With the first season of Amazon’s Rings of Power released and a new season coming in 2024, many are discussing the merits of adapting Tolkien and different approaches. Hence, it’s a good time to look back at lesser-known adaptations of Tolkien’s work.
Much has been said about Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated film based on The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. The announcement that an anime-style movie about the origins of Helm’s Deep will appear in 2024 (Vary 1) has reminded some fans that Rankin-Bass’ 1977 The Hobbit has a background connection to anime: Japanese animation team Topcraft went on to join Studio Ghibli.
However, fewer fans know about an adaptation of The Hobbit made for a Russian children’s TV program. Released in 1985 on Leningrad Television, Western viewers know The Fairytale Journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins the Hobbit better as the Soviet Hobbit.
The Soviet Hobbit’s Plot
The Russian TV movie alternates between a suited narrator with a cane telling the story and scenes showing the story. The narrator sits at an empty café as he tells the story. He is not named. Russia Beyond contributor Balthasar Weymarn suggests the narrator has no name because this adaptation was unauthorized—no using Tolkien’s name theoretically makes it ambiguous whose story this is.
These scenes showing the story play out against painted backgrounds or blue screens. Sometimes, the blue screen allows the dwarves in the background to be significantly shorter than the real people. However, the execution fails because their shortened height doesn’t match scenes where Gandalf stands next to the dwarves and seems the same height as them.
The story follows the book minus much of the second and third acts. The trolls are removed, so the heroes go directly from Bilbo’s house to traveling, then hiding in a cave to escape the storm.
Goblins materialize and dance as they lead the dwarves to the Great Goblin. The dancing is bizarre but not too far from the book: Tolkien depicts the goblins singing as they lead the dwarves down the tunnel (60-61).
After the goblins comes the movie’s strongest: Bilbo meeting Gollum. The actor playing Gollum, Igor Dmitriev, takes a camp approach to the role and shows his theater roots (according to IMDb, he played Rosencrantz in a 1964 Russian film of Hamlet). Everything he does is deliberated over-the-top, and overly physical—when telling the riddle about a fish, he stands on one foot and waves his hands like fish fins.
The performance is laughable but underlines an interesting point: so much of Gollum’s dialogue is him alternating between fawning, whining, and seething. His threat to eat Bilbo feels scary because the narrator mentions that he has killed and eaten goblins (Tolkien 71). Without this confirmation, he would seem creepy but pitiful, a whiny bluffer more than a monster.
The whining and fawning also have a tragicomic effect in later adventures. Many times in the Lord of the Rings, especially when he bickers with Sam, Gollum seems like a comedy double act. One element that made Andy Serkis’ performance so iconic in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is that he provided a fawning, pitiful-then-spiteful voice, then added an undercurrent of menace. Dmititriev aims for comedy over menace, becoming lightweight yet memorable.
After this thick-but-fun slice of camp, Bilbo rejoins the company. The wood elves scene is omitted. The company reaches Lake-town, they find the people dancing a slow rhythm dance for no particular reason. I suspect this means Leningrad TV didn’t have enough time with the one goblin dance to justify hiring dancers, so they added more to the script.
After some discussion in Laketown, the company faces Smaug, played by two puppets: a hand puppet for cave scenes, and a marionette puppet for his (all-too short) Laketown assault. Smaug looks better than the average children’s theater sock puppet, though less convincing than the puppet dinosaur in Roger Corman’s 1984 movie Carnosaur.
Things wrap up quickly. Bard kills the dragon against a bluescreen background. Bilbo and the dwarves argue for a moment with Bard weighing in, but the discussion gets resolved before any battle featuring the Five Armies. Bilbo heads home alone, singing. The narrator summarizes the final details of what happened to Bilbo, then stands, puts on a hat, and walks away from his café table.
Assessing the Soviet Hobbit
As WIRED contributor Ethan Gilsdort put it, the Soviet Hobbit is “very weird… either horribly or brilliantly staged.” This reviewer feels the former is true. However, at its worst, the Soviet Hobbit is not much worse than many fantasy efforts from its period.
It may compare well to other Russian children’s fantasy programming from the same period (I leave that up to experts). Its special effects are probably no worse than in many Doctor Who episodes from the same period. The costumes and staging are not much worse than in the BBC adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia (released only three years later). So, the flaws show the Soviet Hobbit comes from a time when East or West, it was hard to find well-made fantasy and sci-fi material with quality special effects.
The Soviet Hobbit also plays an important part in the interesting discussion about how Russians embraced Tolkien’s work (for more on that, check out Nikolai Kornatsky’s Russia Beyond article “How ‘The Lord of the Rings’ fandom started in the USSR”).
More interesting for Western viewers is the fact it could have worked. It combines many strange elements, but these elements could have worked with the right vision. The song and dance elements are jarring, but the book has song sequences—the Rivendell elves welcoming the party (Tolkien 48-49) and the aforementioned singing goblins. Jackson does provide a more plausible image of goblins singing in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, where the Great Goblin sings as he prepares to torture the dwarves. Placement is key to making elements work.
While the sets look fake, artificial sets can work in fantasy films. After the Kansas scenes, The Wizard of Oz doesn’t have a single set that looks like someone might live in it.
The blue screens to create different height effects could have worked too. Blue and green screens have become associated with overused CGI, but were used to great effect in some pre-CGI fantasy films (most notably, the 1940 film The Thief of Baghdad).
Yes, The Wizard of Oz and The Thief of Baghdad were large-budget films. But budget isn’t strictly the problem. Hammer Film Productions worked on very small budgets during their 1950s-1970s heyday. However, they used a coordinated creative team—Tony Dalton calls them the “magic box” (116)—to create engaging films. While their gothic horror offerings got the most press, Hammer released some impressive adventure films (She, One Million Years B.C.) and at least one overlooked Robin Hood movie (Swords of Sherwood Forest).
The same point holds true if one looks at fantasy filmmakers known for elaborate visions. Terry Gilliam achieved some of his best work (Time Bandits, the surreal animations in Monty Python’s Flying Circus) at his career’s beginning, working with very small budgets.
Fundamentally, the problem with the Soviet Hobbit isn’t limited resources per se but the lack of a vision to make its resources work. It is horribly staged, but could have been brilliantly staged.
More disappointing is that like Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings, it represents something lost. A way of making fantasy films before a sea change that nobody saw coming.
The Soviet Hobbit in Historical Context
A year before Bakshi’s film premiered, George Lucas released Star Wars, which changed many things about filmmaking. One of Lucas’ biggest contributions was what he called a “used future,” meaning the story occurs in an otherworldly setting but feels like a world that people live in. Consequently, the Star Wars characters talk about spaceships like mechanics talk about cars (“what a piece of junk!”). The script has none of the idealism or reverence for technology of earlier sci-fi (TV shows like Star Trek, movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey).
Lucas’ used future informed not just future sci-fi filmmakers (many appearing in the 2004 min-document The Force is With Them) but fantasy filmmakers as well. Jackson appears in The Force Is With Them, describing Star Wars as “the first time I’d ever seen science fiction or fantasy presented in that way, that everything was beaten up and dirty and oily… if you believe in the world, you’re going to believe in the characters.”
In Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the influence meant the story might occur in a fantasy world, but the fantasy world feels lived in—the muddy Rohan armor, the scarred swords. One might call the concept a “used history” rather than a “used future” since Tolkien described Middle-earth as set in the distant past.
Jackson not only carried Lucas’ worldbuilding to fantasy, but set a template for following fantasy franchises. Fantasy epics (be it TV series like Game of Thrones or movies like King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and of course Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy) aimed for weathered, grungy visual palettes. They became historical dramas that happened to have magic.
When the Soviet Hobbit appeared, it was possible to make a speculative movie that mixed whimsey, deliberate artificiality, theatricality, camp, and high adventure. After Star Wars, and especially after Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, “realism” (or at least a popular notion where realism meant grungy and grim to represent a lived-in look) became the norm. Great films followed the shift, but some diversity disappeared. The idea of a speculative fiction film set in a world that doesn’t “look realistic” lost its popularity.
Thus, the bittersweet thing about the Soviet Hobbit is it represents not just a lost opportunity. It represents a time capsule of what once was possible. Like John Boorman’s never-made Lord of the Rings script featuring the Council of Elrond acting out the ring’s history with a singing Sauron (Fenwick 274), it has great flaws yet recalls a time when the rules were unwritten. A time when innovation was more possible, though many misused the opportunity.
There are some indications that innovation, or at least alternatives to “realism,” is regaining fashon. The 2023 film Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves had no problem being a fun-loving fantasy, breaking the Game of Thrones mold. The previously mentioned movie War of the Rohirrim will appear in April 2024 and takes its visual look from anime rather trying to emulate more naturalistic Western animation styles.
Perhaps if more “non-realistic” fantasy films follow, someone will take the Soviet Hobbit’s ideas and do something more effective with them. It may be a widely released and authorized film—perhaps an animated film deliberately taking a different direction to get better reviews than Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. It may be small and unofficial—perhaps a filmed community theater production or a fan film released on streaming. But it is worth keeping an eye out for.
Sources Cited
“A young, enthusiastic crew employs far-out technology to put a rollicking intergalactic fantasy onto the screen.” American Cinematographer. theasc.com/magazine/starwars/articles/starwars/behind/pg2.htm.
Fenwick, James. “John Boorman’s The Lord of the Rings: A Case Study of an Unmade Film.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, 42:2, 261-285.
Gilsdorf, Ethan. “A Very Weird Russian Hobbit from 1985.” Wired, January 9, 2013. wired.com/2013/01/russian-hobbit/.
Kornatsky, Nikolai. “How ‘The Lord of the Rings’ fandom started in the USSR.” Russia Beyond, September 17, 2022. rbth.com/arts/335420-lord-of-rings-soviet-fans.
Skazochnoe puteshestvie mistera Bilbo Begginsa, Khobbita. Directed by Vladimir Latyshev. Leningrad TV, 1985.
“Skazochnoe puteshestvie mistera Bilbo Begginsa, Khobbita.” IMDb. imdb.com/title/tt2563662/.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit. Del Rey Books, 1982.
The Force Is With Them: The Legacy of Star Wars. Produced by Leva Films in association with Lucasfilm. Included in Star Wars Trilogy: Bonus Material. Twentieth-Century Fox DVD, 2004.
Vary, Adam B. “‘Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’ Anime Feature Set for April 2024 Release by Warner Bros. (EXCLUSIVE).” Variety, February 14, 2022. variety.com/2022/film/news/lord-of-the-rings-the-war-of-the-rohirrim-release-date-1235181646/.
Werman, Balthasar. “The Hobbit: Soviet adaption of Tolkien’s book.” Russia Beyond, January 2, 2013. rbth.com/articles/2013/01/02/the_hobbit_soviet_adaption_of_tolkiens_book_21639.html.