One of the main ways Rankin and Bass make it clear that this is a film intended for children and their families is by deliberately echoing aspects of Disney’s animated films. The decision to make the film a musical is one obvious similarity with Disney’s animated fairy tales, but there are others as well. The similarity in the character design of the dwarves in The Hobbit to the dwarfs from Disney’s 1937 classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is not a coincidence. (By the way, if anyone is wondering, Tolkien was quite particular about the fact that his imaginary creatures were dwarves, as opposed to dwarfs. In his Author’s Note at the beginning of The Hobbit, Tolkien explained that “in English the only correct plural of dwarf is dwarfs, and the adjective is dwarfish. In this story dwarves and dwarvish are used, but only when speaking of the ancient people to whom Thorin Oakenshield and his companions belonged.”)
To cement the Disney-like feel, the film opens on an image of a big, hard-bound and illustrated book, just like Disney’s Snow White, Pinocchio (1940), Cinderella (1950), Sleeping Beauty (1959), The Sword in the Stone (1963), The Jungle Book (1967), and Robin Hood (1973). Interestingly, Rankin/Bass’ The Hobbit opens on an image of the book, by J.R.R. Tolkien, with the author and the famous first line (“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”) clearly visible. The end of the movie, on the other hand, shows Bilbo’s in-universe Red Book, titled There and Back Again: A Hobbit’s Holiday, before finishing on an image of the One Ring, glinting in a glass case on Bilbo’s mantelpiece. Both clearly parallel the Disney trope, especially the opening, which places the story firmly in a fictional, “fairtytale” universe.
There are of course some things the Jackson movies got right that the Rankin/Bass version did not. One of the more inexplicable decisions made for the animated movie was to increase the body count of named characters in the climactic Battle of the Five Armies. In Tolkien’s novel, and in Jackson’s film, the only three members of the Company to die are Thorin, Kili, and Fili. Rankin and Bass, however, kill off seven of the Dwarves, only even naming Thorin and Bombur, both of whom die on screen. We can assume that Kili and Fili were among the seven killed and that Balin survived (since he has to go and die in Moria sometime between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings), but it is a mystifying decision, especially since films aimed at children do not usually increase the body count.
The Jackson movies also include some fantastic sequences that, taken on their own, are perfect screen adaptations of scenes from the book. Bilbo’s riddle-game in the dark with Gollum under the Misty Mountains in An Unexpected Journey and his verbal sparring with Smaug in The Desolation of Smaug are near perfect, helped by fantastic performances from Martin Freeman as Bilbo, Andy Serkis as Gollum, and Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug. The casting is all around pretty perfect, especially Freeman, and while Legolas’ added storyline was controversial, the character really is supposed to be the son of Thranduil, the King of Mirkwood, and it’s rather nice to see him slotted in there, even if the role he is given is not to everyone’s taste.
Overall though, the Rankin/Bass animated adaptation of The Hobbit, whatever its flaws, feels like it captures a bit more of the feel of the book, even if it leans quite heavily toward a more Disney-like tone. And if you have young children, you are almost certainly better off trying to show them this version instead of the live-action films. That is if you are too impatient to wait until they are old enough to read the book!
