Interesting enough, a few years after the death of J.R.R. Tolkien they produced this animated movie based on The Hobbit. Apparently it was pretty well received back in the day, and I was kind of excited to watch it because Rankin-Bass was behind it. They had also done Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman.

It’s not a horrible retelling of The Hobbit novel. In some ways, it actually does things a little better than Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy. But I did feel like the pace of the movie moved so slow despite being much shorter in length than any of the Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies.

The biggest offender is actually the animation style. The only person I think they got on the money was Bilbo Baggins himself. But look at Gollum, he looks like a evil Charmander from Pokemon.

I would have never imagined the dwarves this way either. Especially as they all look like extremely short grandpas

Gandalf the Grey could have looked a little bit cooler too.

Elrond the elf wasn’t too bad though. I don’t know why he has gray hair since he’s IMMORTAL.

The biggest mistake is actually Legolas’ dad Thranduil. The movie is quite clear that he’s a Wood Elf and not something else. Despite belonging to the same race as Elrond, he looks more like a gremlin than the king of the elves. Especially compared to the Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies.

I wasn’t too impressed with Smaug the dragon either, especially his face. Kind of looked like one of those Chinese dragons mixed with a dog.

I can actually see people today actually enjoying The Hobbit from 1977. It has a lot of strengths but many weaknesses. They could have done a lot worse, but I was just so disappointed with this adaptation. But ironically, I kind of wished I had seen it before watching The Lord of the Rings movies back in 2006.