Last night we played a massive show for my birthday, good times were perpetrated, feelings were felt. We came home, loaded in, left everything in a massive pile next to the door because band practice kicks off in 40 hours, and as is our wont, settled down at around 1am with our comfortable cat on our comfortable couch with some comfort-food television and some comfort food before retiring. My choice, thrown in while Kristen wasn’t looking, was the 1977 animated version of The Hobbit by Rankin/Bass.
My Uncle George may or may not be proud of this particular influence on my Life, but he introduced me to fantasy with this movie. My brother and I would go to family gatherings but I don’t know that we were always that good at interacting. In hindsight I’m wondering if it was just screentime to keep us from being underfoot, but at the time, hunkering into my uncle’s basement bedroom, with that strange dark shelf on the far well that held a dimly-remembered ceramic head, the lights went down and the tiny television came up and he showed us The Hobbit and it was like it was OUR SECRET. Recorded off the television (Uncle George was an early adopter of the VCR), commercials carefully clipped out, he introduced my brother and I to a whole other UNIVERSE down in that Hyattsville basement.
The songs, the art, the sense of adventure and travel and horror, clearly-visualized darkness, the scratchy linework and rich layering of shades in the backgrounds, the strange jerkiness of the foreground but the beautiful textures of the background – this strange TV special probably defined my aesthetic as an artist more than I knew. Maybe it engendered my wanderlust and affection for poor editing as well? It definitely left a mark.
The animation studio eventually evolved into Studio Ghibli, and later on the Ralph Bakshi version of the Fellowship of the Ring redefined my concept of … if not the BEST animation than at least the COOLEST animation… but for a long time the beauty of the Hobbit was everything I aspired to as an artist, and the story told was my gateway first into fantasy reading and then later science fiction. It was incredibly formative and rediscovering it last night was perfect.
Over the past couple of weeks the above pattern has oft been repeated with Disney movies (thank you Heather’s Disney+ : this ain’t illegal, we family) and we’ve thrown on Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and (my favourite) Robin Hood in our post-gig hazes, watching the aesthetic evolve, watching the animation of characters grow smoother, more beautiful, watching the harsh strangeness of the animators’ earlier German Impressionistic influences slowly soften – and so switching studios was a very interesting shift. Line work and texture… and suddenly different voices.
No more cutesy Disney singing voices, high fluting sopranos. No whistling, no softly lisping humourous Disney drunks or sped-up mouse voices.
Growls and gravel and passionate : I don’t think the voice cast for the Hobbit could be improved upon. The smirking threat of Smaug, the wisdom of John Huston’s wry Gandalf, the mad and terrifying inhumanity of Theodore’s Gollum and – of course – the beautiful optimism of Orson Bean’s Bilbo. He was a non-hero as heroes go, with unfortunate hair choices, but you could feel his Love of comfort being slowly supplanted by his quietly-growing Love of adventure in the vocal delivery. I relate to HIS heroes’ journey perhaps more than any other… because at the end of the gig, all he wants is a comfortable couch with some comfort-food books with some comfort food before retiring… and even though it was always off-camera, I’m sure he had a comfortable cat.
Orson Bean will forever be my Bilbo.
Unbeknownst to me, as we took the stage for our third set, Orson Bean was struck and killed by a car last night in LA. Tis an ignoble way to begin his Greatest Adventure.
Rest in peace.
