Visualizing The Hobbit

 

Rankin and Bass' The Hobbit characters

The Hobbit is a children's book, written as one and presented as one. Part of why it holds up so well on so many rereadings for me as an adult is because it's charming. There's a delightful playfulness to most of the encounters. The trolls are Cockney yobs. The Great Goblin isn't terrifying, but imperiously ridiculous. Bilbo starts as wonderfully, ridiculously proper middle-class character, thrust, only mostly against his will, into a wilder and woolier world reacts in just the way most of us would in similar circumstances.

After I rewatched Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, I set myself an even more onerous task: I watched all three installments of his version of The Hobbit. It is, in every scene and in every way, an utterly charmless movie. The slightly bumbling coal-mining dwarves of Tolkien's book with their colorful cloaks and hoods have been replaced with terrible looking characters who seem to have raided a Klingon arms locker for their weapons. 

You can read the book in an afternoon. The theatrical versions of the movies are almost eight hours long. The extended versions - the ones I suffered through - add another two hours of terrible, made up elements. Every exciting moment in the books is turned into a bloated and very bad roller coaster ride. Everything is BIGGER and LOUDER and TERRIBLE. He took a short children's story and turned into a obnoxious video game that feels like it'll never had the decency to end. 

My favorite film depiction of Tolkien's world is in the Rankin & Bass The Hobbit (1977). Directed by Rankin and Bass (creators of all those wonderful stop-motion Christmas specials), it was animated by Topcraft, a studio in Japan. Topcraft would go on to produce Hayao Miyazaki's first movie, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. When it folded, Miyazaki picked up some of its pieces to create Studio Ghibli.

The character designs were by Lester Abrams who had illustrated a chapter of the book, Riddles in the Dark, for Children's Digest (something I'd come across, probably in my dentist's office). Arthur Rankin had seen them and liked them well-enough to have Abrams do all the other initial character designs as well.

Yes, the elves, especially the wood elves, look awful, but they are strange and unworldly the way elves probably should be. All the other characters, though, I think are perfect. Bilbo is stout and slightly ridiculous, while the dwarves range from the the comical Ori and Nori to the wise-looking Balin and the imposing Thorin. The trolls and goblins are both gruesome and comical looking. Smaug, voiced by Richard Boone is far more regal and monstrous than Jackson's CGI creation. 

 

John Houston as Gandalf is fantastic, as is Orson Bean as Bilbo, and, especially, Brother Theodore as Gollum (even though he looks more like a frog than a hobbit, it's still how I tend to imagine Gollum looking). I actually like Martin Freeman in the Jackson atrocities, but he's squandered among a host of mostly undistinguished performances and characters that lack much semblance to Tolkien's creations.

 

Something I really like about the animated Hobbit is the design of Laketown and the humans. Instead of a generic medieval town, it looks like something from the early dark ages in Northern Europe. The same goes for the look of the town's citizens. It's defenders are simple militia men withouth armor and it's a small town, not the sprawling, corrupt metropolis of Jackson's imagining.

As an adaptation of The Hobbit, the Rankin & Bass version is moderately successful. It doesn't eliminate too much, though it does condense what remains. Still, it's far truer in tone and spirit to Tolkien's book than anything Jackson put on the screen.

The Sword of Shannara, again

I've written before about Terry Brooks' (or is it really Lester and Judy del Rey's?) The Sword of Shannara, largely a carbon copy of The Lord of the Rings. When I last read it a decade ago, I wrote I'd probably never read it again:

I don’t hate The Sword of Shannara, but I doubt I will read it again. It does suffer in comparison to The Lord of the Rings. As I’ve aged my readings of Tolkien have become deeper and his themes more resonant while Brooks’ first book seems shallower and less successful than it did when I was eleven. The golden cloak of nostalgia — for my youth, for the excitement of reading a big book so quickly, for all sorts of things I associate with Sword — is fading. I fear if I read it again it will vanish entirely, and I think that might be a very sad thing.

The thing, now, is, I might actually read it again as part of my series of articles about Prof. Tolkien's writing. Brooks' novel is inextricably tied to LotR, as is my old affection for it. Since the glow fade from Sword for me, I don't think I've ever read it in close conjunction with LotR and I'm curious to examine them side by side. 

Now, I don't think my somewhat still warm feelings for Sword will fade after a reread. Those feelings were real, and I can never be less than grateful for the world of fantasy reading that it was instrumental in opening. The Lord of the Rings was and will always remain its own thing for me. It stands alone. Sword is part and parcel of the stacks of books I read in its wake, but it is and will always remain the first one. 

I don't get the feeling Sword is anywhere near as popular as it once was. With the death of the Tolkien clones in favor of the GRRM clones, readers' tastes seemed to have shifted from the too-noble heroes to the too-amoral anti-heroes. Brooks has sold 25 million books over about fifty years, whild GRRM has sold over 90 million. That all makes me a little depressed. At least the Tolkien clones, even if poorly, stressed things like honor and courage. 

I probably won't read it until the end of the summer, though, I will advise anyone to never rely on me saying when I'll read what. 

PS: Aside from those of Glen Cook and Terry Pratchett, I don't think I've read more installments in a series than those of Shannara. I've definitely read the first trilogy, the four Heritage of Shannara books, and, I think, First King of Shannara. That's eight, big books.

There's a flatness to Brooks' writing - I said previously that Sword settled for talking when it should've been singing - and his characters never stray far from the standard fantasy/adventure stories tropes, but there's a compelling drive to his narratives that dragged me on to the next book. I actually planned to finish the series (I really wanted to get to the later books that bridge the gap between the demon-cause nuclear holocaust and the world of Sword). At this point, I doubt I will, but I might just skip nine (9!) books, and pick up some of those later ones.

Gandalf and the Witch King

 Gandalf and the Witch King from Rankin and Bass' The Return of the King (1980)

Something I brought up writing about The Return of the King - the confronatation between Gandalf and the Witch King. It's one of the most striking moments in the book and Peter Jackson left it out of the movie. He sort of included it in the extended cut, but it's moved about and weak. I've castigated Jackson for always dropping nuance in favor of action. I can at least appreciate that for someone making a visual work of art. But, man, he's handed an utterly staggering scene and he doesn't do it. I remember sitting in the theater, waiting for the scene, and BAM, nothing! Sheesh.

   In rode the Lord of the Nazgul. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazguˆl, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face. 

   All save one. There waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dınen.

   ‘You cannot enter here,’ said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. ‘Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!’ 

   The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter. 

   ‘Old fool!’ he said. ‘Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!’ And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade. 

   Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn. 

   And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin’s sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.

 

 Gandalf and the Witch King (and Grond in the background)

by Ted Nasmith