RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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IndieWire is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2026 IndieWire Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved. After Dark Ralph Bakshi's 'The Lord of the Rings' Remains the Best Spiritual Sequel Ever Made Round out IndieWire's Sequels Week , and After Dark's animated Tolkien marathon, with the unfinished epic from 1978. By Alison Foreman , Sarah Shachat August 14, 2026 11:59 pm Share Share on Facebook Post google Google Preferred Share on LinkedIn Show more sharing options Share to Flipboard Submit to Reddit Pin it Post to Tumblr Email Print This Page Share on WhatsApp On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.
First, the BAIT : a weird genre pick, and why we're exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE : a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, "Is this old cult film actually worth recommending?"
Note: This is the finale of IndieWire After Dark 's three-part animated "Lord of the Rings" series! Have you watched 1977's "The Hobbit" yet? What about 1980's "The Return of the King" ?
The first midnight movie IndieWire After Dark ever recommended was Ralph Bakshi's "Cool World." This column's co-founder Christian Zilko and I appreciated the cult classic then as a sticky, spectacular, artistic… disaster . In fact, we called it the kind of movie you could "safely pick for parts": a clever-enough description that, when I reread it today, actually inspired a full-body shudder. Related Stories Top of the Line: We Are We Going, Where Have We Been? About That 'Super Bowl Moment' in the Middle of 'Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma'
Suffice to say, even as an objective fan of bombshell Holli Would (Kim Basinger) and tortured cartoonist Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne), I was understanding Bakshi backward when I picked that film three years ago. By pegging our programming to the cinematic wonder of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?," After Dark unknowingly announced itself through an article that relegated the cult filmmaker — now 87 — to the margins of a creative landscape he himself had helped carve out decades prior. Woof.
Sadly, that's the strange fate so much of Bakshi's filmography has met over the years. A singular talent, the animator/director followed his enormously successful 1972 debut, "Fritz the Cat," with movies that ranged from profitable provocations to compromised commercial flops. "Heavy Traffic" performed respectably, while "Coonskin" was effectively buried amid distribution chaos and protests from the Congress of Racial Equality. (Notably, the NAACP recognized its use of racist stereotypes as satire and supported it.) Later films — including "American Pop," "Fire and Ice," and, yes, our beloved "Cool World" — struggled to find audiences before building their reputations through home video and late-night TV.
Bakshi remained something of an underdog even when his work succeeded. And yet, filmmakers and cartoonists across the industry kept returning to him for inspiration anyway. Peter Jackson credited Bakshi's "The Lord of the Rings" with introducing him to Tolkien, while Quentin Tarantino became such a vocal champion of "Coonskin" that he later wrote the foreword to 2008's "Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi " biography — for whatever that's worth. And during a 2011 Hollywood Reporter roundtable, director Gore Verbinski pointedly asked his fellow filmmakers, "What happened to the Ralph Bakshis of the world?" when the group discussed why American animation had become synonymous with family entertainment.
"Æon Flux" creator Peter Chung called Bakshi a greater early influence than Disney, and John Kricfalusi developed his creator-driven approach under Bakshi on "Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures." The list goes on. Hollywood spent nearly half a century picking Bakshi's films for parts — to borrow some, uh, ill-advised phrasing — effectively repurposing the collisions that kept him suspended between mainstream and underground art. Despite winning nearly every argument he made back then about what animation would ultimately become, Bakshi rarely got credit for the cinematic future he helped make.
Born into a Krymchak Jewish family in Haifa and raised poor in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Bakshi entered the animation industry at just 18, polishing dirt from cels at Terrytoons. He worked his way up to director, learning both how the American cartoon factory operated and, more importantly, that he wanted to break its cultural machinery. By violating the boundaries between illustrative storytelling and supposedly adult subjects, Bakshi created work that could be volatile, offensive, and conspicuously unfinished — but was too often reduced to those traits in spite of the exceptional skill beneath them. (I said, I'M SORRY! )
From a distance, 1978's "The Lord of the Rings" might look like an outlier in Bakshi's career. But the pioneering director and lifelong Tolkien fan approached Middle-earth with the same appetite for invention that drove everything else he made. In the process, he accidentally created the definitive spiritual sequel — not just to Rankin/Bass' animated "The Hobbit," but in the broadest sense of the concept itself. It's a continuation capable of inheriting another film's emotional stakes without seeking its artists, aesthetics, or approval. The result is a wonderfully misshapen (and weirdly noble?) adaptation that resembles the heroes of its story almost as much as the filmmaker who fought to finish it.
Bakshi had supposedly loved "The Lord of the Rings" for decades, and he pursued the project after learning that United Artists had abandoned John Boorman's proposed live-action adaptation. Fiercely rejecting the idea that Tolkien's trilogy could be compressed into a single movie, Bakshi initially considered three animated installments before settling on two that would, in his view, still preserve the original tale's immersive fantasy.
But rather than getting back...
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