Review: The Hobbit (1977)
Posted by on Nov 25, 2012 in Movies | Comments Off on Review: The Hobbit (1977)
With the impending inflow of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Political party, I couldn't resist taking a trip back in time to spotter (yet once more) the 1977 Rankin Bass version of The Hobbit.  I first discovered this moving picture when information technology was shown to my class back in elementary school some thirty years ago, and it was one that we concluded up watching every twelvemonth due to its popularity with the students.  For someone who had been raised on Looney Tunes, The Pink Panther, Tom and Jerry, and Walt Disney Classics, and in the years before Transformers or G.I. Joe stormed the mid-80s, this was a very dissimilar kind of cartoon.  I fell in love with it the first time through, which prompted me to read the J.R.R. Tolkien classic.  I convinced my mom to purchase for me that very afternoon and began reading inside the hour.  I remember it similar it was yesterday.  That was the day I graduated to novels, and information technology was the day I first embraced my lifelong addition to Professor Tolkien's works.  I guess y'all could say I'm a bit biased.  I still take that vanquish upwards old paperback, sitting on the shelf with the leather bound slipcase version and the rest of my Tolkien drove.
By now, thanks to the hype of the new flick, I call up most everyone knows the story even if they've never read the book.  Gandalf drops in on Bilbo Baggins, enlisting him into a company of dwarves as a burglar.  Their mission: to liberate the treasure stolen over the years from the great dragon Smaug.  The take a chance takes them to cantankerous paths with trolls, goblins, elves, eagles, spiders, humans, and of grade Gollum, culminating in the confront-off confronting Smaug, which directly leads to the State of war of Five Armies.  It'southward the story that began the era of modern fantasy and gave rise to the world of Middle Earth.
It'southward been a few years since I final watched this version.  It's ane that the showtime thing 1 might recall upon seeing it is, "they just don't make 'em like this anymore."  It never ceases to astound me to this day how "sometime" this picture show feels.  The thing is, this isn't due to its age or the time it was created.  This movie has always felt older than time to me, which in a bizarre way lends to the ambiance of the story itself, every bit though it passed to us through the ages equally Tolkien intended.  At that place's a sure timeless yet antiqued quality near most things that have come out of the Rankin Bass studios, and The Hobbit very much fits that mold for me.  To say that the animation is a flake rough around the edges is to not requite this motion picture its total credit.  The blitheness is limited, yes, and it even comes across at times as somewhat primitive by a lot of standards, but the cartoon style is so incredibly lush and detailed that information technology brings Middle Earth to life fifty-fifty when the animation itself does not.  As a bonus, many of the visuals used in the illustrated versions of the original novel are here.  We see the map of Middle Earth likewise as Bilbo'southward hobbit hole and the moon map just equally they are depicted in the novel.  With the exception of the vocal "The Greatest Adventure," all of the songs in the movie are really taken from the volume, some of them tweaked here and there as the production saw fit.  Equally to the story itself, information technology hits most of the scenes in the novel and certainly all of the high points.  It might feel a chip like reading the book in fast forward, except that the book is a quick read equally well.
For anyone who has a fascination with Middle Globe and hasn't seen this, information technology's a definite must-run into, both as a testament to an era when Middle Earth was otherwise "unfilmable" and as a curiosity in the annals of animation history.  It's one of those weird happenstances where trying to explain it to those who don't know is difficult, but to those who have seen it, no caption is necessary.  If null else, information technology's a lot of fun to compare what's hither to some of the imagery we've seen from the upcoming movie and speculate on what else is to come.  Information technology'due south a skillful time to be a fan, and this animated classic is pure fan golden.
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