From Amazon.com
Far from the masterful treatment that groundbreaking animator Ralph Bakshi gave the similarly themed
The Lord of the Rings just a year later,
Wizards feels amateurish. A simplistic distillation of fantasy tropes, the scenario is millions of years after nuclear war wipes out civilization. Middle Earth fairies, elves, and magic emerge from the "good lands," while dimwitted mutants with poor comic timing emerge from the nuclear wastes. In the ultimate confrontation between good and evil, a hippie-ish wizard named Avatar defends his utopia against the technological and neo-Nazi revival of his bad-seed twin, Blackwolf. With volleys of jokes that couldn't hit a barn door, elves with Brooklyn accents, and the dubious climax that sees the kindly old wizard using one of the hated machines of war to triumph over evil,
Wizards is one of fantasy animation's least successful examples.
--Alan E. Rapp
Review
For a while in the 1970s, it looked as if animated movies might be entering a new era, one marked by a break with traditional (children's) subject matter, animation styles, and storytelling methods. Films such as Fritz the Cat, Allegro Non Troppo, and Heavy Traffic all challenged the Disney method, quite successfully. Wizards was part of this era, but it's a very mixed bag. The animation is in a different vein -- what might be termed a "multi-media" approach, employing the traditional cel-based process as well as extensive rotoscoping (though often in silhouette) and use of still sketches. It's an intriguing idea, but too sloppily executed to be successful. The story itself is convoluted and not particularly convincing; at times it seems as if director Ralph Bakshi didn't really have a story to tell, just an urge to put some images onscreen and move them through some exercises. However, there are some very nice isolated sequences, and the movie has a palpable sense of the period in which it was made. It somehow or other screams out "1977" in every frame, even though the design scheme is based upon both the distant past and the farflung future. Sometimes irritating, Wizards is of interest mostly to aficionados of animated film, who will find as many things to make them smile as to make them cringe. ~ Craig Butler, All Movie Guide
