Wizards (

1977

) ½

My father was a firm believer that all cartoons were children’s cartoons. Thus, he had no problem showing me Heavy Metal (1981) alongside Bugs Bunny. I suppose I should be thankful that his knowledge of anime began and ended with Speed Racer, else I would have doubtlessly been exposed to Perfect Blue (1997) and Ghost in the Shell (1995) before I left elementary school. Though, of all the age-inappropriate cartoons my father showed me, Wizards was the one closest to his heart. I don’t know how many times we watched it while I was growing up. He owned an old VHS copy of the film, that he eagerly screened for any of my friends that slept over at my house. Dad even flexed some creative muscles I didn’t know he had when he drew a sketch of one of the main characters, Necron-99 AKA Peace. It was years since either of us had thought about the film though, the VHS copy had been rendered unplayable and the drawing lost, when I discovered something that jogged my memory: a Beer. Specifically, Three Floyds’ IPA Necron 99, which bears the namesake and the visage of the same character my father sketched. We decided that it was high time for another screening of wizards.

Thousands of years before our story begins, an atomic war, triggered by a terrorist attack, nearly eradicated all human life. The inclusion of the aside about the terrorists reflects the growing understanding of the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction. Most films would have been content to simply state that war had somehow broken out, but it was becoming increasingly obvious that the major powers had no desire to start a shooting war with one another, preferring an endless series of proxy conflicts throughout the developing world. Only a handful of humans survive the atomic holocaust, the rest are left grotesquely mutated. Don’t worry though, this is not going to turn into a depressing mediation on a post-nuclear war world like Five (1951) or On the Beach (1959). The backstory of the nuclear holocaust gives way to a Tolkienesque fantasy world when the elves and fairies reawaken after a long slumber and retake their place as the dominant life forms on earth. For thousands of years the world is at peace. All that gets blown out of the water when the fairy queen gives birth to two wizards: Avatar and Blackwolf.

Avatar is all right (though he eventually grows up into a dirty old man) but Blackwolf is a monster bent only on world domination. Fortunately, Blackwolf is no match for Avatar in the classic wizard's duel sense, so he runs away to the irradiated wasteland of Scorch, where he builds an army of demons, mutants, and ancient technology. On paper it’s a powerful army, but in the field it always falls apart at the first sign of trouble. The problem isn’t a material one, hell the armies that defeat the gun-wielding, tank-driving hordes of demons are usually elves equipped with swords and bows. The problem is all related to the morale of the troops; Blackwolf’s mutant soldiers simply do not want to fight or know what they are fighting for. For a time, the evil wizard despairs, but then he finds something that can ignite the fighting passions of his army: A vintage WWII Nazi propaganda reel. Armed with this new secret weapon he prepares to invade the free peoples of the world. Still, there’s always a chance that strong leaders could defeat his newly motivated army, so he dispatches a robotic assassin named Necron-99 to eliminate the competent monarchs and politicians in every state he plans to invade, leaving 2nd rate stand-ins in control.

Necron-99 kills his way right into the study of Avatar himself, assassinating the president of Montagar (the chief fairy nation) right before the wizard and his half-naked fairy daughter Ellinore. Avatar is pretty handy with robots though, and he’s able to reverse engineer Necron-99 into a willing assistant. He re-names the robot Peace, and together with Ellinore and Weehawk, an elf warrior, he sets off for Scorch to defeat Blackwolf and destroy his propaganda film before he can enslave all of middle-ear… err I mean regular earth.

So far, aside from the half-naked fairy girl (and she is not without precedent in kid’s cartoons, her outfit is only slightly more provocative than Tinkerbell’s) this premise seems fairly kid-friendly. Rest assured it is not. For starters, the violence is such that it would probably be considered too much in a Japanese children’s cartoon. Now, lots of kids' cartoons are violent, but they are usually violent in very different ways than what we get here. We see the bad guys machine-gun down the POWs they captured in a recent battle after a pair of comic-relief priests refuse to take care of them. In the preceding battle scene, Blackwolf’s mutant soldiers cut down dozens of elven warriors. The sequence ends with a shot of a young elven soldier huddled in a trench, his thousand-yard stare gazing helplessly into the camera. Not is it just the violence of Wizards that makes it age-inappropriate, Avatar’s status as dirty old man, and his open lusting after the much younger (we’re talking thousands of years here) Ellinore is hardly the sort of thing you’d want young kids to watch. That said, I saw this movie at least a dozen times growing up, and I turned out ok. For the most part kids are far more durable than the makers of children's entertainment give them credit for.

From the very beginning Wizards casts itself in the Tolkien model of anti-modernist fantasy, declaring this a war between technology and magic. If anything, Wizards goes a great deal further in its condemnation of heavy industry than the old master ever did, as Tolkien only opposed rapid industrialization at the expense of the environment, not technology in-and-of-itself as is the case in Wizards. Wizards’ director, Ralph Bakshi, also must have bought into the Lord of the Rings as a metaphor for WWII theory as well, as the bad guys in his animation are cast as Nazis. Nor is it particularly subtle about it either. Just take a look at Blackwolf’s throne room; his throne sits in the middle of a gigantic red swastika. The gas-mask wearing storm troopers, that occupy the film’s periodic comedic relief intermission scenes, even refer to Blackwolf as The Fuhrer. In case we somehow missed it, the narrator proclaims at the film’s end that “Hitler was dead again.”

The chief appeal here is the visuals, and honestly it’s pretty wild anarchic stuff. At times, psychedelic light shows used in lieu of background, so the characters are moving through a directionless void of swirling colors. In some shots, touched up rotoscopes make WWII newsreel footage look like an army of monsters from hell. All this is combined with more traditional, almost cutesy (particularly in the case of Avatar), appearance of the main characters gives the film an appearance that varies wildly from scene to scene and moment to moment. There really isn’t anything like it, nor is there likely to be anything like it again anytime soon, given Disney’s stranglehold on Western animation. Certainly not something this professionally put together or this long, anyway.

That said, re-watching Wizards as an adult was more than a touch disappointing. The aggressive anti-modernism seemed naive, and even obnoxious this time around (you can't beat back a panzer advance with longbows, no matter how disinterested the tankers are). Also, they're more than a touch hypocritical given the fact that Avatar eventually kills Blackwolf with a handgun (and not just any handgun but a Nazi-made Luger). The money-saving techniques in some of the crowd sequences make the whole thing look rather cheap, and an advance of a monstrous army is less impressive when it's obviously one guy and his 500 identical twin brothers launching the charge. The humor is a mixed bag, but the funniest scenes are always interludes with Blackwolf's soldiers that have almost no bearing on the plot. Obviously, I'm not the first person to find that some treasured Obscura from childhood failed to live up to a more nuanced critical eye, nor will I be the last. If anything I got off lightly, as there is some good stuff in Wizards that'd make it worth a watch for fans of the genre.