The Artists of the Rankin-Bass Hobbit

The Rankin-Bass production of Tolkien's The Hobbit was notable in that the concept and character art -- the reference images from which the characters and monsters were meant to by drawn by the animators -- were done in the United States by American artists, while the animation itself was done by a team at Topcraft in Japan. For this concept art, Rankin and Bass turned to RISD graduate Lester Abrams, whose illustrations of Bilbo and Gollum for an excerpt of The Hobbit published in the February and March 1974 issues of the Children's Digest must have caught their attention. Abrams was certainly well-acquainted with Tolkien, as these drawings have every characteristic attributed to hobbits, including furry feet and long brown fingers. Bilbo's eyes are surrounded by bags (a visual in-joke, perhaps?) and he certainly looks like a mature, self-assured individual. Gollum has same the frog-like characteristics and saucery blank eyes that we've know from the finished production, but also a slender and more humanoid body that suggests that it could, indeed, be a very withered version of a hobbit (although the posture he takes on the cover illustration seems rather insectine). The detail is rich, and there's a celtic-style ornamental border.

One can also see Lester Abrams' hand at work in the character art which was used by Rankin-Bass on the cover of the LP sold to accompany the telecast; these appear to be very close to what was probably sent on to Topcraft.  There, under the overall direction of Toru Hara (later known for his work as supervising producer on My Neighbor Tortoro and Grave of the Fireflies), the animators set to work. Among the team were animation supervisor Tsuguyuki Kubo, known for his work with many US studios (his later projects included Thundercats, The Wind in the Willows, and Darkwing Duck), Kazuyuki Kobayashi (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky), and Hidemi Kumo (Flight of the Dragons, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm). Many of these same animators, as the titles show, went on to work at Studio Ghibli with Hayao Miyzaki, though others found their niche in continuing work for US television.

And yet, although Abrams' direction over what the animators did with his concepts was limited -- as  when Bilbo acquires large, anime-style eyes -- he did manage to have some significant influence over the production. According to his friend and erstwhile collaborator, Walt Simonson, with whom I spoke on the phone, Abrams was immensely fond of the art of Arthur Rackham, and it seems very likely that it was his suggestion that Rackham be used as a reference for the style of the backgrounds and overall feel of the production that was taken up by Rankin and Bass and passed along as a directive to Topcraft. Also, according to a 2002 interview in Cinefantastique, Abrams was also influential in the decision to retain the encounter with the spiders, as opposed to the Beorn episode, which eventually became the one not produced.

And Abrams' influence was to continue into the Rankin-Bass version of The Return of the King. Before their Hobbit even aired, the producers were anxious to start work on a version of the Lord of the Rings, to which they had acquired some rights. According to Simonson, the precise extent of these rights was unclear, and in the end Rankin and Bass were told by the production's underwriting company that their only clear rights were to the third and final volume of the trilogy. And so, they set to work with a script that used bits of The Hobbit to fill in the backstory missing in the first two volumes, which of course meant that the characters had to match. It was at this point that Simonson -- who had earlier, along with other artists, filled out needed panels and chapter heads for the Harry N. Abrams book of the Rankin-Bass Hobbit, was asked to prepare some presentation panels that the company could use to help get backers for the project.  Simonson shares much of this art in a Facebook album; here we can see his Sam, his "old Bilbo" (holding a copy of his Translations from the Elvish!), Sam carrying Frodo while Gollum follows, and a Gandalf battling the Witch-king. While this art wasn't directly used in the production, it shows the concern of Rankin and Bass with continuity of look and feeling, and certainly may have influenced it in some ways.

Alas, the R/B version of The Return of the King is highly unsatisfying -- mostly because it's unable to follow the full plot, but also because its style doesn't quite match the high heroic tone of the Lord of the Rings. The success of their version of The Hobbit was in capturing its whimsy, that very quality which fades as Frodo takes up the quest of the ring. Still, Simonson's art suggests that it might, in a more ideal world, have been possible for Rankin and Bass to have made an animated LOTR that effectively blended whimsy and epic, and produced a movie worthy of its source.