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Allow Us To Explain

Peter Jackson Says The Hobbit Is Not Lord of the Rings. ORLY?

by Jill Pantozzi | 2:01 pm, December 29th, 2011


Anyone who’s read both J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings will tell you they are two very different animals. So it stands to reason Peter Jackson’s films would follow suit. Apparently not everyone thinks so, so Jackson made a few comments explaining why those dwarves you see in the trailer are so hilarious and how he managed to juggle all those damn cast members. 

“The Hobbit is very much a children’s book and The Lord of the Rings is something else,” Jackson told Total Film, “it’s not really aimed at children at all. I realized the characters of the dwarves are the difference. Their energy and disdain of anything politically correct brings a new kind of spirit to it. And that’s why I thought, OK, this could be fun!”

And about those dwarves. You may recall that Fellowship of the Ring had a particularly large main cast to work with, well it’s even larger in The Hobbit thanks to the new guys. ”That was something I worried about,” said Jackson. “I imagined 13 guys with long hair and beards and I thought, ‘How are we ever going to know which dwarf is which? It’s an ensemble from hell really. I thought nine members of the Fellowship was a problem; but here, with Bilbo and Gandalf, we’ve got 15. It’s working out fine though. The dwarves give it a kind of childish, comedic quality that gives us a very different tone from The Lord of the Rings.”

While both books are similar in location, they are definitely different in tone. Jackson wanted to make it clear that even if The Hobbit films don’t feel like LOTR, they will certainly look like them. ”I want it to seem like we’ve gone back on location into Middle-earth; that these two movies feel like they belong at the beginning of the other three. We’re the same filmmakers going into the same world,” he said.

You may also remember that director Guillermo del Toro was previously attached to The Hobbit. Jackson told the magazine that some aspects of his style still exist but that he had to overshadow a lot to keep things consistent with his LOTR films.

From speaking to the creators, the article describes the second film, The Hobbit: There And Back Again, as “war, madness and dragon rage.” Jackson’s wife and writing partner Fran Walsh said, “We always saw The Hobbit more in the golden light of a fairytale. It’s more playful. But by the time you get to the end, Tolkien is writing himself into that place where he can begin that epic journey of writing LOTR, which took, as he put it, his life’s blood. All those heavier, darker themes which are so prevalent in the later trilogy start to come into play.”

(via io9)

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  • Shelley Belsky

    Taitz necessarily so. 

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_IGRK4BKTKC5RGO56RXTUEVFJSM ainok

    I was thinking recently how much I’m looking forward to the Hobbit because it has so much more of the fantastic about it, strange as that may sound. It has a *real* dragon, and giants, and trolls, and goblins and elves and dwarves and wizards and all these elements more typical to earlier fantastical stuff, and how wonderful! It’s marvelous in a way LotR could never be (and not just for its lack of dragons). It’s got a sort of shameless wonder about it. I think in this cynical era especially, that’s something we really crave.

    As long as there’s no dwarf tossing or surfing elves, that is. >.<

    (Also when are we getting a feature length big screen Discworld film? WHEN??)

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=624649249 Sarah Rice

    I agree.  Much as I like Hogfather, I’d also appreciate Discworld getting some big budget recognition.

  • Frodo Baggins

    Totally agree with Jackson’s point, though I can understand the concerns of LOTR film fans who haven’t read the books. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, another much beloved trilogy was damaged irrevocably by kid-directed prequels. But I have faith in PJ and Fran Walsh’s loyalty to the spirit (if not always the canon) of Tolkien’s vision.

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  • http://nakedhobo.com/blog Glenn Buettner

    I’m glad he has come out and said this, because I foresaw a lot of folks that have never read the book wondering why the tone is so different from LotR.  This is the book that started me off in true nerdom, I think I am looking forward to this more than I was for LotR.

  • Anonymous

    Tolkien intended on adjusting the tone and style of The Hobbit to match TLOTR, but never found the time.  Peter Jackson is trying to justify the unneeded dwarf-tossing, Gimli lolling his eye’s/farting stuff from the past movies that he is going to amplify in this movie.

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