The Return of the King

This animated adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings concludes the story of the One Ring. While the armies of the Dark Lord Sauron gather before the royal city, a monstrous host of trolls, orcs, goblins and Ringwraiths storms its walls, and the city's defenders hold out through a long and bloody siege. Far away in the mountains of Mordor, the hobbits Frodo and Sam press on toward the fires of Mount Doom, worn down by hunger and thirst and hiding from their enemies. The film picks up the quest where the previous animated Lord of the Rings left off, at the close of The Two Towers.

Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin, Jr. directed; Romeo Muller wrote the screenplay, and Bass produced with Masaki Îzuka. It followed the pair's 1977 animated version of The Hobbit in their filmography, and voice work includes Orson Bean as Frodo and Bilbo, Roddy McDowall as Sam, John Huston as Gandalf, Theodore Gottlieb as Gollum, Casey Kasem as Merry and Sonny Melendrez as Pippin. Topcraft and Rankin/Bass Productions handled the animation between the United States and Japan, and the finished film runs 98 minutes.

On IMDb it holds a rating of 5.7 from roughly 5,500 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.4 from about 229 votes. A critics' rating of 6.2 from 15 reviews sits between the two audience figures, slightly above the larger IMDb sample and slightly below the smaller TMDB one.