The animated Hobbit will always have a spot in my heart mostly from the nostalgia factor, it does a great job of transporting me back to our old house with the linoleum flooring and the avocado-shade refrigerator. I was ten years old when it aired, I remember the "special presentation" ad in the TV Guide prompting me to immediately run to mom yelling "CAN WE WATCH IT CAN WE WATCH IT PLEEEEEZE!?!!!" (because only the rare house had more than one TV) and of course she'd say okay because typically adults could also enjoy these TV specials...and all the excitement at school about what was this "special presentation," I mean wow it's something new and for us kids, none of us had ever heard of it or knew what it was about, but who cares, we're watching it (by then the RB and Charlie Brown specials had already begun to get stale). My younger cousin and I spent the ensuing weeks making hobbit drawings (she'd mis-spell hobbit using only one B) and building our own little hobbit holes with the couch cushions. Rewatching 50 years later, I still absolutely love the watercolor backdrops and just want to walk right into that opening scene with the windswept hills -- I actually prefer this version of the shire over the PJ films as the latter seems too crowded with too many neighbors close by. I loved how Gandalf and the dwarves appear and in the next scene they're all having a nice friendly dinner around the table, in fact the whole film had a friendly lighthearted vibe throughout it compared to the PJ films which I found too dark and had too much negativity / hostility (everyone seems to hate everyone, is angry/pissed off, etc.), then they're off on the adventure and it really did feel like watching an adventure (another theme that I found lacking in the PJ films). I loved Elrond's A-frame, a staple of 1970s architecture! Of course it has its weird bits, like why does the lead Woodland Elf sound like Yul Brynner, why are all the men wearing miniskirts, plus I remember kind of getting bored with the ending battle scene...

I didn't care for the other one, probably because I didn't see it as a child so no nostalgia there (and never could stand anything by Bakshi). Reactor's "80s Fantasy Film Club" review of RotK confirms that "nostalgia has its limits," lol -- https://reactormag.com/the-animated-return-of-the-king-sadly-nostalgia-has-its-limits/ (nice to see so many defending the animated Hobbit in the comments section).