UPDATE: What happens when you try throwing together a post about anything you can possibly think of late at night on a day when you’ve been up since five in the morning? Errors, that’s what. So, below wherever you read “Bakshi”, substitute “Rankin Bass”, if you please. I don’t know where my head was on that, but….
Sorry, folks, but today was a solid kick-in-the-arse kind of day. A very early start at work for a big project, resulting in a brain of mush in the evening.
Anyway, way back before Peter Jackson took the reins of filming Middle Earth, the Ralph Bakshi animation studios took a shot at the work of JRR Tolkien. The animated Lord of the Rings is legendarily bad, as is the later follow-up for teevee, Return of the King. But their film of The Hobbit is not without its charms. The animation wasn’t the best, but the actual art was quite good, and the Bakshi Middle Earth had a look all its own. It took me a little while, actually, when watching Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring the first ever time to get my head past the fact that his hobbits didn’t look like this:
The film did a fairly nice job with the songs. It all has a 1970s folk sound to it, but they are still quite charming. Here’s the title song, “The Greatest Adventure”:
And this, Glenn Yarborough’s setting of the “old walking song” that is heard throughout all of The Hobbit and LOTR:
In a scene where a bunch of goblins are attacking Bilbo and the dwarves, the goblins sing this nasty ditty (words by JRRT):
And one of my favorite selections, the song sung by the Dwarves to Bilbo at the beginning, when they are explaining their mission to go back to Lonely Mountain and take back what is theirs:
Great stuff!
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That wasn't Ralph Bakshi. Bakshi's version was nowhere near as charming.
This version was produced by Rankin Bass studios. Much of the animation was done in the Far East, but the designs work is typical of their work.
They aalso produced the animated version of Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn.
"Lemmiwinks" has ruined, forever, the song "The Greatest Adventure."
Not that it was so good, mind you.
Jackson's hobbits were spot-on for me because my first exposure to them was through a leather bound edition (that I still have) that contained Tolkien's own illustrations.
I remember taking my son to see the animated movie when it came out and we enjoyed it well enough. But then, we never dreamed the story could be made into an actual film. So glad it was!
(I'll never get used to the comments being at the top of the post…)
Steph: I have tried and tried and tried again to figure out how to put the comments at the bottom. I can't make sense of the HTML in my template now. 🙁