The Xbox Game Pass catalog has expanded to include Chants of Sennaar. This is the fifth title to hit the service in May 2024, as well as the 63rd new Xbox Game Pass addition since the turn of the year.
Developed by French studio Rundisc, Chants of Sennaar is a mesmerizing puzzle adventure inspired by the biblical story about the Tower of Babel. It tasks players with reuniting the denizens of a mystical desert city who have forgotten how to communicate for reasons unknown. The way to do so is through exploration and deciphering of an ancient language holding many a secret. The concept and its execution were a big hit among reviewers, many of whom labeled Chants of Sennaar as one of the best indies of 2023.
Xbox Game Pass subscribers who missed this 2023 game can now see what all the fuss was about as one of their membership perks. Chants of Sennaar was added to Microsoft's content library on May 15, with its arrival bolstering the selection of highly rated titles on the platform. Specifically, the Xbox console and PC versions of the game boast a Metacritic Metascore of 86 and 85, respectively, whereas its Steam edition currently sits at nearly 12,000 "Overwhelmingly Positive" user reviews.
May 2024 Is Shaping Up To Be a Great Month For Puzzle Fans With an Xbox Game Pass Membership
Like the vast majority of Xbox Store releases, this indie puzzler offers achievement hunters a chance to add up to 1,000 Gamerscore points to their profiles. Doing so will require obtaining 25 achievements, which is doable in about nine hours, according to crowdsourced data compiled by How Long To Beat. Chants of Sennaar is the second acclaimed puzzle adventure to hit Microsoft's subscription service this month, arriving only a day after cult classic Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons had reached Xbox Game Pass. Microsoft's subscribers will also get a chance to experience a more platforming-heavy take on the puzzle-solving genre on May 30, when a wacky title called Humanity is scheduled to reach the XGP catalog.
Five other games are coming to the service in the meantime, starting with Immortals of Aveum on May 16. Xbox console exclusive Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 will follow suit on May 21, debuting as Microsoft's biggest new first-party game of the month. While the coming two weeks are packed with head-turning releases, the Xbox Game Pass library is actually on course to shrink in May 2024, as it's set to lose no fewer than 14 titles.

I still sit sometimes and chuckle, thinking "When Ralph Bakshi started animating The Lord of the Rings in 1976, did he know what he was going to unleash on the world?" There was also the Rankin/Bass TV special, being developed concurrently, but its the Bakshi film that, in 1979, Peter Jackson saw, and this young Photoengraver would later direct six (!) live-action Tolkien films and, between himself and co-producer Philippa Boyens, are hard to work producing three more such films. Other adaptations since - namely, The Rings of Power (especially Season One) but also games from The Shadow of Mordor to Return to Moria - have at the very least taken cues from Jackson's films. All because a Kiwi photoengraver saw a cartoon....
But the relationship between these properties is not so clear-cut as it may seem. I ednumbered the similarities and dissimilarities between Jacksons' films and The Rings of Power elsewhere. Now I want to delve deeper into the similarities and dissimilarities between Jackson and previous adaptations of Tolkien.

The Rankin/Bass TV Specials

Side-by-side video comparisons between Jackson's films and the two Rankin/Bass TV Specials do not reveal any similarities that don't come from the fact that they're adapting the same books. This is an important point: Jackson is NOT trying to make some post-modern "collage" Hollywood film. He's only tipping his hat to those adaptations of Tolkien that he had seen growing up and that influenced him personally.¹
Due to copyright, the Rankin/Bass specials probably didn't air in New Zealand at all, and although it seems Jackson got a hold of the Rankin/Bass The Hobbit before embarking on The Lord of the Rings, he had not seen their Return of the King, certainly before 1999, and neither he nor his close collaborators have made comments about either of the two Specials. By contrast, the (American!) showrunners of The Rings of Power had referenced the Rankin/Bass Specials, and seemingly tipped their hat to it in a set design for season two.²

The Ralph Bakshi film

As I said, Jackson went to see the Bakshi film. He had enjoyed some of Bakshi's previous film, including the Tolkien-esque Wizards, released the previous year, and went to see his latest. At the time he hadn't read the books, making Bakshi's film his first exposure to Tolkien, but he does admit he "heard the name" of the book beforehand. His biography suggests he saw it in late 1978, when it first premiered, but surely it would have arrived at New Zealand in early 1979.³
The connection between the two films had been played up, unsurprisingly, by Ralph Bakshi himself. A leonine, grandiose man, Bakshi is anything but a reliable narrator. His own suggestion that he hadn't actually seen the films - only trailers, he claims - sounds believable enough and certainy understandable.⁴ But, then, if he didn't watch them, it makes his critique of them as deriviative of his films all the more dubious, even without actually looking at the specifics of what he said:

Look at his Lothlorien. Look at my backgrounds of Lothlorien. Take a look! He had much more to see than I did, and if you don't think he lifted it over and over again, you're wrong. I mean, how did he design a knife in Lord of the Rings? How did he design a sword? How did he design the dwarf with his axe? How did he design the fur around him? Why did Peter Jackson put fur around the dwarf? Because I put fur around the dwarf! Why would the dwarf have fur naturally? You see, I could give you a billion little things. I wish I had a movie to look at.⁵

These are truly some confused claims, for the most part. The most credible part here is the Hobbits hiding under the branch from the Ringwraiths, a shot composition later to also be replicated in season one of the Rings of Power, and which we'll get to later.
Another claim of Bakshi's that cannot be dismissed out of hand is that, however big or small a debt Jackson owes to his film, he said that Jackson didn't publically acknowledge the influence and felt that it was only appropriate to have welcomed him to visit the set or something: by comparison, Jackson invited Rick Baker, who played King Kong in the 1978 version, to cameo in his King Kong.⁶
Jackson actually did mention the Bakshi filming in passing in the making-ofs. Then again, he entirely fails to mention the radio serial, either. Ultimately, Jackson possibly in cahoots with New Line Cinema, must have felt it unwise to point to a previous adaptation that had only achieved mixed success, at the outset of his own enterprise. He did talk more about the Bakshi film, and more fondly, in the director's commentary to The Fellowship of the Ring and in a couple of later interviews, which are significant gestures, but he clearly wasn't going to trumpet the influence Bakshi's film had on him off of every rooftop.⁷
In his 2006 biography, Jackson actually briefly reviews the Bakshi film:

I liked the early part – it had some quaint sequences in Hobbiton, a creepy encounter with the Black Rider on the road, and a few quite good battle scenes – but then, about half way through, the storytelling became very disjointed and disorientating and I really didn’t understand what was going on. However, what it did do was to make me want to read the book – if only to find out what happened!⁸

This is a complementary but admittedly mixed review, and Jackson had made similar comments since, calling it "brave and ambitious" but consistently decrying the hokum of the film's second half.⁹ Now, it is true that artists can be influenced by a work of art in spite of themselves, but lets see if we can try and quantify the influence.
From the outset, in the audio commentary, Jackson remarks that "our film stylistically is very different and the design is different," which is apposite: Bakshi swore a debt to Howard Pyle, which certainly leaves its mark of the gorgeous natural bakcdrops, but a source closer at hand (especially considering his follow-up fantasy film, Fire and Ice) is the most popular fantasy illustrator of his day, Frank Frazetta: Bakshi's Witch King is practically ripped from Frazetta's famous "Dark Rider" illustration.¹⁰
Jackson's approach, however, was steeped in a kind of romantic realism that by and large eschewed the heightened work of Frazetta, opening a yawning stylistic gulf between his film and Bakshi's on a general level. Bakshi's Hobbit-holes have overhanging roofs that give the impression of fairies living under mushrooms (which they in fact had in his previous film, Wizards) and the interiors of Bag End are earthen, more of a rabbit-hole than Jackson's English countryside villa. There are some similarities, like the Hobbits having similarly-clipped pants, but its hard to say costume designer Ngilla Dickson had Bakshi in mind for that look.
There's the basic structure of the narrative: both films leave some of the same plot beats out - Tom Bombadil, most notably - both intercut the Frodo and Aragorn storylines throughout (as per the appendices rather than the body of the text), and both open with a prologue. However, many of these are common-sense approaches that, if one were to put 100 screenwriters in a room, a good 90 of which would choose to pursue: in fact, Sir John Boorman's earlier Lord of the Rings script had likewise intercut the stories and redacted many of the same episodes as both Bakshi and Jackson, and similar approaches were taken in the 1958 Morton Zimmerman treatment. Certainly, in the case of the choice to pursue a prologue, a precedent closer at hand exists in the form in the 1981 radio serial, a point made all the stronger by the fact that when Jackson first concieved of and sketched the prologue, he hadn't seen Bakshi's film in 20 years.¹¹
Bakshi did claim that New Line were screening his film repeatedly, but author Ian Nathan says that was never the case. Miramax did screen the film for Jackson in 1997, after he'd written the treatment. Jackson's treatment included Glorfindel and Erkenbrand, who in subsequent drafts are replaced by Arwen (Legolas in Bakshi's film) and Eomer, but still I find that it falls more into the realm of common-sense screenwriting decisions than anything that could be tied to Bakshi in a clear way, especially the latter which happens at the end of Bakshi film, a part of the film Jackson admits to have found incoherent.¹²
Rather, the place to look for similarities between the two projects is in the opening leg of The Fellowship of the Ring. Jackson actually, in the director's commentary, points out the shot of Odo Proudfoot calling "Proudfeet!" as a deliberate homage to Bakshi's shot, "which I thought was great." He doesn't acknowledge a couple - only a couple - of other shots that are quite similar: one is the evocative shot of the Ring tumbling over the rocks in Gollum's cave just before Bilbo finds it. Another still is an entire sequence of shots which misdirect us into thinking the Ringwraiths killed the Hobbits in their beds. Both are a little TOO similar to be waved away as coincidental.¹³
The Ringwraith shot is a more special case: It was nominally based off of a John Howe illustration, ostensibly of the Bakshi scene. But Jackson - who's quoted review of the Bakshi film mentions this scene - could hardly not notice the similarity to the Bakshi scene, especially since the scene doesn't at all play like this in the novel. What's more, the scene was first storyboared only shortly after Jackson say Bakshi's film for the second time, and shot not too long after that being that it was the first scene filmed. So its only fair to cite Bakshi as an influence on that shot.¹⁴
https://preview.redd.it/9mbqqm4zul0d1.png?width=550&format=png&auto=webp&s=a45cdd06543d70200e3eacf150f14d03d222203b
There are other bits and pieces: did Jackson have Bakshi in mind when he added a scene of Saruman rallying up the Uruk-hai before the siege of Helm's Deep? Its hard to say. An even more elusive case is made by Bakshi: "I'm glad Peter Jackson had a movie to look at—I never did. And certainly there's a lot to learn from watching any movie, both its mistakes and when it works." In other words, Bakshi here suggests his film influenced Jackson in terms of what NOT to do. To his credit, Jackson does remember that the design process for Treebeard was in part motivated by trying to divorce him from the Bakshi version, which both him and Dame Fran Walsh remember as being "like a walking carrot." But when we start getting into that level, it all becomes very tenuous. There were a lot of things about the fantasy genre in general - Conan the Barbarian and Willow are oft-cited by Jackson - that he tried to avoid.¹⁵
Ultimately, I have to judge that the similarities between the two versions amount to a handful of rather insignificant beats, all in the first hour of Fellowship of the Ring. To hyperbolically play up the similarities between the two projects is to give in to Bakshi's hyperbolic rhetoric.

Tolkien illustrations

Jackson's first and, at the time, only copy of The Lord of the Rings was a tie-in to the Bakshi film. This would mean he hadn't gotten into the world of Tolkien illustrations until developing his own films, when he suggests he went on a detail-exhaustive search for Tolkien art. He had seen Tolkien's own illustrations, but decided that they're "not very helpful in terms of the lighting and the mood."¹⁶
The most acclaimed illustrators of the previous era of Tolkien were Pauline Bayens (whose Minas Tirith is reproduced in the Rankin/Bass Return of the King) and the Brothers Hildebrandt, whose bestial Balrog presents a precursor both to Bakshi's but also to the Minotaur-like Balrog of John Howe.¹⁷
Howe was one of a trifecta of Tolkien illustrators, along with Ted Nasmith and Alan Lee, to enjoy great vogue at the time when Jackson was developing his films. Of the three, Lee is often deemed the most celebrated and certainly made the biggest impact on Jackson, whose next copy of the book was to be an Alan Lee illustrated edition. But he also noticed Howe through is work on Tolkien calendars, and later also purchased some originals of Ted Nasmith. All three were approached to participate in concept design for the films, although Nasmith sadly had to decline.¹⁸
In many places, Jackson precisely copied designs of Lee's and Howe's existing paintings, and in some places carbon copied their lighting and composition for shots, as well as grading the films (before the advent of the latest remaster) somewhat along the lines established in their paintings. But the majority of Lee and Howe's work for Jackson was in producing NEW concept art to his specifications, and so its wrong to look at Jackson's films as being a part of the Lee-Howe ouevure, as such.

The 1981 Radio Serial

A less touted influence on Jackson's film is the superlative 1981 BBC radio serial. Where Jackson hadn't reread the book nor revisited Bakshi's film between 1979 and 1997, he had spent much of the that time listening on-and-off to a tape of the radio serial, usually while working in his garage on special effects.¹⁹
The most obvious similarity is the casting of Sir Ian Holm, who had voiced Frodo in the radio serial, as Bilbo. Holm was apparently at the top of Jackson's casting wishlist, partially for this reason. A particularly striking moment occurs when Holm's Frodo quotes Bilbo's "Its a dangerous business Frodo, going out your door: you step on to the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to", a line again given to Holm - now as Bilbo - in voiceover at the same spot in Jackson's film.²⁰
Again, many of the similar structural choices here are similar to Jackson, adding a prologue, contracting the early stages of Frodo's quest and intercutting the Aragorn and Frodo's stories throughout. Brian Sibley admits to have modelled his prologue on Bakshi's own, but Jackson is unlikely to have known it at the time, and when we start thinking in terms of second-hand influences we're again into very tenuous territory. Otherwise, the influence doesn't seem all too great, although Sibley remembers that Walsh, perhaps half-jokingly, told him "we stole your ending" in the way that they did the Grey Havens and then a quick segue to Sam's return home, basically along the lines of the book.²¹
A young, and already Tolkien-devotee, Sir Ian Holm recording Bilbo
Sibley had recruited his cast from the BBC's company of actors, which is also the troupe Bakshi turned to, meaning that Sibley ended-up with Bakshi's Boromir (Michael Graham Cox) and, notably, his Gollum (Peter Woodthorpe). In spite of Woodthorpe's evocative performance of Gollum's voice in both the Bakshi and Sibley versions, its influence on Andrew Serkis' performance of Gollum is nonexistent, as Serkis had developed the voice before having heard Woodthorpe rendition, having only read The Hobbit prior to being cast.²²

Other fantasy films

Jackson had seen pretty much all the fantasy films of the 1980s, and while they were important in terms of establishing the genre, they hadn't left much of an impression on Jackson. The most succesful - George Lucas' Star Wars - was more space-fantasy, undoubtedly impressed Jackson but didn't much influence his films: to this day, he professes to not be a huge Star Wars fan, in spite of the amiacable manner he and Lucas took with each other in later years, and admits that he sees the influence of Lucas more "in what he did for the industry, not in terms of the actual films that he made."²³
The first major high-fantasy film, Sir John Boorman's Excalibur, was a little closer to Jackson's heart, but isn't much of an influence on his films either. Its true that Jackson's films feature a lot of plate armour, but that's indebted primarily to John Howe's abiding love of late Medieval armour, and at any rate is quite different to the Enlightement-era suits of armour one finds in Boorman's film. Willow, produced by George Lucas, was a big shot to the arm of New Zealand's fledgling film industry, and like Star Wars is much indebted to The Hobbit, but left a bad impression on Jackson.²⁴
The Clockmaker's Cottage in Sir Ridley Scott's Legend
Two exceptions are to be cited; Ray Harryhousen's stop-motion fantasy films from the 1950s were huge favourites of Jackson's, although their more Graeco-Roman subject matters were a genre apart from Jackson's films. He is also a big fan of Sir Ridley Scott, and while he joins the consensus of deriding William Hjortsberg notorious screenplay, had taken some cues from his Legend (1986): there's something of the Clockmaker's cottage in Rhosgobel, and Jackson referenced some of the features of Tim Curry's devilish "Lord of Darkness" for the Wargs sinewy faces.²⁵

Other films

Jackson took influence from paintings of old battles and landscapes, but surely his biggest influences are other films: Zulu and Saving Private Ryan had been referenced for Helm's Deep, and there's a touch of Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, which Jackson had watched before principal photography, to the atmospheric shots that close the Fellowship prologue. Jackson admitted to rewatching mostly Scorsese films while shooting, and certainly the energy of his moving cameras find a closer kin in Scorsese's films than in anyone else's. There's something of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia to Jackson's intention to make living, breathing people out of his fantasy characters.²⁶
Surely the inspiration for the shot of Aragorn arriving at Helm's Deep
But there's one film that looms largest in Jackson's films, overshadowing any influence we're looked at so far: Mel Gibson's latest spectacular, Braveheart. Along with other films of this kind like Dances with Wolves and Rob Roy (Gladiator came too late to much influence Jackson's films) it is of crucial importance to the overall cinematic style of Jackson's films, having come out just as Jackson first started thinking of making an original fantasy film, and winning the academy award for Best Picture before any sustained work was done to develop The Lord of the Rings.²⁷

Footnotes

1. Matt Skuta, "The Hobbit Side-by-Side: Rankin/Bass ('77) & Peter Jackson ('12-'14)" and "Return of the King Side-by-Side: Rankin/Bass ('80) & Peter Jackson ('03)," YouTube, 15 February 2018.
2. The Rankin/Bass Specials were only made exploiting a loophole in the publication of Tolkien's books that temporarily made them public domain States-side, but meant that their airing was limited to the US, and subsequent a legal agreement with the Tolkien Estate, Canada. Jackson says he hadn't seen their Return of the King in an interview from late 1998. Eric Vespe, “ 20 QUESTIONS WITH PETER JACKSON – PART 2 Ain’t It Cool News,” , 30 December 1998.
3. Brian Sibley, Peter Jackson: A Filmmaker's Journey (London: Harper Collins, 2006), pp. 107-111.
4. Kyle, ""Legends of Film: Ralph Bakshi," Nashville Public Library, 29 April 2013.
5. Emru Townsend, "INTERVIEW: Ralph Bakshi", Frames Per Second, 2 July 2004.
6. Ken P., "Interview with Ralph Bakshi," IGN, May 25, 2004. Broadway, Clifford Q., "The Bakshi Interview: Uncloaking a Legacy". The One Ring, 20 April 2015.
7. Anonymous, "From Book to Script," and Peter Jackson et al, "Director's Commentary," both in Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (New Line: 2002). Also Anonymous, "Peter Jackson interview". Explorations (Barnes & Noble, November 2001). Peter Jackson interview at the Egyptian Theater, 6 February 2004.
8. Sibley, pp. 109 ff.
9. Director's Commentary.
10. Ned Raggett, "The Trouble With Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord Of The Rings & Other Tolkien Misadventures", The Quietus, 19 November 2018
11. Ian Nathan, Everything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth (London: HarperCollins, 2017), p. 138.
12. Peter Jackson et al, The Lord of the Rings, quoted in Sibley, pp. 109, 704, 751.
13. Director's Commentary.
14. Celedor, "10 Things You Know About The LOTR Movies (That Aren’t True)," TheOneRing, 11 June 2013.
15. "Interview with Ralph Bakshi."
16. Sibley, p. 738-744. Exeter College, Oxford, "Sir Peter Jackson in conversation: Exeter College Oxford Eighth Century Lecture Series", YouTube, 30 July 2015.
17. Howe admits to the influence of the Hildebrandts, and in turn his own bestial Balrog would influence those of Alan Lee and Ted Nasmith. This would be popularised by Jackson, and finally emulated by Rings of Power. John Howe, "First Thing's First," John-Howe, 6 January 2012.
18. "Sir Peter Jackson in conversation", Sibley, 738-744. The One Ring, "Peter Jackson MISSED OUT! Talking Tolkien with Renowned Artist Ted Nasmith," YouTube, 11 July 2023.
19. Nathan, p. 123, NB 1008.
20. Nathan, p. 258.
21. Nerd of the Rings, "Brian Sibley, writer, BBC's The Lord of the Rings (1981) - Interview," YouTube, 20 April 2021.
22. Nathan, pp. 621 ff
23. "Sir Peter Jackson in conversation"
24. “20 QUESTIONS WITH PETER JACKSON – PART 2"
25. Ibid.
26. Nathan, pp. 158, 393, 645.
27. u/Chen_Geller, "How Masterpieces beget Masterpieces: Braveheart and The Lord of the Rings," Reddit, 23 June 2021.

Conclusions

Any notion that Jackson's films are derivative of previous Tolkien adaptations - namely, Bakshi's - are very much hyperbolic, and stem more from adopting an inflated rhetoric taken by the likes of Bakshi. As an adaptation, Jackson's works are based soley on Tolkien's books, and merely tip their hat occasionally to previous adaptations - and not all previous adaptations, either. Cinematically, they draw rather from other sources: less from other adaptations of Tolkien or other fantasy film (Tolkien-esque or not) and more from historical epics, both from the 1960s but also and especially from the time in which Jackson first started developing his films.