Lacking a firm center in Frodo's story, the film plays itself out as a bewildering parade of elves, dwarves, ores, trolls and talking trees.

What most people remember is the mix of the live-action tracing within the traditional animation and just how effectively creepy it managed to be, but for the time this did a pretty good job of adapting the dense novels.

It looked terrible then and it still does: cartoon characters move differently from live actors, and the attempt to duplicate natural movement ends in stylistic incoherence.

While it is quite interesting to see an early attempt to bring this beloved classic to the screen, it simply has too many issues holding it back, primarily with its sloppy rotoscoping and the unbalanced nature of its adaptation.