Fargo Guerra (user-230-106275) In a crazy age for animation Wizards delivers a crazy story where radio-decayed mutants fueled by footage of Nazi propaganda and other artifacts of the earths aggressive past attempt to take over the future. The only thing that can stop domination is a party of forest creatures, a derelict assassin, the old wizard himself, and one psychedelic trip of a movie.The film can get preachy, and sometimes maybe too blunt. But hey, something rare and cool to come out of '77, stop messing around and watch Wizards.

MissSimonetta The first time I saw Wizards (1977) I hated it. Then I was somehow compelled into watching it again and while I still didn't like it, I admitted to myself that it was interesting. Upon the third viewing, I was in love. This is a movie that gets better and better the more you watch it.God knows why, as it's quite flawed. Whoever they hired to do the voice over narration sounds like she's just taken a sleeping pill. Sometimes the plot is choppy and the editing can be strange. The ending is a bit abrupt.But still, this movie has charm to spare. The characters are twists on archetypes and feel human despite their cartoonish nature. Even the villains are compelling and sometimes likable. The backgrounds are gorgeous, ranging from soothing, storybook-like watercolor illustrations to sketchy, over-detailed concoctions with violent colors. The music is pure, awesome 70s cheese. And the climax is just fantastic; totally unexpected.Folks are divided on Bakshi's love affair with rotoscoping. Unlike The Lord of the Rings (1978) or American Pop (1981), the rotoscoping is great in Wizards, because the rotoscoping is used only for the demons in the villain's army. Some would say they clash with the other, Saturday morning style characters, but the contrast actually works here and feels like less of a mess. And because the rotoscoping is saved for the villains, it makes them all the creepier.Out of all Bakshi's films, this one is my favorite. I have the Blu-ray and have probably seen it over twenty times by now.

TheLittleSongbird I have come across who like this movie and some that don't so much, sometimes downright hate it even. As for me, I don't love or dislike Wizards. It is certainly an interesting movie, and is certainly better than Cool World, but as far as Bakshi's movies go I do much prefer Heavy Traffic and American Pop. Wizards' flaws have been covered a number of times in previous reviews, but I do share my agreement with some that have been brought up. The dialogue I don't think has been a general strength in Bakshi's movies but I did find it very corny here. The soundtrack also felt a little cheesy and perhaps too 70s, and the pacing is awkward, often feeling sluggish. I had mixed feelings on the story, it was a great idea and while simple was generally interesting and engaged me once I got over its strangeness. But I did have issues with the narration; not since Don Bluth's Rock a Doodle have I seen an animated movie with such an (I feel) unnecessary overuse of narration. However, the film does look wonderful, the characters do look too cartoony but I liked their rough-around-the-edges charm and the backgrounds and colours are stylish and beautiful. The characters while on the stereotypical side are at least likable and engaging, I did find myself rooting for Avatar. The voice acting is solid on the whole. Overall, decent film and underrated but too flawed for me to consider it a masterpiece. 6/10 Bethany Cox

noizyme Before I begin, I give huge respect to Ralph Bakshi to release this experimental animation to the public and going against the family- friendly-grain of most animated films from Disney and other studios. I loved everything that the film swings for (anti-establishment, questioning technology taking over our humanity, trying to tell an actual story instead of animating "horses eating apples"), but its delivery is a bit askew. I understand that they had a rather lax attitude to hiring animators off the street, which is interesting, but you can definitely see the results in this film. The emotions of the characters don't match how they're drawn, and this film suffers from "over-animation" if anything...back then, its as if every wrinkle in the characters' clothing had to move in every frame, and it gets a bit absurd. I LOVED THE ROTOSCOPING...it was my favorite thing (aside from the wonderfully intricate background paintings) to watch, and the DVD has a wonderful "making of" video with Bakshi describing what the process was like. There's a commentary track, too, which I didn't listen to, but I got a lot of information from the "making of" video. The story was confusing a lot of times, and why certain characters ran off with different groups of faeries and elves and got captured almost seemed without reason. Having Bakshi describe the story in the "making of" video almost sounds like a completely difficult thing to capture, and I think the film needed to be worked on for a few more years. The thing that dates the movie the most is the funk music that plays during certain action sequences, as if it were a blaxploitation film or something...the breathy, airy singing of their "theme" for the movie is another 70's throwback that needs to go (and had nothing to do with the film). The Nazi thing...confusing as hell. I'm not sure why this was added in the movie or even the story...maybe to show that how dumb the bad guys were because they really dug war propaganda (?). As a fan of animation, I really liked it, but not enough to watch it over and over. It's crude, somewhat hastily-made, and could've been refined to be a lot more if given the time, but the studio's attitude was not in agreement to do that, so this is what you get.