Once again I am forced to admit amusement at people who are hopping mad that a movie wasn’t 100% faithful to a book and wasn’t made to their exacting specifications.
And I am forced to explain that not being 100% faithful is really just fine to a point, so long as the movie is great. It wasn’t, and I agree with Knorf’s objections as to why this was the case.
The basic issue is that the Hobbit was expressly written as a children’s book, and LoTR was expressly not written as a children’s book - despite the fact that LoTR follows as a sequel to the Hobbit.
This means that they have very different tones.
Not to defend Jackson at all, but the fact that the movie trilogies have different tones is sorta inevitable.
Just to be clear: I do NOT, ever, expect a movie to be “faithful” to a book. Movies are movies, that we see and hear. Books are words that we read. Books can tell us a character’s inner feelings, but movies can’t. Movies can show us details (we can see the whole room) that a book can’t possible describe. There’s no way that a movie can reproduce a book, and I never expect it to.
My problem with THE HOBBIT movie is that it’s boring and repetitive, not that it does things different from the book.
I agree with that, and would add that often where the first Hobbit movie (the only one I’ve seen yet) departed from the book, it was not an improvement.
Not fans of chase scenes, I take it. 
But yeah, agreed, Sadly.
But…but, they’re Rhosgobel rabbits!
You know, I felt the exact opposite way. Rabbit sleighs are very much OK for the Nature Wizard of the bunch in a fantasy universe ; and he is an Istari so special perks and small wonders are to be expected. Gandalf gets giant eagles as his Deus Ex, Radagast has giant bunnies, that’s fine.
OTOH, he doesn’t just have bird shit in his beard, the right side of his face looks like he dipped it in a vat of yoghurt. I mean, come on. A speck of bird shit would have been fine (again, ermit of the woods, eats mushrooms, doesn’t do the social thing on a regular basis… standards slip), but an entire bowl of bowel custard ?
Although I still maintain the entire party would have done better to simply hang Bombur at the start. 
Tolkien himself explains that Dwarves, though tough, enduring and capable fighters, don’t have the same penchant for heroism as Men:
Missed edit window but a fuller quote:
I would have been annoyed if the rabbits had turned up in LOTR. But The Hobbit is lighter fare and the text already includes two species of talking birds (three if one doesn’t split hairs about the thrush), talking spiders, and Beorn’s animal butlers. Alongside that company, the bunny sled doesn’t bother me.