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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.
1. Short Running Time
Seventy-seven minutes is not nearly enough time to give proper weight to the events in this story. While The Hobbit novel didn’t have the enormous scope of The Lord of the Rings, and while it is episodic enough to make it possible to trim the story without ruining it, there’s just not enough breathing room in 77 minutes. But this is what happens when the network orders a cartoon to fill an hour and a half, with commercials. Granted, this is much preferable to an 11-minute short, but sort of in the way that being hit by a car is preferable to being hit by a Mack truck.
As an example of the destructive effects of a short running time, Bilbo decides to join the dwarfs at the 3:44 mark. In contrast, Peter Jackson made Bilbo put off his decision for about two hours, but we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.
2. Confusingly Odd Animation Choices
Strange things happen in this movie that confuse rather than clarify. During the riddle game, for instance, the camera apparently gets bored with Bilbo and Gollum’s tete-a-tete and starts a-wandering through the caves while a riddle is narrated by a singing chorus. This might be interesting if the caves were anything but rock and the occasional goblin skeleton, but they aren’t.
Battle scenes are annoyingly surreal. Because this was a kid’s movie, I guess the animators weren’t allowed to show any direct kills. When the goblins are being smitten by elven blades, instead of simply dying they fly in circles and vanish into nothingness (start around 2:10). When the spiders feel the sting of Bilbo’s blade, they swirl around in kaleidoscope effects and likewise vanish from the landscape. Surely there was a way to kill the monsters without sending them to LSD Land.
“Somebody call my agent.”
3. Musical Shortcuts
The songs themselves are pretty cheesy, with the exception of the Misty Mountains song, which is better than the incongruous (and shorter!) version in Jackson’s movie. However, the biggest problem with the music is that it is used as a method of skipping over narrative gaps. Bilbo’s taking too long to decide to join the dwarfs? Have him listen to a hippy ballad about seizing the day. Want to rush through a lot of walking? Another hippy music montage is in order. This kind of soundtrack is the musical equivalent of voice-over narration, and there’s a good reason voice-overs are barely tolerated in film. They’re a cheap way of telling the story by taking you out of it for a short while.
4. No Beorn the Berserker Bear
Enough said.
5. Bizarre Character and Location Designs
Ok, I’m torn on this topic. On the one hand, I like to see an artist do something new with an old and weathered subject, so I don’t want to be critical of art just because it’s different. On the other hand, why is Gollum so freaking huge?
“We eats steroids, precious.”
And do you remember the grand elven valley of Rivendell, with its ancient buildings, awe-inspiring forests, and cascading waterfalls?
“Time for another thrilling day of boulder farming, Elrond.”
But surely they couldn’t mess up Smaug, the slithery dragon, the winged lizard, the great and powerful…
“Woof.”
It Could Have Been Worse
Believe it or not, Disney seriously considered an adaptation back in the 70s. According to The New York Times,
The Walt Disney Studio considered animating “The Hobbit,” but decided against the project because the work lacked the kind of humor that audiences expect from Disney animation and because any attempt to alter Tolkien’s story to inject such humor might result in bad will and vocal resentment among Tolkien devotees.
Good call there, Disney. Even Rankin/Bass made a point of being faithful to Tolkien’s work in order to appease the fans who might kidnap them and toss them into a lava pit.
Both Rankin/Bass and [Ralph] Bakshi [director of the 1978 Lord of the Rings animated feature] make a point of their fidelity to Tolkien. “There is no material in this picture that did not come from the original Tolkien book,” says Rankin of “The Hobbit.” “I am not going to alter the story,” says Bakshi of “The Lord of the Rings.”
While it’s true that The Hobbit cartoon is largely faithful to the novel, in that it alters little and adds almost nothing new, so much is removed that the narrative ends up holding together by a few threads. It’s a quick watch, and not the worst way to kill an hour and a half, but it would go down better if you were watching it with a small child. That way they can create fond memories of a movie that will ultimately let them down as an adult.
Coming Soon to a Blog Near You! — The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, directed by Peter Jackson.
2 Comments
Here, this should make it ALLLL better: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGF5ROpjRAU
I remember seeing this when I was pretty young, having no idea what it was, and being a little frightened by it!
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