2.04Summing up Bakshi
Working with Ralph Bakshi’s movie has been a very confusing task for me. It is hardly believable how good narrative problems as well as visual problems in Tolkien’s story were solved in a number of scenes, and at the same time how, is has to be said, unbelievably bad the movie proves to be in other scenes.
The very same thing applies to its German translation. As I have shown on the previous pages there are numerous passages of Tolkien’s dialogue which the translator solved much better than both Carroux and Krege. He delivers by far the best rendition of ‘While I look foul and feel fair’ (see 2.03, B 8). In other passages he completes partial quotations from Tolkien’s book thus trying to improve the original script, like in B 12 as he replaces ‘By all the Shire!’ by the original ‘Bei Elbereth und Lúthien’ (from T 282, C 299).
On the other hand there are scenes like in B 23, as Boromir proclaims:
B 23
Boromir
For Gondor and the city of Minas Tirith.
Boromir
Recht so! Und dass niemals ein Feind die Mauern von Minas Tirith bezwinge.
In these passages the unknown Bakshi translator proves as guilty of using the dreaded and unnecessary fairy tale language as Carroux and Krege in their worst moments.
On the whole the truth is that I do not know what to make of it. It is certainly a very nice movie and partly more complete than Jackson’s first part. The German translation, especially when seen in comparison to the other German versions, works, but is very inconsistent.