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Over Christmas break, my husband and I took our two kids to see The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.  Both my husband and I had a few issues with the movie: he’s a Tolkien purist, so his were mostly textual (in the books the Ringwraiths never had any tombs, because they were never dead), whereas mine were mostly aesthetic (the high frame rate was terrible…I felt like I was watching a TV show, or a televised play).  But on the whole, we both liked it, and there were parts that were magnificent.  For me, Smaug was, hands down, a triumph: beautifully animated, terrifyingly realistic, and that voicing by Benedict Cumberbatch?  Incredible.

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The movie got me thinking, though.  Tolkien wrote The Hobbit for children.  As he wrote The Lord of the Rings, he went back and modified The Hobbit as the mythos developed.  Still, it remained, and remains, a book that is primarily intended for ten year olds.  And yet the movies are intense action flicks rated a hard PG-13.  My kids are nine and seven, and although they both loved it (my daughter spent the whole dragon sequence on the edge of her seat, both hands over her mouth, eyes wide) I would not feel comfortable with them watching it without us there.  How is it that this kids’ book became movies with shoot-em-ups (albeit with arrows)?

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The first thing that comes to mind is that what works in a book does not always work on the screen.  Pacing is different, dialogue sounds different, things that could be left to the imagination in a book have to be shown somehow in a movie, etc.  Think about Harry Potter.  The movies that were the least successful in conveying the feel of Hogwarts, the feel of the characters, were the ones that most closely followed the text.  As much as my dear husband might disagree, if Peter Jackson had strictly adhered to the book, the movie would have sucked.

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But did they really need to make three movies?  Lots of people have lambasted that decision.  Miramax even sued Warner Bros over it, saying they made three movies to get around a provision in the sale of the rights that gave Miramax a cut of the profits for only one movie.  And who knows?  Maybe they did make three movies to cash in, or to do an end run around the agreement with Miramax.  Ultimately, though, their motivations don’t matter.  What matters is whether the three movies work.  And so far, I would say yes.  The material within the book is deep enough to expand and explore.  What Peter Jackson has done is arguably the same as Tolkien: he modified The Hobbit based on the mythos found in both The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.  He also included original elements, such as the female elf Tauriel.  Some people hate this decision, but expanding a narrative with your own inventions is a time-honored tradition of storytelling.  Was Tauriel in the originals?  No.  Does her inclusion go against the spirit of Tolkien’s work?  No.  (And is it nice to have an important female character in what has always been a very heavily male-dominated genre?  Hell yes.)

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I’m struck by this depth in The Hobbit and in all great children’s literature.  These stories are doorways to discovering the world in all its complexities. And an adult can return to the best children’s books and experience them on a deeper level.  In The Hobbit there are sophisticated themes of reclaiming a home that isn’t your home anymore, and how material wealth and power can corrupt the soul, issues that a kid might be discovering for the first time but that will likely resonate with an adult. Every book, regardless of intended audience, should strive for this combination of revelation and recognition, and those with it transcend the ages, from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time.

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I’m really looking forward to the third Hobbit movie.  I can’t wait to see how Peter Jackson brings Tolkien’s vision as well as his own to a climax and conclusion.  And I really want to see that dragon again!

by

Eileen Maksym

Author of Haunted

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