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This film tells the story from The Fellowship of the Ring and some of The Two Towers, leaving the finale for a presumed sequel which was never really made. If you require the end of this story in animated fashion, you can check out The Return of the King, which revisits the tale in a 97-minute-long made-for-TV special, produced in 1980 by a wholly different crew and in a different style, including nonstop songs.
Made for a reported $10 million, the film reportedly earned seven times that theatrically -- despite the fact that half of it is a jumbled mess (reputedly because director Ralph Bakshi didn't even finish the movie, see above). All of which goes to show: Tolkien fans will sit through anything. More than once.
You certainly know the epic tale. The Lord of the Rings follows the journey of the hobbit Frodo Baggins, en route from the sleepy Shire toward Mordor's Mount Doom, where he is tasked with destroying a magical (and evil) ring. With a gaggle of dwarves, elves, wizards, orcs, talking trees, and more along the way, Frodo feels overwhelmed by the journey, fearing he'll never make it to the volcanic mountain off in the distance.
And of course, he doesn't. Not in this movie.
Ending on the heels of a huge battle with the orcs, we are left to see the conclusion of the story in the sequel. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the problem is that The Lord of the Rings just doesn't stand well on its own. The sequel, however, does. As does The Hobbit, which was made a year later and tells the prequel story of how the ring was found by Bilbo Baggins. But as mentioned earlier, fantasy junkies won't care much, anyhow.
Of questionable merit is Bakshi's (Cool World) animation technique, which combines regular drawings with rotoscoping -- the practice of hand-tracing and tinting live action film to make it look sort of animated, but not. Some of these effects are quite successful, but mostly, when a fully animated elf jumps into a fight with 10 rotoscoped orcs, it looks silly. The hand animation itself is often crude and chunky -- check out the Balrog and the anthropomorphic talking tree for the worst examples of this. That, and the hobbits all look like Joey Lawrence -- what's up with that?
