Product: The Hobbit [VHS] (1977)
Rating: 3.0
Good effort
Perhaps my opinion of this as a mediocre film is aided by the fact that no video can do Tolkien justice, but, nevertheless, I found Hobbit to be different from the book in that fleeting "feel" quality: it's too cartoony. The songs, the voices, everything is great and true to the book, but the characters are either intolerably rounded off to make them look cute (as in the Hobbits), thinned off nearly to stick-figurehood (as in the elves), or dried out and parched ( as in the dwarves, who looked rather like pieces of firewood). This is not epic or enthralling, partly because you know what is going to happen and partly because it's botched.