But it’s telling that one filmmaker, animator Ralph Bakshi, tried his damndest to use his talents to bring fantasy filmmaking to the masses without sacrificing the things that made it so damn appealing to readers, both those young and those there primarily to have something to drop acid to, all done without causing a Waterloo-like catastrophe for studio heads. With a few notable exceptions beginning in the ’80s, it mostly was never worth the investment to make live-action big-budget fantasy, as studio heads often feared it would keep audiences away with its weird lore and magical trappings, and those exceptions I mentioned above were often rooted in, at least, recognizable names: Conan, Robin Hood, King Arthur. The ones that did make it out of development were, first and foremost, B movies, and slowly became cheap counter-programming at both the Home Box Office and the physical one.
In the 20 years since Peter Jackson injected mass-market populism into its language with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, it’s become very easy to forget just how intractable and maligned the genre was in the eyes of executive and, to a smaller extent, audiences. To fully grok just how special Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King’s new animated fantasy The Spine of Night is, one must go back to the dark roots of the fantasy film. Luckily, he’s still watching all the films worth seeing, and reviewing them in our film section check out his official preview here, and keep it locked to our continuing coverage as the fest unfolds. But SXSW 2021 is a virtual edition, so he’s at home like the rest of us.
Editor’s Note: Normally this week, Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston would be down in Austin for South-By-Southwest’s film festival, catching as many premieres as he can in between tacos and fun walks down a crowded 6th Street.