Wizards

After an apocalypse, humans are now dead or mutated from the nuclear fallout.  The real ancestors of humans, creatures such as fairies and dwarves rise up to live in peace.  After several millenia, their queen births twins, Avatar (voiced by Bob Holt), the one still using magic, and Blackwolf (Steve Gravers), who has found a way to use technology against the wizards, hoping to lead the mutants into a revolution. An animated film written and directed by Ralph Bakshi.


The animation is of its times and seems low budget, and the mishmash of differing styles don't mesh enough to make a coherent looking piece (different animators worked on different parts, some modern and inventive, others like a slapped-together Saturday morning cartoon).

Generally, both the backgrounds and character designs are not particularly original and the voices don't fit a lot of their characters. Avatar as an adult is a short crusty wizard, while Blackwolf is an all-powerful demon, so nothing about them is twin-like. Perhaps they are supposed to represent two sides of man. The voices mostly sound like they are reading from a script instead of acting a role. The film seemed to choose to animate a lot of boring talky scenes instead of those with action or fantastical elements that would look good in animation.

The broad comic elements also don't fit what should have been a dark and painful story of good vs evil and is a waste of time and effort. There's much too much of it.

As for the story itself, despite the Avatar vs Blackwolf storyline, there really is no identifiable main character or emotion that carries throughout the film. Too much of the film is told through exposition instead of visuals, both through character dialogue and the storybook type narration by Susan Tyrrell.

It's obvious though that the filmmaker is making some kind of humanity/war statement as Blackwolf discovers that Nazi propaganda films can be used as a weapon (this is the "technology"). This odd tactic and wholly human artifact makes the story too obvious of a parable instead of masking it in fantasy terms for us to make our own connections through symbolism or metaphor. But the shabby way this film is put together, I think the message is lost, or conversely, too heavy-handed.

There is no big denouement or battle, and I can't recall where it showed any real hand to hand combat. Blackwolf eventually is defeated by an ordinary pistol instead of magic. His movie projector is destroyed thus the battle is won. If only real life warfare were so easy.

The film looks lazily and sloppily made, and is missing a guiding hand to put it together.