Usamah Harvey The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Scott LeBrun Ralph Bakshi wrote, produced and directed this animated combination of the post-apocalypse and fantasy genres, in which two brothers, Avatar (voice of Bob Holt) and Blackwolf (voice of Steve Gravers) both grow up with magical powers. The thing is, Avatar is a good guy and Blackwolf is just plain evil. Avatar goes on a quest to face and vanquish his putrid sibling, accompanied by an elf named Weehawk (voice of Richard Romanus) and a fairy princess named Elinore (voice of Jesse Welles). Largely aimed at a younger audience than previous Bakshi films, "Wizards" still does offer some pretty intense battle sequences, some cartoon gore, and a little suggestiveness (such as how Elinore is dressed throughout). What makes it interesting is that Avatar rules his kingdom of Montagar benevolently and kindly, while Blackwolf relies on weapons and technology, and also uses Adolf Hitler as a role model. Blackwolf reaches into Earths' past and appropriates Nazi propaganda to brainwash his minions, leading to some inspired use of live action sequences within the frame.Nowadays viewers are much more conditioned to computer generated images, but for the time this was made, this remains a fine example of traditional hand-drawn animation. Some of the images are quite striking, and character and creature design are enjoyable, as elves and mutants ultimately engage in war.The vocal performances are wonderful, especially from Holt; also lending their voices are David Proval (Romanus' co-star in "Mean Streets") and Mark "Luke Skywalker" Hamill.A short-and-sweet running time (81 minutes) and a rousing score composed by Andrew Belling further assist in making this an enjoyable feature, if not as satisfying overall as Bakshis' later "Fire and Ice".Seven out of 10.

Anssi Vartiainen Ralph Bakshi, the man you might know best as the director of that animated The Lord of the Rings film, has in fact had a long and illustrious career as an animator of the weird and bizarre. His films are rarely all that politically correct, kid-friendly or even sane. So, what if he decided to direct a family-oriented fantasy epic?Well... it would morph into an allegory about the founding of the nation of Israel, the use of propaganda in the Nazi war machine and the struggle between the forces of natural world and the industrial revolution. Nazi flags and swastikas would feature prominently, the main protagonist would be a drug abusing garden gnome lookalike, with a love interest so skimpily dressed that it would not even fly in most strip clubs, and would feature enough gore, horror imagery and acid trip sequences to satisfy even the legendary Caligula.You know, for kids!So yeah, the film certainly didn't hit its once intended mark, but when you put that aside, the film itself is actually quite a lot of fun. Sure, it goes bat guano insane with remarkable frequency, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, is pretty inconsistent when it comes to the quality of animation, contains numerous plot holes and errors, and is all around just a blatant mess. But what a glorious mess it is! This is pure let your jaw hang loose and just take it in kind of experience. The film makers were clearly taking something while animating and you can get the last remaining whiffs of that from this film. Is it for everyone? Absolutely not! It's offensive, insane and unhinged. But, if that sounds like fun to you, you're in for a ride. My advice: bring booze.

Nikonani S The man (Bakshi) clearly holds no regard for the standard fare of his profession: he'll cut scenes of low-budget fighting faeries(?) and slap them next to low-budget rotoscopes, he'll juice up pulp fantasy with pulp Nazi affection and pulp gunplay because he'll feel swords uninteresting to draw, he'll slap fat tits onto a main character faerie and slap off her clothes because he wants to draw things that would be fun to slap in real life, he slap his screenwriter if a scene requires more than five lines of dialogue without the slap-faerie with slap-tits slapping some slappable robot with a slapped in gun.It's a movie of slapping in doodles. The movie is just a bunch of doodles in a high school boy's notebook. That's fine, and the eclecticism forced by the low budget and high aspirations makes those doodles captivating. But they're just doodles, lacking entirely the vague and social quirks of "Fritz The Cat" or "Heavy Traffic".

Criticman12 "Wizards", is an animated 1977 movie about a wizard and his friends going on a quest to stop his brother from taking over the world. The story is pretty interesting and has a couple World War II references in the movie, like propaganda and the Holocaust.The animation and the visuals were great and has some interesting character designs.But the problem's I have with this film is that it has a big lack of character development and the movie can be really boring at time's."Wizards", is a good animated film from Ralph Bakshi, but it's not a film for everybody to watch. If you're a Ralph Bakshi fan, you would be interested with this film. If you're not, then you would make this a rental.