Esotropiart

Wow! Last night I discovered something really swell. Everyone knows about the new 3-part movie series, The Lord of the Rings. Perhaps not everyone knows that the movies were not original material but based on previous works. I just watched a cartoon version of The Hobbit, the story that builds a background to the three legendary movies.

I am amazed at the authenticity of the cartoon version. My theory is that it is the ultimate standard. I believe that it is was actually filmed live using highly sophisticated cameras from the future. A modern scientist and photographer from the 23rd century built a time machine and traveled back to the time when J.R. Tolkien was alive and in his creative prime. The two of them traveled to the year 1975 where they found a world of bright colors and dark lines, much like a cartoon. Little did they know that the time machine had also transported them to another dimension called "middle-earth". They had discovered the world where the Lord of the Rings characters played out their existence and epic stories. They simply filmed it as it was happening, and the two spies went back to their own times (and dimension).

J.R. Tolkien, with his astounding memory capacity, remembered most of what he saw with his scientist friend. He decided that, since film technology didn't exist in a workable form in his time, he would write numerous books full of maps, character sketches, linguistic studies and other details to retell the story of the cartoon world he co-discovered. This is where the famous books about Middle Earth came from.

Consequently, the scientist/photographer met a beautiful woman in the cartoon world and tried numerous times to return in order to marry her. He settled for a somewhat interesting girl in our dimension whom he met in the early 1970s time period. He settled in and became an independent filmmaker. He released his footage of the cartoon world in 1977, and that is what my friend and I watched yesterday. It is so authentic and cool that I can't believe it. It's like you have stepped into the lives of these creatures that we always assumed were fictitious.

It is unfortunate that the scientist/filmmaker was not also a linguist. The English voiceovers (to make the footage understandable in modern times) were far worse than the martial arts film dubbing I'm used to, and there was an astonishing number of uninformative 3 line songs throughout. I guess I shouldn't be so judgmental because the elves, hobbits and dwarves themselves were singing the songs, and they all sounded like John Denver gone Irish. The American voiceover actors spoke so slowly that nearly all the dialogue from the original footage was lost, and we are left with a pretty simple, childlike story. When it takes ten minutes to speak ten words, it severely limits the content you can stuff in. There was this really cool part where the camera panned in a circle, showing a bunch of rocky cave structures while yet another weird song was played. That was a really useful inclusion. I guess it proves it was filmed live, cuz no one would actually waste the time to draw all that stuff. Even if directed to do so, any animator with half a brain would utterly refuse such a task. The movie must have been one of the cheapest in history to make because it was essentially recorded live. It just needed to be edited. It's utterly disgrace that there are animators listed in the final credits. Surely they must have seared conscience after taking credit for drawing something that was recorded with a high-tech camcorder.