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Memorable, crazy movie

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One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

It was visually incredible picture and it pushes us into a great world of hobbits, dwarfs, elves and all other so we witness a grand adventure of Bilbo Baggins. It's compact and tries to the best job in showing you an important stuff but as older audience that had privilege to read books and see movies made about Hobbit it was quite tough because of so many good scenes that are cut from this animated movie. There is a lot of action inside the movie and it was great but sometimes it ends all that to soon and you are just pushed in other way. Some things are also changed from original to create better motion of movie. Dialogues are taken from the book and it was quite amazing how they managed to create scenes based on real dialogues. 2.5/4

Rank and Bass were never known to use top quality studio art, and this version of The Hobbit is testament to that. Even so there is enough art in the character and overall production design to make it palatable to most visual pallets. But, it is offshore animation, meaning a Japanese production company took the script delivered by Rank and Bass and gave their rendition of a Northern European mythology."The Hobbit" is not a sterling book, but readable, and written for a pre-teen to mid-teen reading audience. As such, distilling the story to screenplay format means taking the key events and highlighting them for the visual format. The film suffers because there's little in the way of making a cohesive story. The writing does that on its own, which is testament to Tolkien's skill as a writer, because otherwise the film leaves little to bring the scenes together as a cohesive film. Essentially we're seeing a made for TV animated special, as was the original intent, and because of this the production limitations are noticeable, but for most children at the time this was aired, somewhat forgivable. I say somewhat because both Disney and Warner Brothers had shown children what good animation looked like.So when Japanese animators, used to cranking out anime episodes a week with low drawing count, comes and presents us a very Anglo tale with a Japanese tinge, the results are somewhat mixed.Even so there is a certain charm to this production in that it was the first filmed version of Tolkien's very entertaining story of Bilbo Baggins and his adventures. Bilbo represented the young boy reader, including myself, who read the tale years back before it became a media sensation in the 70s and again in the 2000s. I've always thought this rendition of "The Hobbit" had its high points, but was also a bit conservative, it being a children's film and the need to keep the violence in the story toned down for mass consumption. It would have been interesting to see what one of the big animation studios could do with the same tale.Not a bad film per se, but lacking in my personal judgment, primarily because it was "dumbed down" so to speak for a mass market. Still, it's an interesting watch, and likable in a nostalgia like manner.Give it a shot.

I was 5 years old in 1977 - so I had the pleasure of watching it when it first aired. I fell in-love with this movie so much that my parents bought me both of the read along record albums to this film (I still wish I had them today but lost them many years ago).This is an outstanding classic TV Movie. If you loved Peter Jackson's films (Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit series) plus animations then I'm sure you would love this old 1977 made-for-TV movie. It's well worth finding a copy of the film to watch. I would love a copy of this movie to add to my collection.Other great animated classic films that are similar: "The Black Cauldron", "The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe", "The Last Unicorn" and "The Secret of NIMH".9.5/10

Despite its valiant effort to offer a close-to-the-source-material animated story the Rankin-Bass 1977 animated musical television special suffers from many obvious shortcomings.The plot does follow that of the Tolkien book but the animation itself seems to be amateurish and hurried due to budget and time constraints.Maybe Topcraft, a now-defunct Japanese animation studio that created the animation for The Hobbit, was not the best choice for this work because it gives one the feeling of an amateurish animation designed to target a too young an audience.In this respect I prefer Director Ralph Bakshi's animation for The Lord of the Rings (1978)because the quality of his animation techniques (rotoscoping and posterization)leads to a superior finished product that can be appreciated by children of all ages and adults alike.It's the difference between real illustration as opposed to cartoons.Also, Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings (1978) is much longer (132 minutes)than Rankin-Bass' The Hobbit (77 minutes).Both animated films were released in late seventies (1977 versus 1978) and both works cost about 3-4 million US dollars to produce.Finally,both animated films feature excellent soundtrack and cast. The Hobbit (1977) features very famous cast members such as John Huston, Otto Preminger and Richard Boone. I give it a 10 out of 10 because I'm a big fan of Tolkien but I wish it had been a longer animated feature created by Ralph Bakshi rather than by Rankin-Bass purely for the high level of animation sophistication seen in Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings (1978).