The Hobbit in 12 Minutes of the Day: Long before Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, or even the animated Rankin-Bass film, there was another official movie version of The Hobbit.
In 1966, film producer William Snyder’s rights to the story were about to expire and revert to the Tolkien estate. He assigned animator Gene Deitch to create a super-low budget version of the story that would fit on one 35 mmfilm reel, which held about 12 minutes.
Deitch has released his Hobbit, along with the story of the one-month ordeal it took to create it, on his blog. He writes:
Snyder played his ace: to fulfill just the letter of the contract – to deliver a “full-color film” of The Hobbit by June 30th. All he had to do was to order me to destroy my own screenplay – all my previous year’s work, and hoke up a super-condensed scenario on the order of a movie preview, (but still tell the entire basic story from beginning to end), and all within 12 minutes running time – one 35mm reel of film. Cheap. I had to get the artwork done, record voice and music, shoot it, edit it, and get it to a New York projection room on or before June 30th, 1966! I should have told him to shove it, but I was basically his slave at the time. It suddenly became an insane challenge.
Deitch met that insane challenge, and the results are far less terrible than the one-month deadline would suggest.
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