He may look more like the Thorin of the book than Richard Armitage, but whereas Peter Jackson’s version portrays his character very closely to the book, the appearance is the only faithful thing about the cartoon’s portrayal. No mention either of Bilbo’s Tookish heritage, the very reason Gandalf has chosen Bilbo to be his burglar. No mention of Gandalf’s fireworks, which in the book are the only thing the hobbits actually know about him. Then Bilbo tells him he’s come to the wrong place, and Gandalf starts shooting lightning out of his staff or something and introduces himself. Here, Gandalf’s first line of dialogue is
Virtually all the dialogue from the book is cut out.
Rankin/Bass however, strips the scene to the merest skeleton and sucks out the bone-marrow. When Gandalf brings up the subject of an adventure, the meaning of “Good morning” quickly becomes that it won’t be good until he’s got rid of the wizard. Upon Bilbo offering a simple “Good morning,” Gandalf grills him on exactly what he meant by this. The book begins when the hobbit Bilbo Baggins is approached by the wizard Gandalf, and the witty dialogue quickly summarizes the characters while being hilarious at the same time. Now it’s time to give the cartoon a proper review (so I never have to think about it again!). The hundred-or-so tweets I had time to write don’t even come close to covering this thing. Every moment of this cartoon feels rushed, and with everything wrong with it I couldn’t even hope to write my tweets quickly enough to keep up. After watching the Rankin/Bass version, I can’t understand why so many people seem to think that Peter Jackson’s adapting it into three films was unnecessary. I dreaded watching this cartoon, and it was somehow worse than I remembered. This, along with two later cartoons, are often considered to make up a sort of half-formed trilogy, and I’ll eventually get around to reviewing the other two.įor fun I recently decided to tweet my thoughts on the 1977 Rankin/Bass adaptation of The Hobbit as I sat through it. Many of their other works are really good, but they’re really out of their league here.
Now, this cartoon was actually calculated to be as faithless an adaptation as possible for use as a tool of blackmail, and this eventually led to the existence of a second attempt to adapt The Hobbit to the screen eleven years later, this time by Rankin/Bass, a studio famous for its holiday specials. In the first article I ever wrote for this site, I reviewed a 1966 cartoon loosely derived from The Hobbit by J.
These articles were originally from my previous blog at My miniature painting articles range from updates concerning what I’m painting to full guides on how to paint. Miniatures Posts about my hobby of painting The Lord of the Rings miniatures from Games Workshop.
There’s a lot more to most of the characters and plot elements in the book, and even a twelve-hour masterpiece of a movie just can’t compare. Overall, Tolkien’s books are deeper and more complex than any film adaptation could be.