Product: The Hobbit [VHS] (1977)
Rating: 3.0
Not one of Rankin-Bass's best.
Rankin-Bass is a master of animated (& claymated) fantasy, but they are also notorious for rushing & skipping entire scenes from source material to make room for lots & lots of singing. What they should have done with this & their other LotR movie is broken it into two movies.The lyrics to the music are taken straight from the book. Some people like the music & some people wouldn't have cheered if the music had been the "sound effects missing from the remastered DVD release."Another thing that goes two ways is the character designs. Some people find them endearing, fantastical, & extremely detailed & very Rankin-Bassish. Half of the people think it's "damn creepy" & even young children have been known to find the style unsettling. The real problem with the visuals is that the character designer (Lester Abrams) was apparently not that familiar with Tolkein's descriptions of Elves. The Wood Elves resemble Dungeons & Dragons style Goblins, the Goblins look like cat monsters, Smeagol looks like a Kappa or some kind of toad-monkey, & Elrond should have black hair, look much younger, & not have a beard, as Tolken wrote that Elves do not grow facial hair & are fair & ageless in appearence. The Dwarves take the Disney approach of looking like Garden Gnomes, & the Ent looked like it was made of wood, but they should be able to blend in with the trees seamlessly.Most readers complain about the absence of Beorn. Indeed there is a great deal of scenes where the characters are walking to music, but meetings are cut out or cut short, like how no one ever includes Tom Bombadil from Fellowship of the Ring. (Though I dout Rankin-Bass would have cut him out, as asll he ever does is sing).The entire venture through Mirkwood & the introductionns to the Wood Elves & river folk are short & not very eventful.In the end, the tension between the greed-sticken Thorin & tired Bilbo is almost cut entirely, & the big battle is not well explained & very short.The voice acting isn't bad (Smeagol's is especially interesting) & the motions, expressions, & quality of the animation are much higher than what you can expect out of anything hand-drawn today. They also do a great job of making Gandalf look like a scary badass.In the end, it's highly recommended for people who have never & will never read the book, for only they will find no fault in it.