Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings Animated (1978)

Ralph Bakshi's animated fantasy film version of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings has been cited as an influence on director Peter Jackson's film trilogy based on The Lord of the Rings. Bakshi on his interview with IGN is quoted as saying "Peter Jackson did say that the first film inspired him to go on and do the series, but that happened after I was bitching and moaning to a lot of interviewers that he said at the beginning that he never saw the movie. I thought that was kind of fucked up."

The 1978 animated fantasy film makes some deviations from the book, but overall follows Tolkien's narrative quite closely. Bakshi had created it by utilizing new technique in animated filmmaking, used live-action footage which was then rotoscoped to produce an animated look. The technique could transform highly complex live-action scenes into animation, thus saved production costs and gave the animated characters a more realistic look.

Same as Peter Jackson's version, Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings was both financial and artistic success. While the budget was only $4 million, it grossed $30.5 million at the box office. At the Giffoni Film Festival Bakshi won a Golden Gryphon award for the film. The film's score (composed by Leonard Rosenman) was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Original Motion Picture Score. The Lord of the Rings was ranked as the 90th greatest animated film of all time by the Online Film Critics Society.

The film, along with The Hobbit (1977) and The Return of the King (1980) has released by Warner Bros as a boxed-set "trilogy" of films on VHS and DVD format (packaged separately).