Our first glimpse of Martin Freeman as the “first-class and legendary burglar,” with his dwarvish companions in the background:
Benedict Cumberbatch has been confirmed as playing the voice of the Chief Burglee, so the scene under Lonely Mountain will be a Sherlockian reunion of sorts.
Blunt the knives and bend the forks!
Smash the bottles, burn the corks!
That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates –
So, carefully! carefully with the plates!
It’s a shame we won’t have a (pretty cool, honestly) musical background a la the cartoon version. Glenn Yarborough’s warblings FTW.
Even better is the Misty Mountain song.
I had heard Smaug was to be voiced by Leonard Nimoy. This will probably be better but still. I do wonder if the idea of Hobbits (and elves) having pointy ears has its origin in the video for Nimoy’s “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” in which women with Spock ears are dancing or singing or something. I don’t recall anything in Tolkien’s writings about pointy ears. Martin Freeman is a good actor, so I am somewhat optimistic about this.
Elves had pointed ears in the Victorian Age, and I think it’s likely that the idea of Dwarves and Halflings etc. having them as well might have been because of a visual cue that if a character had pointed ears he was of a diminutive race. I seriously doubt it was inspired by a silly video of Leonard Nimoy and a bunch of extras dancing around like idiots.
How strange. Except for your title it would not be obvious at all you’re talking about “The Hobbit” if I hadn’t read the book already.
Am I missing something? The article says Cumberbatch is voicing Smaug, and IMDB is saying the same except it lists voice of the Necromancer as well.
IMDB includes rumors as well as confirmed news. I doubt they would have the same person do both.
It’s not a big deal but was anyone else upset about how the hobbits were portrayed? In my imagination hobbits were not just scaled down humans. Everything else I thought they did reasonably well as far as Hollywood movies go except for that.
FWIW, in Tolkien’s own drawings they do look a bit like scaled-down humans. See here, here, here, here, here, and here. Admittedly, he always draws them from a fair distance away (presumably because he was better at landscapes and buildings than at people), so it’s hard to be sure what he had in mind.
To both K.V. (on ears) and Brad (on scaled-down humans) — just tracked this quote down from Tolkien’s Letters:
“I am afraid, if you will need drawings of hobbits in various attitudes, I must leave it in the hands of someone who can draw. … I picture a fairly human figure … fattish in the stomach, shortish in the leg. A round, jovial face; ears only slightly pointed and ‘elvish’; hair short and curling (brown).” (Letter to Houghton Mifflin circa March-April 1938; emphasis added)
You learn something new every day.
Thanks. Now I know better.
Looks almost exactly what I visualized hobbit, although those ears seem more pointy than I would have pictured. It’s hard to miss those ears, actually they are the first thing I saw, so on that note, I think they are too big/pointy.