Justin's Rating: If only Bilbo could capture Smaug in a poké-ball, he would have the ultimate pocket monster!
Justin's Review: Long before Peter Jackson took the easy way out by doing a Lord of the Rings version with (yawn) live actors filmed in his backyard and such, the craftsmen of yore (1978) actually put it a good day's work by making animated versions of the Tolkein classics. Instead of a lush, rich three-dimensional computer generated Gollum, we got a flat, two-dimensional WONDER OF THE WESTERN WORLD Gollum, moving at a generous three frames per second. Well, sometimes none. Sometimes the animators went on a coffee break, leaving the poor screenwriters to scribble in and record a 15-minute internal monologue of a statue-still figure. But that was good enough in my day, and by gum, it should be good enough for yours!

"I'm sorry, but if a spooky wizard and a baker's dozen of dwarves barge into your home and flatly demand that you come triapsing around the world with them to get some booty (the diamond-filled kind), you just say NO! Then you call the Hobbiton Police Department to escort the kindly crazies out."

Sure, some negative film critics might becry Lord of the Rings as being one of the single worst travesties to befall the silver screen, but they're just cranky because they haven't had their diapers changed yet. During that same year (1978), Tolkein fans were gifted with a television dowry as well: an animated version of The Hobbit, a.k.a. "The One Tolkein Book That Actually Reads Well, Possibly Because Tolkein Didn't Spend Every Other Chapter Fawning Over The Elves And Their Language, Culture, Clothing, Likes, Dislikes, Hobbies, Pets, Dating Rituals, Mating Rituals, Birthing Rituals, Graduation Rituals and Favorite Web Sites As He Does In Lord Of The Rings".

Based on every single unoriginal Dungeons & Dragons campaign that came both before and after, The Hobbit is a tale about a reluctant adventurer (a bowling ball-figured midget) who is hijacked to go on a quest with gold-crazy dwarves and their senile wizard ringleader. Bilbo finds a secret inner strength to battle trolls, spiders and dragons, but he finds this strength about three hundred pages too late, as he's already agreed to go on this insane quest. I'm sorry, but if a spooky wizard and a baker's dozen of dwarves barge into your home and flatly demand that you come triapsing around the world with them to get some booty (the diamond-filled kind), you just say NO! Then you call the Hobbiton Police Department to escort the kindly crazies out.

If you've read the book, then you'll probably be able to follow the plot; if you haven't, then good luck. Even though the events more or less follow what happened in the novel, they rush certain parts along (including many important backstory scenes) just to get to the next fireball-spewing part. The most disconcerting aspect is the underdevelopment of Bilbo. As the main hero and the focus of The Hobbit's plot, Bilbo should have gotten a few more minutes to show his reluctant transformation from a meek soap opera-watcher to brash adventurer. In the movie, he goes from the first to the second almost instantly -- and in the first fifteen minutes -- making the whole question of hidden Hobbit strengths moot.

By far, the most ridiculous buffoonery that The Hobbit has to offer is its aspirations to be a grand musical (read more about my thoughts on the tunes in the Soundtrack Review section). Just because Tolkein wrote songs in his books doesn't mean they should be sung. I like to imagine that the music composer of The Hobbit had a fierce hatred of the movie's director, and so decided to throw a song in just about everywhere, even over dialogue and important action sequences. Sometimes the songs are used as a sort of montage, to speed up the pesky plot and utterly confuse any eight year-old watching.

Despite some instances of flat acting, jerky plot pacing and the constant, soul-rending musical numbers, The Hobbit remains a fairly fine piece of Tolkeinobelia even today. After the herky-jerkiness of The Lord of the Rings cartoon, I sincerely appreciated the minimalistic watercolor drawings -- sometimes this captured the spirit of Middle Earth very nicely. Some of the voice acting (particularly Gollum's) is spot-on, and unexpected in something made straight-for-TV.

Still, the only reasons to see this would be either if you were a stupid movie reviewer who wanted to find stranger-than-ordinary fare, or if you had a few friends and wanted something to lightly mock while still being lightly entertained while doing so. At least The Hobbit wasn't as bad as the other animated LOTR movies, so we'll let it rest in piece, my precioussss.