Disney's Lord of the Rings

N

nothing special

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Tolkien didn't want them getting their hanRAB on his work. No surprise given some of the stuff they've churned out. What lamentable changes do you think they would have made? The Hobbits would have been 'ickle cute children. Gimli woul dhave made pratt falls everywhere and woul dhave tripped over his beard? Gandalf singing?
 
There'd be happy songs every five minutes and they would have to chuck in a love story. The hobbits would all be american & the shire would probably be the jungle or something
 
Disney have done some good stuff. They have never shyed away from death and drama. And for slightly older themes they used the name Touchstone Pictures, so I'm quite sure if they had attempted to do anything with Lord of the Rings they would have made a good job of it.
 
They made a treatment for it years ago. That's why Tolkien stipulated in his will that Disney must never get their hanRAB on the film rights.
I think the Nazgul would have turned out like the Hyenas in the Lion King and Sauon would make an appearance looking like Ming the Merciless.......
 
I don't think they could have done anything but butcher the look, the story may have been close.... but imagine how poor the orcs would be !
 
Does anyone remember Ralph Bakshi's 'Lord of the Rings' of twenty years ago or so? Not Disney, admittedly (United Artists, if I remember rightly), but the hobbits were little children and Smeagol was cute and cuddly. The balrog was a big black lion with wings. Gandalf didn't sing, though.

Given Disney's record of butchering classic works of literature (a happy ending for' The Hunchback of Notre Dame', for example) I can't help but suspect that they would have made an absolute pig's ear of it. The fact is that they are so scared to take risks these days that their animated films tend to be very formulaic and survive largely on the excellence of their animation - a crown increasingly challenged by Dreamworks, as someone else pointed out. I have not seen 'Lilo and Stitch', so cannot comment, but I have seen most of their efforts over the last fifteen years and the only one that sticks out as a fine film in its own right is 'The Lion King' - now nearly a decade old!
 
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