A friend of mine in England, responding to my own comments, has written rather amusingly about the strengths and weaknesses of Peter Jackson’s movie adaptation of The Hobbit:
I agree with you about Radagast the Ridiculous. In which context I noted that one of his er unusual means of transport team was none other than Bugs Bunny (there is a brief glimpse of the characteristic pose and goofy grin). Not a character I naturally associate with Middle Earth. The chase he leads the warg-riding orcs looks like something out of a kiddie cartoon also. The dwarves fighting their way out of the orc caverns also seemed to enjoy the miraculous immunity to physical injury I associate with Messrs Tom & Jerry.
That said, I still think the film gets a thumbs up rather than down. It is (mostly) not up to the standard of the LOTR films, but then The Hobbit as a book is not up to the standard of the LOTR books in my view – it is an early essay in the craft, as it were. Cate Blanchett as Galadriel was much better in this film than she was in the LOTR ones, where in some scenes she would have made a fitting co-hanger-out in Greenwich Village with Radagast the Stoned. In this one she achieved a measure of majesty.
I watched The Hobbit on Christmas Day eve and agree that in places it is a cartoon more than anything else.
The Hobbit itself is a children’s book but NOT a Walt Disney ‘What’s up Doc?’. Watching the movie confirmed my original opinion of Peter Jackson that I had formed after I had seen LOTR. Jackson simply does not understand Tolkien nor the world of Middle Earth he created. He is a contemporary hamburger-and-treacle director who completely misses the depths in both books, written by a man who had grown up in the Edwardian era and seen the First World War close up.
A generation gap with a vengeance.
I find my good friend Joseph has posted my comments to him here. So here are a few more, essentially random and doubtless superficial, to share with you.
I have now seen the film twice, once in 3D and once in 2D. The difference makes little difference to me. I would have foregone the illusion of depth for a bit more of the reality in any case. I also can’t see any difference due to the thing being shot at 48 frames per second rather than the conventional 24, although much atmosphere has been heated by film-buffy pundits anent this weighty matter…
At one point Bilbo says “OK”, an expression from West over a very different Sea than Tolkien’s, and which duly elicited a shudder (nothing beside the reaction this crass Americanism would have received from the good Professor Tolkien himself I suspect!). We shall be fortunate not to see the dread Golden Arches rising above Hobbiton in future instalments at this rate ;-).
Also, whilst much of the New Zealand scenery is appropriately awe-inspiring, Tolkien was clear that his tale was set in an earlier version of NW Europe, if not England, and he would have expected its natural history to reflect this. Jackson simply got in a muddle here.
Sebastian the Ailing Hedgehog will correctly have seemed exotic to Americans, as these charming little creatures of the English countryside (and my garden) do not occur, in any form, in North America. I suspect Jackson’s spiny Sebastian probably does not owe his name to the fact that with his arrows pointing outwards he reverses the means of martyrdom of his sanctified namesake.
However at one point Radagast the Far Out, Man, converses with an American Robin, whose European relative – the Song Thrush, not the Real British Robin Redbreast – plays an important role in the story later. Whilst his bizarre Bugs-Bunnymobile crashes through a Kiwi forest which would strike Tolkien, accustomed to English oak and beech woods, as distinctly exotic. Some of the background birdsong heard therein likewise doubtless comes from Antipodean avifauna with consonantally-deprived Maori names unlikely ever to have delighted the ears of the Hobbit’s author in his North Oxford garden.
Calling the phasmid the Wizard of Odd is interrupted by his more authentic-appearing brother Istari apparently in the process of ingesting a “stick insect” instead of its American name, “walking stick”, does not make it any more authentically an indigenous English insect. Although ironically in recent years New Zealand stick insects/walking sticks have now got loose and are rampaging through Devon and Cornwall.
Finally the night-time wildlife noises we hear outside Bag End owe more to a Georgia swamp than the idealised rustic England which is the Shire, where foxes may bark and owls may hoot but never the chirr of a cricket, the scrape of a cicada or the mating cry of some bizarre bullfrog is heard…