Amazon.com video review:
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
