Treasures Under the Mountain (1991, unreleased, directed by Roman Mitrofanov)
Russia seems to have had a particular fondness for Tolkien during the Soviet era. This may be related to something Rod Dreher noted in his book Live Not By Lies: interviews with Christian dissidents who almost religious read Lord of the Rings, during the USSR years, seeing it as an allegory of the struggle they were living and a means to gain lessons about how to resist evil. The authorities who permitted Leningrad TV to produce an adaption of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings likely did not see it that way.
While Russian animation studio Argus never finished their animated film based on The Hobbit, they did finish six minutes of prologue material. The footage has appeared in various places online, sometimes with English subtitles.
Fortunately, the six minutes create a well-contained scene. It begins with a candle on a table; then a narrator talks about the need to remember the past as a map unfurls. The map becomes the Mountain and Dale, and a scene shows Dale’s golden times: dwarves and men dancing and feasting.
Smaug—looking very much like a dragon from Asian literature illustrations—materializes and lays waste to the village. The narrator sings a sad song about the carnage but notes footprints in the snow leading from the Mountain.
The scene switches to a table holding a candle and map, with Gandalf and the dwarves talking. Gandalf advises the dwarves to get a fourteenth member. Following Gandalf’s instructions to find someone with a particular mark on his door, the dwarves walk off, and Gandalf blows out the candle. Opening credits appear, then the footage ends.
It’s impossible to tell from an unfinished film what the final product would have been like. Some fans may get a general idea by looking at Argus’ other projects—the studio went on to release at least eight other projects in the late 1990s to early 2000s, mostly based on fairytales.
However, the footage suggests that Treasures Under the Mountain would have been the best Hobbit adaptation up to that point. Some of its animation techniques are limited—in the Dale scenes, frames are reused to make characters move like clockwork figures, yet it comes across as charming rather than cheap. The backdrops look beautiful, reminiscent of Golden Age Disney animation.
The way the prologue begins and ends with the candle suggests a well-written script—and one that would have solved a structural problem. Tolkien begins his story by giving readers no information about the dwarves and their quest, delaying the reveal as long as he can (after the dwarves have eaten all of Bilbo’s food).
Tolkien’s delayed reveal creates a comic scene, but also a long scene that filmmakers have consistently struggled to adapt. Rankin-Bass condenses the scene thoroughly—the dwarves appear all together shortly after Gandalf appears, the dinner scene is trimmed to the dwarves singing their song and telling Bilbo their story. The Fabolous Journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins follows the scene fairly closely… and as a result, it’s 20 minutes into a 70-minute movie before the company leaves Bag End.
Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey attempts to resolve this problem with a battle-heavy prologue showing the dwarf kingdom’s demise before transitioning to the Bag End scenes. After that, it follows the dinner scene closely—causing reviewers like Mark Kermode to argue that the movie drags.
Treasures Under the Mountain apparently had a script that resolved the issue. It covers the important backstory in under six minutes, quickly establishing why the dwarves must recruit Bilbo. What the filmmakers planned to do in the next scene is impossible to say, short of contacting Argus to see if they wrote a script and archived it. However, the prologue’s economy suggests they weren’t going to dawdle.
Come back next week for part 9, where we look at perhaps the best Lord of the Rings adaptation before the Peter Jackson movies arrived.