For quite some time, I've been looking forward to Lucy's 5th birthday (next Tuesday) as being her first major introduction to the world of Middle Earth; namely, with a viewing of the Rankin & Bass animated "classic," The Hobbit. Before the actual viewing, though, I wanted to sit down & do a parental pre-screening of the content.
What I remembered was a cute little hobbit running around and some nice songs. What I saw was some crazy-ass animation over a soundtrack with half the songs sounding like they were written and performed by Art Garfunkel, and the other half sounding like the people who put the music together for The Electric Company. The setting is the middle ages, but all I could think was: 1977, man.
With the exception of the Art Garfunkel-inspired songs, the whole thing was pretty dark, and the relatively simple message of the actual The Hobbit was buried in some pretty clumsy retelling of a lot of the individual escapades Bilbo weathers on his way towards The Lonely Mountain. Then there's the old thing (blogged, or at least spoken about before) about these far-eastern animators needing to brush up on their Western history, as they are drawing middle-ages-era people wearing sandles and robes; more The Ten Commandments than The Lord of the Rings. When the adventuring party came upon the men at Lake Town, I thought they'd stumbled across The Masada.
Alas - I may try to come across some of the movie stills on the web and do a dramatic retelling of the story via Powerpoint, with my own words and explanations. Then, read the book a couple of years down the line.
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3 comments:
Man sounds like a bummer. I hope that Lucy likes 5. Happy Birthday young one!
I think I have the vinyl album soundtrack of the "Return of the King" cartoon around here somewhere...
The Hobbit is pretty dark, in the sense that it is Bilbo and the boys going from on very perilous situation to the next. There's not much relief as an enormous amount happens in what is a very short book.
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