VIDEO: Long Lost Animated Version Of The Hobbit, As Made In Under A Month (Bleeding Cool)

Written on January 9, 2012 by Brendon Connelly in Film, Video

Recently hauled out of the vaults and uploaded to the internet is a most interesting short animation based upon The Hobbit. It was animated and edited within a single month by Gene Deitch… but why in such a hurry?

You can read the full story, well-told, at Deitch’s website (with thanks to Cartoon Brew for the link), but here’s a few excerpts, picking up the story soon after the publication of The Lord of the Rings:

The Tolkien craze had exploded, and the value of the film rights reached outer space. Suddenly Bill [Snyder, the producer] had the possibility of getting a hefty profit without having to finance or produce anything!

Why invest money, plus a year-and-a-half of work, when you can make money without all that sweat? Not only had the Tolkien estate lawyers given Snyder the rights for peanuts, but in their ignorance of film terminology, they had left a million-dollar-loop-hole in the contract: It merely stated that in order to hold his option for The Lord of the Rings, Snyder had to “produce a full-color motion picture version” of The Hobbit by June 30th 1966. Please note: It did not say it had to be an animated movie, and it not say how long the film had to be!

 I knew my screen story line by heart, so I just had to put it through a mind-shredder, and wrote a sort of synopsis, with a few key lines of dialog scattered throughout. I called on close friend, brilliant Czech illustrator, Adolf Born, well known even then, and now the premier book illustrator. We managed to work out a simple storyboard. Adolf came up with a paper cutout scheme, and I worked out some multiple-exposure visual effects and scene continuity. We worked directly under the camera to shoot it.

I got an American friend here, Herb Lass, who worked as a broadcaster for the Czechoslovak Radio’s English language transmissions, to come up to our apartment and record the narration. I borrowed a tape of dramatic movie music from a composer friend, Václav Lidl, which I quickly extracted and cut together, also at home. It was no problem with music rights, as I could assure him that the film would never actually be distributed, but would be – sadly – a mere decoy.

And here is said decoy, in full:

Deitch had been planning a full feature length adaptation, in collaboration with Jiri Trnka. He holds some of the designs for that version, and has promised to post them soon. I’ll point you towards them when he does.

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2012/01/09/video-long-lost-animated-version-of-hobbit-as-made-under-month/