). A second sequence features the camera slowly revolving around Strider and the Hobbits, who stand in a circle as the Black Riders approach them on Weathertop. In his staging, Jackson also used a similar shot, although his camera was much faster, and Strider is not amongst the Hobbits. A third similarity was the depiction of Gollum losing the Ring in the prologue: both movies show similar events, but the book had no such prologue, and it runs directly counter to Tolkien's scheme for the storyline. Another similarly staged scene is Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn's discovery of Gandalf the White.

• Predominantly filmed with live actors in black-and-white and rotoscoped, each animation cel drawn over a film frame of an actor. However, several sequences do not use rotoscoping.

Box Office

Gross (Domestic): $30,471,420

Opening Weekend (Domestic): $626,649 (1978-11-19)