This Is The 'Lord Of The Rings' Adaptation I've Always Wanted

The next adaptation of Tolkien's work should leave the modern world behind.

This short animated Lord Of The Rings film, which was published earlier this year, is mostly just a trailer for a potential new animated series based on Tolkien’s classic fantasy trilogy.

I love it. It’s not exactly how I’d do it if I were an animator or an artist. I’d probably stick to something a bit more pastoral and a little less anime, less bloody and action-packed (and I’d definitely use different music) but I love the spirit of this animated piece. It makes me think about how I’d craft my own adaptation of Tolkien’s work. First and foremost, I’d want to capture the essence of what he was setting out to do with is books—which means keeping the story as close as possible to the original source material, but translating that from the page to the screen.

If I were a billionaire like Jeff Bezos, I’d hire some very talented artists and some very talented writers and I’d take a piece of art like this one—

—and use it as a springboard for a near word-for-word adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings. Not live-action. Not a movie. A simple yet beautiful animated adaptation with the best actors I could find, the best composers and the best writers and artists. Rather than go big, this would be a project devoted to quality and detail, and to capturing the themes and world that Tolkien laid out in his decades-long work on Middle-earth. (Dwarves would not have Scottish accents, sorry).

A slow, sometimes boring, song-filled animated mini-series that spans The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King. It would feel more like a BBC series than a Hollywood blockbuster. A great deal of time would be spent on Hobbits and their cozy customs. Since it wouldn’t be narrated like the audio books, and visuals tend to be quicker than text, the 54-or-so hour audiobooks of the trilogy would be cut in half (or close enough) to about 24 hours. 8-or-so hours per novel, cut into 8-or-so animated episodes.

It would not be flashy. The focus would not be on the battles or the magic, but on the friendships and the forests. My adaptation would spend an inordinate amount of time in the Old Forest, simply driving home how oppressive those resentful trees were, how ominous it seemed to our heroes. We would spend time with Tom Bombadil and Goldberry. Every song Tolkien penned would be sung, accompanied by lutes and harps. Dialogue would be as close to word-for-word as humanly possible.

And we’d sit in the Shire for a good long while, planning Bilbo’s party, smoking our pipes and watching the grass grow, wiggling our hairy toes in a calm summer breeze.

I write all of this not only as a reaction to Amazon’s The Rings Of Power, which I wanted so badly to love, but as something I’ve always wanted since I first watched the 1978 Ralph Bakshi animated version of The Lord Of The Rings (which was only a half-finished project). But back in the day, fantasy stuff was often cheap and bad and a far cry from what we envisioned as readers. Then, as CGI got better and cheaper, new doors opened. Peter Jackson’s films were imperfect, sure, but wonderful in many ways. If nothing else, Rings and later Game Of Thrones made fantasy a serious genre worthy of big investment (and eventually the $1 billion that Amazon is spending on Rings . . . at least to start). But somewhere in-between “shitty and cheap” and “big budget AAA” a piece of the puzzle was skipped over: Quality storytelling.

I don’t want crappy, low-budget fantasy but gorgeous, big-budget fantasy with shitty scripts isn’t much better. So give me the BBC adaptation of Lord of the Rings, won’t you? And skip live-action and make it animated and make the art beautiful and subtle and nothing whatsoever like the Jackson interpretation that Rings has been aping. Here is Tolkien’s own painting of Sauron:

And here is an image of John Howe’s Gandalf (it’s out of print but I just purchased one and had it imported from England, and I’ll post pictures of it soon):

Here’s Alan Lee’s Minis Tirith:

Here’s Tolkien’s own Hobbit illustrations of Smaug and the river-barrels:

And here is Tolkien’s Shire:

Please, this is what I want. I want these images made real, brought to life in animated perfection, with a story true to Tolkien’s words, rich with detail and thematic thrum, humming with elven songs and the swish of steel and the smoke of pipe-weed. Is this too much to ask?