Guillermo del Toro Will Direct "The Hobbit"

jagermeister101 tips us to news that Peter Jackson and the Lord of the Rings production team have officially selected Guillermo del Toro to direct the upcoming Hobbit film and its sequel. del Toro's resume includes films such as Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy, and Blade 2. This confirms rumors which began after the controversy between Jackson and New Line Cinemas was resolved last year.

Re:What's the draw?

[Psychotria]

I actually agree with the OP... I think. I wouldn't have used the same words, but each to their own. I think there are many many fantasy books out there that easily surpass LOTR. I find the LOTR characters "shallow" and undeveloped. I understand that LOTR is immensely popular--I just found the books bordering on boring (which is a shame, I really wanted to like them).

Re:What's the draw?

[CannonballHead]

Second rate?

The Hobbit is more of a child's book, granted (LOTR was originally going to be a sequel to The Hobbit but turned out to be longer, deeper, and "darker"), but Tolkien is not second-rate. And yes, it's Tolkien. If you can't spell his name correctly, I question your ability to criticize his work.

Tolkien may not have been the best story teller, though I would hold that he is excellent; what draws me to his works is the extreme depth and development. It is like a contemporary rock song compared to a Beethoven symphony. The rock song may sound really cool, but Beethoven's symphony is far deeper and far more developed that a surface-shiny composition. IMO, Harry Potter is actually more surface-shiny. Tolkien had the mythical history of Middle-Earth more or less figured out by the time LOTR was published to the extent that some of the languages are fully functional (Quenya and Sindarin especially).

There is nothing second rate about Tolkien, except perhaps to a world of small attention spans and desire for quick (and cheap) thrills...

Re:Phew

[macshit]

Absolutely... Guillermo del Toro is an excellent director, and Pan's Labyrinth made it very clear he knows how to do fantasy justice (Pan's Labyrinth was one of the best fantasy pictures in a long time).

I think del Toro is arguably a better director than for the Hobbit than Peter Jackson actually -- Jackson sort of had the "epic scope" thing of the LotR down pretty well, but the Hobbit is smaller, more intimate, and more whimsical story, and could do with del Toro's deft touch.

I had sort of given up hope for the Hobbit with all the crap going on, but now I'm psyched!

Re:What's the draw?

[Anonymous Coward]

Arguably, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series is far better. Albeit a different kind of fantasy, they were written around the same time and are (again, arguably) a far superior piece of writing.

Re:What's the draw?

[LarsWestergren]

If it's anything like Pan's Labyrinth, it'll be worth watching -- del Toro isn't bad.

Seconded... I can also recommend Espinazo del Diablo (the Devil's Backbone) [imdb.com]. Don't read about the plot beforehand, that will spoil too much. Just watch it.

... but can he do "delightful"?

[Selanit]

I was very impressed with his work on Pan's Labyrinth, too.

I do have one reservation, though. Del Toro is primarily known as a director of horror films. The vast majority of his work is pretty seriously dark and violent. There are definitely some dark moments and some scary/violent scenes in The Hobbit (such as: the troll attack, riddles in the dark with Gollum, spiders in Mirkwood, and of course the Battle of Five Armies). But there are also a lot of light, delightful scenes (such as: songs in Rivendell, lunch with Beorn, seeing butterflies above Mirkwood, the kindly reception at Lake Town, and so on).

I may be going out on a limb here, but the overall tone of the book slants more towards "delightful" than "scary". Del Toro has amply demonstrated that he can do "scary". But can he do "delightful" just as well? If he can, we're in for a treat. If not, well, who knows what it'll be like? I'll definitely be interested to see what he comes up with; I just hope he does justice to the pleasant stuff as much as the unpleasant stuff.

Re:Sequel?

[EdIII]

Don't feel bad about reading the article. There is NO sequel to the Hobbit, well not really. Tolkien never published a story dealing with the 60 years between the end of the Hobbit and the beginning of Frodo's journey in the Fellowship of the Ring.

I read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings twice before I was eleven years old, and THAT was the unedited edition I received from my mother from an original printing when it was first released. I believe it was the best fantasy ever written in the English language and I have read quite a lot of Tolkien.

Anyways, there might be some Fanboy come out to correct me, but I am not aware of any actual publishings by Tolkien regarding that time period. He had written quite a lot that was never published, and his son did eventually collect quite a bit of it and then publish it later on as The Unfinished Tales, but Tolkien himself never published it or even finished it to my knowledge.

I have The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien by Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien and upon a quick glance, there is a letter from Tolkien to Stanley Unwin of Allen & Unwin regarding his work on the sequel. It was written on the 19th of December 1939 and here is an excerpt:

May I turn now to The Hobbit and kindred affairs. I have never quite ceased work on the sequel. It has reached Chapter XVI. I fear it is growing to large. I am not at all sure that it will please quite the same audience (except in so far as that has grown up too). Will there be any chance of publication, if I can get it done before the Spring? If you would like to try it on anyone as a serial I am willing to send in chapters. But I have only one fair copy. I have had to go back and revise early chapters as the plot and plan took firmer shape and so nothing has yet been sufficiently definitive to type.

Now I had always thought he referring to the Lord of the Rings, but he apparently attempted to publish the Silmarillion after the Hobbit and was rejected. If any parts of this story are to come from Tolkien's own hand, it is not going to be much, probably pretty raw, and not necessarily suitable for a movie.

If anybody is really interested, I think it would have to come from The Quest of Erebor which is included in the Unfinished Tales and possibly from certain appendices in The Lord of the Rings.

Re:What's the draw?

[Ihmhi]

I dispute the "created a whole genre" stuff. You're saying absolutely no one wrote a book about dragons, elves, and midgets before 1945?

That stuff has been around for over a thousand years as far as popular stories go (The Odyssey, for one). Tolkien just popularized it with the modern public (at the time).

Created a genre, no. Popularized a genre, yes.

This is grave news indeed

[comradeeroid]

Because it will mean that del Toro's attention will once again be distracted from what he was born to do. Namely bringing At the Mountains of Madness to the big screen.

Re:Not sure about this

[Tjebbe]

Which is actually why I like the notion of del Toro directing it. He has enough style of his own to make the chance big enough that he will not simply copy the Lord of the Rings.

If I understood correctly, both the Hobbit movie and its sequel will be based on the book; they've split up the story in two parts. My guess would be one part 'There', and one 'and back again' ;)

By the way, i've kind of always liked the Hobbit better as a book than the LOTR trilogy.

Re:Phew

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been drinking tonight and it shows, but I will agree del Toro is superior in directing and even a LORT fan will agree. Jackson knows his role as a producer and no one has vision like he does. The worst part of LORT and King Kong were the cheesy shots (in lotr where pippen grabs the eye of Sauron) or the awkward native shots in Kong. Del Toro is obviously the better director and any one that has watched the other disks in LOTR will know that Jackson can handle the the scope of big pictures. The Hobbit is an extremely simple story that can be interpreted in a very complex manner. Dividing the story into two parts may be over the top, but money over-rides logic. In the end, I am very happy to put one thought together tonight, but ultimately the fans will be the judges. We won't let it be crap and I hope Jackson gets WETA involved and I can sleep easy tonight. Make fun of my comments so I have something to wake up to. Goodnight all!

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

I think that may have been the third one. Blade II was the first of that series that I saw, and IMO probably the best. Hellboy didn't have much of a story, but the atmosphere was pretty good. Pan's Labyrinth and The Orphanage are both good slighty fantasy-ish films - I can't wait to see how the Hobbit turns out with this guy at the helm :)

Re:What's the draw?

[somersault]

Pan's labyrinth isn't about those characters (and btw I found the guy with eyes in his hands extremely creepy even though I'm not usually bothered by monsters in movies), the plot goes far beyond that. I don't even remember Hellboy having much going on in it, but Pan's Labyrinth is very unique and memorable (though The Orphanage is quite similar to it in some ways). Perhaps you spent too much time watching the puppets/CGI effects and not enough time reading the subtitles? ;)

Re:What's the draw?

[lena_10326]

I find the LOTR characters "shallow" and undeveloped.

That wasn't the goal of LOTR. It was an epic. Epics (and odyssey's) are usually shallow on character development, but big in scope. That's the nature of novel writing because it's a trade-off between close up character stories, which tend to be narrowly focused time-wise, and large scale fantasy universes spanning decades in novel time. You can't have both and still have a relatively small number of volumes. The Harry Potter series are weak on character development, but no one complains about that.

Re:He'll do a good job

[rlobue]

Completely agree. Pan's Labyrinth was one of the best fantasy films I've ever seen. I thought Lord of the Rings lacked intimacy and I think del Toro will bring some of that back to the Hobbit.

Re:What's the draw?

[Hemogoblin]

That's arguable; I've found the Hobbit is better than LotR in certain ways. For example, the fact that it's a shorter, more contained story helps keep my attention and provide closure. Compare this to the Two Towers, which doesn't really feel like it's going anywhere for a good 3/4 of the book.

Re:... but can he do "delightful"?

[Rob T Firefly]

Pan's Labyrinth had its measured doses of "delightful" in between the generous helpings of "dude, that's pretty f'd up right there." Just based on those I have high hopes for his Hobbit.

Re:What's the draw?

[ProppaT]

This is highly debatable. I've always felt that Tolkien was a master story teller but a second rate writer. His writing style drives me up the wall and half way makes me wonder how these books became popular at all. The Hobbit is much more straightforward prose-wise (and story-wise) and is an immeasurably better read than most of his other work. It's also why I've always found his contemporary, C.S. Lewis, a much better author. C.S. Lewis can say more in a sentence than most people can in a paragraph.

Re:Not sure about this

[onemorechip]

Well, I disagree. The light tone of the Hobbit is deceptive, just like the early chapters of LotR. There's a heavier story line deserving of a serious film treatment. Otherwise, you might end up with this [wikipedia.org].