The Return of the King (1980)

Can we all just agree that the “Where There’s a Whip, There’s a Way” song slaps and move on? Full disclosure: This is probably the hardest call in our Tolkien movie ranking so far. All things considered, this is probably the least essential adaptation of the lot — a film that we cannot bring ourselves to hate, but one that frankly doesn’t really stand on its own.

Weirdly, this 1980 film by Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin serves as an unofficial sequel to their earlier animated adaptation of “The Hobbit” (why they decided to skip straight to Return of the King without so much as a nod to Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 “Lord of the Rings” is anyone’s guess). This leaves the viewer pretty much to their own devices to fill in the gaps and keep up with the story as we watch Frodo and Sam recount their perilous journey to Mount Doom to Bilbo at Rivendell, while Gandalf fends off Sauron’s forces at Minas Tirith.

Not everything sticks together, and you have to take it for what it is — a 77-minute TV movie pretty much made for kids that condenses the saga’s grand finale while wasting a large chunk of its runtime on Sam’s rescue of Frodo at the Pass of Cirith Ungol (also, Legolas and Gimli are omitted entirely). Hot take: The visually striking animation style, quirky character designs, and gorgeous hand-drawn backgrounds have aged much better than Bakshi’s noble but failed rotoscoping experiment, the voice-acting cast is stacked (John Huston gives Ian McKellen a run for his money as Gandalf), and the story effectively captures the dark, brooding atmosphere of Tolkien’s text.