The film has been cited as an influence on director Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings" film trilogy, although Jackson said that "our film is stylistically very different and the design is different." Reading about attempts to make the films live-action by Boorman and The Beatles contacting Kubrick and Lean to do the same, Jackson agreed animation was the most sensible choice at the time. Jackson remembers Bakshi's film as a "brave and ambitious attempt". In another interview, Jackson stated that 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 "about half way through, the storytelling became very disjointed" and it became "confusing" and "incoherent". He and his screenwriter and producer Fran Walsh remarked that Bakshi's Treebeard "looked like a talking carrot". Jackson watched the film for the first time since its premiere in 1997, when Harvey Weinstein screened it to begin the story conferences.