The other (sort of) Tolkien film trilogy

Next week, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies will conclude Peter Jackson’s trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel, and may be the last Tolkien adaptation we see for a while. But audiences may be surprised to know that in addition to the New Zealand director's six movies, another Tolkien film trilogy already exists. Well, kind of.

A whole generation before Jackson turned his homeland into Middle-Earth, two different parties produced three animated features that, together, adapted The Hobbit and all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings. They can only loosely be called a trilogy, though, as the three don’t consistently sync with one another. As for their quality, let’s just say Jackson has no competition to fear for the definitive motion picture portrait of Tolkien’s world.

The Hobbit (1977)

Tolkien’s novel is sometimes classified as a children’s book, though it’s been enjoyed by readers of all ages. However, in the hands of Rankin/Bass Productions (most remembered for their perennial Christmas specials), the tale was tinkered specifically for youngsters in this TV movie. As such, several characters and plot points are simplified, reduced, or eliminated. Bilbo (voiced by Orson Bean) talks us through every step of the way, lest the little ones watching lose track of things. Gollum and the orcs look more amphibious than hideous, and Smaug is only slightly more threatening than Pete’s Dragon. There’s very little scariness or battles, but plenty of singing (much of it adapted from the book’s songs). For what it is, it’s a decent production, but viewers above the age of, say, six or seven will likely find it flavorless and unengaging. It might also be hard to keep a straight face if you’re a South Park fan, as the main theme sounds an awful lot like a song about a certain gerbil.

True to the book, though (truer than Jackson’s version with all its added-on prequel elements), there’s little mention of the events to come in The Lord of the Rings. That story would be told the following year, albeit by a different studio, in...

The Lord of the Rings (1978)

Contrary to the kid-friendly tone of Rankin/Bass' The Hobbit, the first film adaptation of Tolkien’s seminal trilogy was the work of cult animator Ralph Bakshi, best known for his more adult-oriented features in the 1970s and early 80s. Bakshi’s style heavily utilizes rotoscoping, a process of animating over live-action footage. He’d employ this technique more successfully in other movies around the same time, but the results here are mixed, and that’s putting it nicely. Some of it is quite good (a few of the more impressive sequences clearly inspired scenes in Jackson’s adaptations). Some looks like a badly colorized black-and-white movie (the Balrog in the Mines of Moria is particularly awful). We do get a decent if highly compressed adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring, but the narrative crumbles when it moves onto the events of The Two Towers, becoming hard to follow even if you know the story.

The film ends partway through the second book, and Bakshi intended to make another movie finishing the trilogy. That didn’t happen, leaving the task of resolving the story to...

The Return of the King (1980)

Rankin/Bass took a second stab at Tolkien with another telefilm, but it can barely be called an adaptation of the trilogy’s final book (and really doesn’t work as a follow-up to Bakshi’s picture, either). Legolas and Gimli are cut completely, and even Aragorn is marginalized, despite being the king mentioned in the title. Instead, the storyline is reworked into a sequel to The Hobbit of three years prior, and mainly follows Frodo (Bean, again) and Sam’s (Roddy McDowell) long walk to Mount Doom. Sounds simple enough, but the production’s selective elimination of significant plot points leaves so many scraps of story that become tangled and confusing. The few darker elements from the book that made it in are extremely watered down (the Ringwraiths are less terrifying than the average Scooby-Doo villain), or undercut by incredibly lame musical numbers. If they don’t get stuck in your head, this one’s completely forgettable.