Thank you.
So Rank-Bass, you suck. You ALMOST cost me the reading of a fantastic book.
I just remember my mother telling me that something called “The Hobbit” was on, so I started to watch it and was so freaking BORED.
As for Gremlin elves, maybe it was the RB, again- it was on Cartoon Network earlier this year. Were they showing the Rankin-Bass version?
Eowyn looks as if she’s about to give birth any minute. Is Santa-er, Theoden aware?
Ah. That does seem to account for both sets of memories. Thank you!
Not only is she pregnant, she looks like she is wearing a wedding band! I wonder if Faramir knew that he was her second husband.For anyone who wants to try and hunt up illustrations, there is a gallery of LOTR artists’ work at
http://fan.theonering.net/middleearthtours/alexander.html
It starts with Rob Alexander; scroll down to the bottom for links to other artists including John Howe, Alan Lee, and Ted Nasmith.
I prefer the live actor hobbits, primarily because they’re so darned cute, but also because I do feel as if they really are little adults–very young, perhaps, but grown-up. In Bashki’s version, most of the secondary hobbits are lumps (I’d managed to blank out my memories of Bilbo until I watched parts of the film again last night); of the main hobbits, Frodo, Merry, and Pippin are cute enough, but I can never entirely shake the idea that they are little boys. There are scenes that aren’t so odd if you think of Frodo being about 10 years old, but kind of creepy when you realize he’s supposed to be past 50. The last time a discussion of this film came up, I mentioned his play-fighting with Aragorn in Lothlorien as an example.
Both Alan Lee and John Howe were consultants on the PJ movies, and it shows. Lots of the stylistic elements are based on their work, so I’d look at those two first, and see if there’s a painting that resembles that scene. They’ve both (Lee esp., IIRC) been at it for years, but I’m not sure if either of them predate the Bakshi version.
And Bakshi is an egomaniacal arse who’s not fit to kiss Peter Jackson’s hairy feet!
Here We Go
The piece called the Black Rider, with closeups - fits the bill for the scene, but I’ve no idea when it was painted.
In other news, Bakshi still an arse
I found Black Rider by Howe right after I made my first post. I couldn’t find a definitive date, but some quotes I found from Howe make it sound like he did it after the Bakshi version. He said it was original though and the similarities were coincidental or subconscious. The thing is, I’m still not sure if this is the one that was in my head. I seemed to remember one with the full shape of the horse and rider. It was a black and white book illustration. It’s been enough years now though that I could easily be misremembering.
The Black Rider, by John Howe: 1985. According to Howe, it was inspired directly by the scene in Bakshi’s version.
John Howe states that the background for the image was taken directly from a real life photograph of a hiking trail. Although he admits that his inspiration had to come from the Bakshi version, he also says this:
“And so it was actually an unconscious redrawing of the scene from the Bakshi film. And Peter, I think, liked that painting and there it is on the screen in this film.”
I retract the use of the word coincidental which is an overstatement. However, Howe hedges the Bakshi influence with the words subconscious and unconscious in the places that I see him mention it.
The Art of the Lord of the Rings books mentioned earlier also show a lot more of Howe’s and Lee’s influence on the film. Most all of the grand set-pieces (Rivendell, Lothlorien, Minas Tirith, Grey Havens, etc.) and Gandalf are directly from Lee, for instance, and the armor was heavily-influenced by Howe.