The Best Film Version of The Hobbit Is a 1977 Cartoon

When I was a child, my mother got very excited about an upcoming children’s television special–something I don’t remember her doing before or since. She told me that I had to see The Hobbit. Catching her enthusiasm, I sat down in front of the TV at the appointed hour and was pulled into an enthralling tale of wizards, elves, dwarves, dragons, and a strange being I’d never heard of: a hobbit. Two hours later (I assume it was two hours with commercials), I had hobbit fever. I pulled The Hobbit and, later, The Lord of the Rings off my parents’ bookshelves and devoured them. Somehow, either as a gift or purchased with my own savings, I obtained the original soundtrack to the special and listened to it again and again. I insisted on seeing Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings (and at the time, I liked it). I fervently wished that hobbits were real and that I could meet one.

I was obsessed.

I don’t remember any other cartoon affecting me quite so much. What was it about this one that so enchanted me? First and foremost is Tolkien’s story, neatly condensed into a 90-minute format. Although this Rankin/Bass production is shorter than The Battle of Five Armies, the shortest of the movies in Peter Jackson’s trilogy, it somehow manages to capture most of the book, except for Beorn. (I’ll come back to Jackson’s trilogy in a moment.)

The voice actors are also good, especially the narrator and Gandalf, both voiced by John Huston. The cast includes Orson Bean, Richard Boone, Cyril Ritchard, and Otto Preminger. Paul Frees, whose voice can be heard in many a Rankin/Bass movie, voiced Bombur and “Troll #1,” and voice actor Don Messick was Balin, a goblin, the Lord of the Eagles, and “Troll #3.”

Then there’s the music, some of it sung by Glenn Yarbrough. I’ve read The Hobbit aloud to both my husband and my child, and in each instance, I had a hard time not singing Tolkien’s songs as they were written in this film (they are not exactly the same, so if you do start singing the Rankin/Bass tunes to Tolkien’s words, eventually you’ll have to start improvising).

Put it all together, and you get this:

In just over three and a half minutes, the folks at Rankin/Bass have distilled the essence of the party’s first encounter with the goblins, and they’ve done it well.

I think few, if any, people will dispute that Peter Jackson did an amazing job with his Lord of the Rings trilogy, finally giving fans what we’d been wanting. Understandably, we were all excited when we learned he’d be directing The Hobbit as well. And then, many of us were disappointed.

There was value to Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. I thought Martin Freeman was a perfect pick for Bilbo, and I was glad Ian McKellan was once again playing Gandalf. I thought the first movie wasn’t bad. I very much enjoyed Bilbo’s encounter with Smaug in the second movie. But the further into the trilogy I got, the more disappointed I was with Jackson’s additions: unbelievable action sequences that weren’t in the book (as if the book wasn’t action-packed enough) and an unnecessary love triangle.

By using three movies to tell the story, Jackson had room to include what Rankin/Bass left out, particularly Beorn. But with three movies to fill, he ended up padding a masterpiece. What the Rankin/Bass production gets right is letting Tolkien’s tale shine through. The Hobbit works better as an abridged work rather than as a story that has been supplemented with additional plotlines.

If you are a Tolkien fan who was disappointed in Jackson’s trilogy and who hasn’t seen the Rankin/Bass version, I encourage you to seek it out. And if you have young children you want to convert into little hobbit fans, by all means show them the cartoon. It’s definitely a ’70s production and not up to today’s cartoon standards, but in the end, it will still do an excellent job of telling Tolkien’s story. Forty-five years after it was released, it’s still the best film version we have, and a pretty good one at that.