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Hell is Adaptations: The Hobbit Cartoon
What has a running time of 77 minutes, was once called “execrable” in the introduction to The Annotated Hobbit, and received a Hugo nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation but lost to Star Wars? That’s right, it’s the Rankin/Bass 1977 animated adaptation of The Hobbit! Loved by children and tolerated by critics, The Hobbit is a mix of cheesiness, hasty storytelling, and hippy ballads. And lest you think I’m exaggerating when I say hippy ballads, I give you this:
Many people might look back on this cartoon with fond childhood memories. They remember the dwarfs’ unexpected party, the sudden and electric appearances of Gandalf, the riddle game beneath the mountains, the trip down the river in barrels, the monstrous worm Smaug, the massive battle of the five armies, and think, “That sure was a great movie.” These people are wrong. Horribly, terribly wrong.
Time to suck your childhood memories dry, kiddos!
What makes this movie so bad? Let’s make a list.
Hell is Adaptations: The Hobbit!
Originally published in 1937, The Hobbit has been a perennially appealing source of material for films and other media. The book itself is an entertaining children’s story, episodic in structure, simple in tone and theme, inventively fantastic, and occasionally frightening, but generally acceptable to a broad audience. It is a widely read book, being long but never boring, and especially entertaining for its intended audience.
Insert poop joke here.
So obviously Peter Jackson would decide to change the tale into one of “epic” scope, filled to the brim with violent battles, portentous overtones, and car—I mean, sled—chases. But I am not yet concerned with Jackson’s ill-begotten films. His trilogy of films adapted (or perhaps “inspired”) by the novel is but the most recent example, and film rights to Tolkien’s breakout novel have been passed between studios like Hepatitis B for decades.
Once after receiving a script adapting his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien complained about the process in a letter:
I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about.
I cut my tobacco with the shredded remains of your script, punk.
