Aw man... Bakshi was EVERYTHING in the 70's! His Heavy Metal and The Hobbit were core elements at my coming-of-age. When I think of The Hobbit, I think about what it sounded like when my Dad read it to us, as children, and Bakshi's animation. Those are still my touchstones for the visual version of Tolkein. ... which may be why I never finished Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Shit, Bakshi was everything in the '80s. We recently subjected my daughter to The Secret of Nimh and that dude is fuckin' weird. It occurs to me that we basically traded the Disney/Bakshi duopoly for Disney/Dreamworks and culture is definitely worse off for it. For the record, Bakshi had nothing to do with Heavy Metal. He had everything to do with Rock & Rule, which is somehow weirder.
Welll sheeeeeit. Heavy Metal wasn't Bakshi after all. My childhood is ruined. (Or, misinformed.) That rotoscoping of the mob scene from LOTR was - in my head - from the Heavy Metal movie, with Black Sabbath's "Mob Rules" behind it: All my childhood memories are seeping together into one primordial soup...