The Hobbit (1997) Review

Dear Internet,

I write to you today with my reportings on The Hobbit Movie. No, not the Peter Jackson spectacular but the Rankin Bass creation. In 1977, Rankin Bass beat Peter Jackson to the punch by 35 years; in 2012 Peter Jackson will probably punch the guy who directed it because it’s poor. No, I’m being extremely overly critical here for the sake of an unfunny sort-of-pun. Now I write to you under the assumption that you already know the story of the Hobbit since you took the time to find this obscure Blog Post about an obscure movie with a similar plot to a huge movie and one of the greatest selling books of all time. If you don't know the plot then I apologize.

This film is an animated, made for TV movie and the first thing I should say about it is that I love the story of the Hobbit. The entire set-up of the adventure story where a group of companions go on a quest together, running into mishap after mishap on an episodic basis is one that I love and The Hobbit is probably one of the best and most imaginative renditions of this idea. It paved the way for most of the fantasy worlds we see today from Eragon and Dungeons and Dragons to A Game of Thrones and its numerous sequels. Through the eyes of the Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins we are taken on a journey over Hill and Under Hill through forests and fields it’s like a road trip in an entirely new world.

When I was younger I would have argued that The Hobbit was superior to The Lord of the Rings because Bilbo and his company have more adventures. Little did I understand the importance of the character interactions and development in Lord of the Rings and whilst the Hobbit is more in it for the ride – hell half the dwarves are just a list of names whilst the rest fall into these characterisations. Balin is old and nice, Dori is also nice. Kili and Fili are young, Bombour is fat. Thorin Oakensheild is a bit more interesting, he is intensely proud and doesn’t suffer fools gladly but is, at the same time loyal and a good leader. Gloin is Gimli’s Dad.

In contrast of this, however Bilbo is really rather interesting. He is shown to be kind, accommodating, a fierce lover of a comfortable life-style and above all peace. A typical Hobbit but underneath it all he has a yearning to prove himself and, as suggested by his love of maps a secret desire to see the world. He is well meaning but at the start a bit useless. That is before he finds the ring and saves himself from Gollum. From this point onwards he becomes distinctly more of a leader, more resourceful, sneaky and clever. He becomes the Gandalf of the group when Gandalf leaves in the middle of the story. Eventually Bilbo’s decision to steal from the dwarves, giving their most prized possession to their enemies proves to be the most interesting moment of the whole tale as he is doing what he does for noble intentions. To prevent a massacre but he is also manipulating people. It’s a complicated dilemma which flies in the face of the black and white/ good and evil nature of Tolkien’s world.

I think that this is the true strength of the Hobbit story, we are introduced to the world with a good side and a bad side but the more that we and Bilbo experience it the less clear cut the lines become. The Dwarves don’t wish anyone harm but they are selfish and unforgiving. The Wood Elves are judgmental and cruel to their enemies but they are a force for good, fighting off the demonic spiders and only wanting the gold to help their friends the lake men. Both sides are racist and uncooperative and we see that to resolve a problem caused by good and bad people bad things may have to be done for the greater good. It’s a pretty mature message the likes of which aren’t really seen in the Narnia Chronicles and whilst it’s a simple message I think it’s delivered brilliantly. This is why I find the removal of this pivotal, climactic dilemma – where Bilbo betrays his friends for their own good - from the Rankin-Bass film baffling. Rankin-Bass do a good job of showing Middle Earth on screen but the writers don’t seem to understand the point of the story they’re telling. This however is only one of the things that I find baffling about the Rankin-Bass telling of the Hobbit.

Why the way Rankin Bass tell The Hobbit is baffling to me number 1

The songs in the Hobbit are fairly numerous so naturally is would seem logical to try to include some of them in this film but the way that Rankin and Bass decided to go about this is to find a potentially exciting action scene and play their soothing renditions of the songs on top thereby removing any tension.

What’s more, the introduction of the dwarves is terrible. They all do their little act, popping up from behind trees and bushes and tell Bilbo they are at his service.

 So... is it odd for dwarves to be in the Shire? We don't know. Literally all a fresh viewer would know is that Bilbo likes to smoke eccentrically long pipes and all of a sudden, for some reason a bunch of dwarves are singing about… stuff in his living room.

THAT SAID, I really do like the way that they use the Dwarves’ song (Misty Mountains Cold), by mixing the words with a V/O guy's lovely voice it really adds a sense of destiny, depth and danger to the adventure, in fact if it was this sequence that had persuaded Bilbo to join up I would have been really satisfied but for some reason they chose to make him decide to join up before he even knew what the journey was for. At that point we had no idea the kind of character Bilbo was so we are introduced to him as an adventurer making his character development completely pointless later in the film.

Why the way Rankin Bass tell The Hobbit is baffling to me number 2

The character designs… now whilst many of the designs in this movie are pretty good. The wizard looks like a wizard, the dwarves look like dwarves right down to their Disneyesque hats. Actually this is taken to quite a peculiar extreme, as shown below even the dwarves' helmets are designed to look like those of their Snow-White cousins...

But for the rest of the characters and stuff I just can’t see where they were coming from. I mean look at Bilbo he’s really quite cute but that’s not who Bilbo is, he’s got a pretty dark side to him, what with stealing the Arkenstone and cheating at the game of Riddles and surely this should be reflected in the way he looks! 

I guess there’s nothing wrong with making Bilbo so goddamn cute but I think it would have been wiser to try and show some of the toughness of the character in the design rather than trying to make a cuddly toy, for god’s sake during the adventures in Mirkwood he pretty much takes over Gandalf’s role in the party.  Guess it would have been a better idea to use the original designs

 oh… maybe not.

I

 think Gollum looks silly though I will concede that he is a pretty difficult character to get right. He’s so weird and inhuman and in the original concept art you can kind of see how he used to be a hobbit… a froggy hobbity thing but in the final movie, he doesn’t work for me.

The wood elves are weird too. 

I don’t think the film-makers knew that Tolkien thought of elves as tall, slender beautiful people as opposed to weird short mutants and he resented Shakespeare for ‘what he did to them’ in making them short and like in fairytales. In ancient British or Scandinavian folklore elves were like tall, graceful humans and J. R. R. saw those as true elves… as opposed to this.

Finally I would complain about the spiders but there are no spiders in this film, just eight legged cartoon bats so I guess I won’t bother.

Why the way Rankin Bass tell The Hobbit is baffling to me number 3

The story is told wrong. From the stuff they left out to the stuff they dedicated no time building up at all. From the very start of the film Gandalf turns up and is like I brought some dwarves… they’re hiding behind this hill over here, it’s all so random and weird and this sporadic nature of the storytelling leaves the viewer a little bewildered and it makes it difficult for them to get invested in the story being told.

Other problems are scattered throughout most prominent of all is the problem of repeated use of the dues-ex-machina to get Bilbo and the dwarves out of trouble numerous times. Now whilst this is a problem in the book in cases like how the characters escape the burning trees and the trolls at least in the book a satisfying explanation is given afterwards in this film the only setup to these escapes is ‘Gandalf’s a wizard who does shit, of course he’s got a way out’ which I find a little disappointing… just a little.

The worst case of this, I find is how Bard of the Lakemen isn’t introduced into the film until literally moments before he kills Smaug. Smaug is the primary antagonist, don’t you think his defeat should be given a little more setup than… next to nothing. Oh, I guess Bilbo told a thrush to tell the guy he’d never met that he needed to shoot the dragon in its chest. I guess I’m wrong. Except I’m not.

HOWEVER, despite all of these shortcomings I really did enjoy the film, through Mirkwood and up until the defeat of Smaug the character of Bilbo becomes quite interesting and he really did hold the film together. What’s more the songs aren’t bad just a little dated and silly and I felt the whole production had quite a satisfying homespun charm and it’s just the sort of thing I could imagine my younger self enjoying on a rainy afternoon so I found it easy to forgive it most of its shortcomings. I’d recommend you take a look, Internet. Its available on YouTube for free so what have you got to lose? Well, an hour and a half of your life… Check it out if you want.