The release of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy changed how viewers and critics see fantasy films. While fans will keep debating the merits of his later Hobbit trilogy, his first trilogy continues to be the milestone for what makes a great Tolkien adaptation, and a great fantasy film adaptation.
As of this writing, no one has surpassed Jackson’s achievements, but the 2020s have brought surprising new adaptations of Tolkien’s work (the TV show Rings of Power, the upcoming anime-influenced film War of the Rohirrim). Discussions about just what Jackson did so well—and why no one did it before him—have regained popularity, and will likely continue at least until Amazon concludes Rings of Power.
In the interest of saying something comparatively new to this discussion, I will not look at the current discussion. I will look backward. Determining why no one did what Jackson did so well first requires looking at what earlier filmmakers have done. There were several Lord of the Rings and Hobbit adaptations before Jackson, and I’ve tracked down as many of these Pre-Jackson projects as I could find, to see what they have to offer.
These pre-Jackson projects vary widely. Some have become cult films with just as many detractors as supporters. Others are obscure projects still waiting for critical appraisal. Well-made or rudimentary, they all provide an interesting look at (live-action and animated) fantasy filmmaking before Jackson came along in the 1990s. Sometimes they even give hints of what would follow.
Note: several of these movies were produced in foreign countries. For simplicity, I have noted the original title in the entry, but used an English translation of the title for most references.
The Hobbit (1967, directed by Gene Deitch)
The late Gene Deitch (1924-2020) was well-known within certain sectors of the animation community. Like Ralph Bakshi, he began his career in the 1950s at Terrytoons (Michael Barrier’s 1972 Funnyworld profile of Bakshi reports that the two animators clashed when Dietch became Terrytoon’s creative director in 1956). In the 1960s, Deitch cemented his reputation by working on classic cartoons like Popeye and Tom and Jerry before moving to Prague and focusing on animated short films (such as an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s story The Night Kitchen). This 1967 cartoon adaptation of The Hobbit was made during his early Prague period.
Dietch’s movie is a lesser-known Tolkien adaptation, primarily because almost no one was supposed to see it. Well, almost no one.
Running at twelve minutes long, it is an ashcan copy—a movie made for minimal or no release. Most film options have a stipulation that the producer loses the rights unless they produce an adaptation by a certain date. Aschan copies allow producers to legally fulfill that obligation without releasing a quality product, and keep the rights for later. Sometimes ashcan copies get circulated via bootleg to achieve cult status (the most famous example being Oley Sassoon’s 1994 Fantastic Four movie). Dietch’s Hobbit was less fortunate, but the story of how it got made could be a movie in itself.
Deitch explained on his blog that in the early 1960s, he was working with producer William L. Snyder to produce a feature-length animated Hobbit movie. At the time, the film rights weren’t especially valuable—Lord of the Rings wouldn’t become a bestseller for several years.
By 1966, Tolkien’s work had reached bestseller status, the Hobbit film option was highly lucrative, and Snyder realized he couldn’t afford to renew his option if it expired. So, he commissioned Deitch to make a very low-budget Hobbit cartoon before the option expired… in a month. The film was shown once in a small New York theater where everyone paid a dime to see it. Dietch reports that he gave each viewer the dime going in, then collected their signatures (and the dime back) so Snyder had legal evidence that a “paying audience” had seen his Hobbit film. Dietch recalls this occurred in 1966, though Kristin Thompson reports in her essay on Tolkien film adaptations that the New York viewing occurred in 1967 (A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, 518-519).
After decades of being apparently lost, Dietch’s The Hobbit was recovered from archives in 2012 and is now available to watch online. The film turns out to be crude but fun. The animation is bare bones—literally just drawings with a camera moving around to create the illusion of motion. The approach looks more like an episode of Reading Rainbow than an animated film. The drawing style itself looks like the “Fractured Fairy Tales” segments in Rocky and Bullwinkle, though in vivid contrasting colors that those Jay Ward cartoons rarely had.
The script consists of one narrator telling the story and doing all the voices (with no attempt to make the characters sound different). The plot condenses everything so much that Deitch called it “The Ghost of the Hobbit.” The major scenes—a dragon destroying a town, Bilbo’s guests eating all his food, two monsters transformed into stone, Bilbo finding a ring in a cave, Bilbo taking the Arkenstone from the dragon’s lair—happen, but at double time. Character names are changed, presumably to make them sound winsome (Gollum is Goloom, Smaug is “monster lizard Slag the Terrible”). To omit the Battle of the Five Armies and other complicated plot points, Bilbo is the ordained dragon slayer. To save on character development, he travels with three people instead of thirteen. One of the three people is called Princess Mika and becomes his bride at the end.
All things considered, Dietch’s movie does feel like the ghost of Tolkien’s book. It may even qualify as an unintentional parody of the book. However, it is consistently entertaining. The ways that Dietch bends over backward to fit the basic plot points, then butchers them to create something that will work in a mere twelve minutes, make for a shockingly hilarious piece of work. In fact, it’s considerably funnier than many of the deliberate Tolkien parody films that have appeared over the years.
Dietch’s approach also highlights perhaps the toughest part of adapting The Hobbit. The book may be a children’s fairytale, but it’s a children’s fairytale that breaks many of the usual tropes. No love story (something Deitch fixes by marrying Bilbo to a princess). No easy plot where the story will end once the dragon’s dead—Tolkien’s hero isn’t meant to kill the dragon, and the dwarves’ troubles don’t resolve with Smaug’s death.
Dietch and everyone following his lead would learn that adapting The Hobbit is harder than it looks. Tolkien may not have been writing a postmodern deconstruction of fairytales, but he did present an unusually complex fairytale.
Come back next week for Part 2, where we look at a little-known 1971 Swedish adaptation of Lord of the Rings.