What do you think of the Film Adaptations of LOTR and the Hobbit?

[paeng]

I started researching on the works after a student needed to use his trilogy for a senior thesis, and a few years before the films started coming out.

I found the articles (I've been trying to keep copies of online articles I read and used since the late 1990s, and cataloged them using DiskDB), and the one I was referring to isn't by but about Shippey. It's no longer available at TNR unless one subscribes, I think:

Bored of the Rings

J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century by Tom Shippey (Houghton Mifflin, 348 pp., $26) Click here to purchase the book.J.R.R. Tolkien's is indeed an extraordinary story, delightful in its improbability. Here was a quiet scholar, conservative, devout, nostalgic for a bygone rural way of life...

newrepublic.com

but someone shared the content here more than two decades ago:

Bored of the Rings

www.cheftalk.com

But finally it is what is left out of The Lord of the Rings that makes one wonder if this is really a book for adults. Tolkien invented his own mythological world, but it lacks the dignity and the sinew of a real mythology, for it is without religion and essentially without sex. Hobbits may have fur at the bottom of their legs, but they have seem to have no balls at the top; and that pretty much goes for the rest of Middle-earth, too. The women in The Lord of the Rings are few and pallid, while The Hobbit has no female characters at all: even the giant spiders are regarded by Bilbo as male (the narrative voice uses the unsexed pronoun "it"). The film of The Lord of the Rings seems to have tried to beef up the female quotient; but it was surely an uphill struggle. If one is to regard The Lord of the Rings as a book for adults, what disturbs is not so much the absence of women, perhaps explicable in an adventure story of this kind, as the absence of desire. In this work that presents itself as the representation of a whole world, there is hardly any awareness that we are sexual beings.

And that is not all that is missing. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic of conservative type, and he was sensitive to the charge that his Middle-earth was religionless. He replied that The Lord of the Rings was "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work." But that does not get around the difficulty: even if it can be shown that The Lord of the Rings is religious as a book--and I doubt whether even this is true in more than the superficial sense that it concerns a struggle of good against evil--the objection is that the people within the story have no religious beliefs or practices, and are thus unlike any real human society. Tolkien always insisted, and rightly, that his work was not an allegory, but the construction of a self-subsistent world with its own history. The trouble is that it is an emotionally impoverished world, in which the blood runs very thin.

The article also has references to Wagner and Tolkien's prose, which may be seen as both noble but also "gimcrack".

Some more:

Tolkien and the flight from modern life

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is the first part of the trilogy adapted from J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic. It concerns an imaginary world in which unlikely heroes undertake a quest against the powers of Sauron, the personification of evil and darkness, by destroying the ring...

www.wsws.org

All of The Lord of the Rings is an elegy for the past, suffused with longing for the return to a better time, a golden age from which history is moving ever further away. As the elf Legolas laments: “Alas for us all! And for all that walk the world in these after-days.” In every sense the fantasy is a dirge looking backwards from the afterdays, that is, from the time after mankind’s fall from grace.

Tolkien’s outlook was bound up with rejecting the possibility of the progress of civilisation. Attacking such conceptions, according to his children, he would firmly say: “Progress to what?”

Tolkien’s magic diminished

The Return of the King, the third movie in director Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, has been released worldwide and established new records at the box office. Very few of its audiences would be new to the saga—the two previous films having won many enthusiastic adherents...

www.wsws.org

Tolkien’s life-long work was to weave a vast tapestry of an imaginary world, of which The Lord of the Rings was only a part. His artistry was mediated through his academic training as an expert in ancient languages—including Middle English and Icelandic—and the tales of antiquity.

His entire imaginative project made up for a deficiency he felt was manifested in English tradition. In this sense he was seeking to consciously elaborate a complete history, to enable him to seed the past at will with a more satisfying alternative—in his opinion English society had gone wrong from the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066. And it was through the stalwart efforts of his main characters, the hobbits and their fellowship, that Tolkien spun his fantastic notions of regenerating the present by recourse to a mythical past (see “Tolkien and the flight from modern life”).

Tolkien: Man Behind the Myth

At odds with his age, he created another.

www.christianitytoday.com

The 1960s brought not only fame but cultural change, invading even the great bulwark of traditionalism, the Roman Catholic Church. At one Vatican II-inspired Mass, Tolkien found the innovations too much for him. Disappointed by changes in the Mass's language and the informality of the ritual, he rose from his seat, made his way laboriously to the aisle, made three low bows and stomped out.

Much to the conservative Tolkien's chagrin, in the mid- to late 1960s the drug and political Left especially embraced his mythology. Afraid that such readers might create a sort of "new paganism" around his legendarium, Tolkien spent much of the last decade of his life clarifying its theological and philosophical positions in the work that became The Silmarillion.

The Anti-Tolkien

Michael Moorcock once wrote, “I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I’d rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas”

www.newyorker.com

Not even Tolkien’s vast philological scholarship, his deep knowledge of mythology, and his world-building skills could impress what Moorcock and company saw as a troublesome infantilism inherent in Tolkien’s work. In a 1971 essay in New Worlds, the writer M. John Harrison acknowledges Tolkien’s position as the first and last word in fantastic fiction, but begs readers to look more closely, where they will see not the “beautiful chaos of reality,” but “stability and comfort and safe catharsis.” In 1978, Moorcock did a more thorough takedown in an essay called “Epic Pooh,” in which he compares Tolkien and his hobbits to A. A. Milne and his bear.

But the message was not getting through. In 1973, long before Tolkien’s characters would become internet memes and Lego figures, the British don died and left behind a pop culture landscape that was quickly being populated by elves, orcs, and hobbits. Tolkien could be found in songs, Harvard Lampoon parodies, and hippie slogans (“Frodo Lives!”). By the early nineteen-eighties, “The Hobbit” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy had spawned not only adaptations in the form of cartoons and animated motion pictures, but had established the dominant flavor of fantasy books, games, and films.

Why I hate ‘The Lord of the Rings’

It’s long, it’s boring and you could drive a Balrog through the plot holes. By Larry Terenzi

www.today.com

All action, no story movement. Where Fellowship was bogged down in exposition, “The Two Towers,” for all of its action and sense of momentum, likewise accomplishes little in the way of actual movement. Frodo and Sam begin the movie looking at the distant belching of Mount Doom – and that’s how they end it. In between, they do find Gollum, a CGI-character ironically infused with more soul than the live actors. He’s essentially a junkie who says the word “precious” way too often, yet amidst the movie’s chaos and circular wandering, he’s the only character to actually come up with a plan. Legolas, Gimli and Aragorn, meanwhile, kill Orcs at an ever faster rate. In the nadir of the series, Merry and Pippin, the Cheech and Chong of Middle Earth, hug a walking, verse-spouting tree in one of the most clock-stopping sequences put to film.

As if they’re not long enough, both movies follow the recent and so very greedy trend, see “Kill Bill” and the middle “Matrix” movie, of just ending – nearly in mid-sentence. How would you like this article to have ended three paragraphs ago? Don’t answer that. Yes, they’re segments of a whole but I didn’t put my satisfaction on the two-year installment plan. Each movie should offer at least a taste of closure, rather than be content with itself as a single frustrated act of an epic designed to suck 30 bucks from my billfold.

Finally, this piece from Alex Ross talks about not only one of the movies but its music composer, and in light of Wagner, and with that Tolkien and Wagner, and Tolkien's background:

The Ring and the Rings

Wagner vs. Tolkien.

www.newyorker.com

It is surely no accident that the notion of a Ring of Power surfaced in the late nineteenth century, when technologies of mass destruction were appearing on the horizon. Pre-modern storytellers had no frame of reference for such things. Power, for them, was not a baton that could be passed from one person to another; those with power were born with power, and those without, without. By Wagner’s time, it was clear that a marginal individual would soon be able to unleash terror with the flick of a wrist. Oscar Wilde issued a memorable prediction of the war of the future: “A chemist on each side will approach the frontier with a bottle.” Nor did the ring have to be understood only in terms of military science. Mass media now allowed for the worldwide destruction of an idea, a reputation, a belief system, a culture. In a hundred ways, men were forging things over which they had no control, and which ended up controlling them.

Tolkien began “The Lord of the Rings” in the wake of the First World War, whose carnage he experienced firsthand, and he finished it in the wake of the Second. In both wars, he witnessed the wedding of Teutonic mythology to German military might. He bemoaned how the Nazis had corrupted “that noble northern spirit.” You could see “The Lord of the Rings” as a kind of rescue operation, saving the Nordic myths from misuse—perhaps even saving Wagner from himself. Tolkien tried, it seems, to create a kinder, gentler “Ring,” a mythology without malice. The “world-redeeming deed,” in Wagner’s phrase, is done by the little hobbits, who have no territorial demands to make in Middle-earth and wish simply to resume their gardening. In the end, the elves give up their dominion, just as, in Wagner, the gods surrender theirs. Yet it is a peaceful transfer of power, not an apocalyptic one. The story ends not with the collapse of Valhalla but with the restoration of a wasted world.

 

[KGeo777]

Some of the FX dates now--the scene where Gandalf fights the Balrog looks kind of funny where he is flying through the air.
The Balrog scene was all I really cared about.

"You shall not pass!"

Is it considered sword and sorcery?
I don't find those movies to fit into that or Arthurian or dragon-knight stories.

I am just not a fan of LOTR.
I read the Hobbit--it was alright. Innocuous.

The movies are just too long-winded for me to want to check out again.
I am more interested in the FOTR than the rest of it.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

paeng:

Firstly, you could quote a hundred critics who think that Tolkien's writings were worthless and that his hobbits were emasculated, and that would still not address the principle question about which we are in disagreement, which was Tolkien's intentions in writing LOTR. In divining Tolkien's purpose (which there is absolutely no need to do, whatever scholastic background or ideas they may bring to the task, since he explains it clearly enough himself in his own letters as Peat has demonstrated), whatever opinions the people quoted in your post above may hold about the writings themselves is completely irrelevant to that question.

Secondly, if including sex is so essential to serious adult literature, I wonder why romance novels (which have plenty of sex) are in such disrepute in literary circles? (That's a rhetorical question, so no need to answer it. I think I already know.)

And thirdly (and this is an honest question), why were you studying The Lord of the Rings in a university class? Was it a course in children's literature? Why was a student studying the trilogy for a senior thesis? Was he studying children's literature? And if the answer in both cases is "no" how did you arrive at the opinion that The Lord of the Rings was intended as, and is regarded as, a story for children? What of the millions of adults across the face of our planet, and over the course of several generations, who have enjoyed and thought highly of the trilogy? Can you not conceive that they might be getting something out of the books that is not readily apparent to you? (There are plenty of highly regarded books that I don't like, and it sometimes occurs to me that maybe, just maybe, I have missed something.)

You and others you might name may think poorly of the books, and that is perfectly fine. You don't even have to have a reason, much less a reason we can all agree on. What I take issue with here is trying to validate that opinion (which is quite unnecessary in the first place, since a person is allowed to like or dislike a book simply because it doesn't speak to them in any meaningful way) by making statements about the author and his intentions which are patently not true. Doing so calls everything else that follows on those statements into doubt.

But I feel we have been talking in circles for a while now, and I think we could both find better things to do than debate each other when neither of us is likely to convince the other of a single thing. I know that I have better things to do, and so will no no longer be engaging with you. What you decide is up to you.

 

[Oligonicella]

The man stated that he wrote LOTR as an analogy for the British people of the Norse and Icelandic legends. As it's setting is a rather Ragnarokian journey quest, there's not much you can tack on movie-wise. The books had a lot of feathering the movies consolidated as it was.

As for Amazon... She stood there and ate a pyroclastic blast... jeez. Only a moron would write that. She was an elf, not Captain Marvel.

 

[The Big Peat]

I have to say that I find judging whether a book should be considered written for adults on whether its contents and themes are sufficiently adult for some people, and not the simple merits of "what did the author say/where is it sold in the book shop", to be a great deal more childish than not really writing about carnal desire.

Not to mention unpleasantly sneery and terribly dull in its constrictions.

 

[BAYLOR]

The man stated that he wrote LOTR as an analogy for the British people of the Norse and Icelandic legends. As it's setting is a rather Ragnarokian journey quest, there's not much you can tack on movie-wise. The books had a lot of feathering the movies consolidated as it was.

As for Amazon... She stood there and ate a pyroclastic blast... jeez. Only a moron would write that. She was a elf, not Captain Marvel.

You might find the anthology Tales Before Tolkien : The Roots of Modern Fantasy by Douglass Anderson to be of interest .

 

[Oligonicella]

Reading Tolkien's letters got me interested in Icelandic poetry. Very cool stuff and rather amazing at the detail considering it was kept orally so long. I had a short I wrote based around the attempted chess game swindle tale and turned that into a poem using the Icelandic cadence and rhyming scheme of one I liked. Rough going.

Baylor, thanks. Just ordered a copy on Amazon for $7.98 total. Don't bother me if the cover's torn. Thanks again.

Golden Bough if you don't have it.

 

[BAYLOR]

Reading Tolkien's letters got me interested in Icelandic poetry. Very cool stuff and rather amazing at the detail considering it was kept orally so long. I had a short I wrote based around the attempted chess game swindle tale and turned that into a poem using the Icelandic cadence and rhyming scheme of one I liked. Rough going.

Baylor, thanks. Just ordered a copy on Amazon for $7.98 total. Don't bother me if the cover's torn. Thanks again.

Golden Bough if you don't have it.

Thanks .

Book of the Three Dragons by Kenneth Morris

Votan and other Novels by John James

Eric Brighteyes by H Rider Haggard

I will leave it at that.

 

[paranoid marvin]

When you compare LOTR with similar epic fantasy stories written much later such as Game of Thrones or the Thomas Chronicle chronicles, it may superficially seem less adult orientated. But as mentioned already, just because it doesn't have the bad language, sex and graphic violence of those other stories I've mentioned, doesn't make it less adult in its symbolism or origins.

I'd quite happily encourage a child, especially a teenager, to try reading LOTR just like I'd encourage them to read Dickens, Austen, Bronte, Shakespeare and some poetry; but that doesn't make those authors childrens authors, just accessible to (some) younger readers.

I do wonder if a series like Game of Thrones would have even been allowed to make it on to the bookshelves in the 1950s without getting banned, and I suspect that even if it had, it would have been poorly received. But times change, and what would be seen as 'adult', appropriate or acceptable back then is different to today.

 

[Pyan]

I suspect that if Game of Thrones hadn't had the sex, violence and apparently random character deaths that it had, plus the good fortune to be taken up as a graphic TV series, we'd be talking about GRRM in the same breath as Michael Scott, Hugh Cook and John Norman.

 

[paeng]

paeng:

Firstly, you could quote a hundred critics who think that Tolkien's writings were worthless and that his hobbits were emasculated, and that would still not address the principle question about which we are in disagreement, which was Tolkien's intentions in writing LOTR. In divining Tolkien's purpose (which there is absolutely no need to do, whatever scholastic background or ideas they may bring to the task, since he explains it clearly enough himself in his own letters as Peat has demonstrated), whatever opinions the people quoted in your post above may hold about the writings themselves is completely irrelevant to that question.

Secondly, if including sex is so essential to serious adult literature, I wonder why romance novels (which have plenty of sex) are in such disrepute in literary circles? (That's a rhetorical question, so no need to answer it. I think I already know.)

And thirdly (and this is an honest question), why were you studying The Lord of the Rings in a university class? Was it a course in children's literature? Why was a student studying the trilogy for a senior thesis? Was he studying children's literature? And if the answer in both cases is "no" how did you arrive at the opinion that The Lord of the Rings was intended as, and is regarded as, a story for children? What of the millions of adults across the face of our planet, and over the course of several generations, who have enjoyed and thought highly of the trilogy? Can you not conceive that they might be getting something out of the books that is not readily apparent to you? (There are plenty of highly regarded books that I don't like, and it sometimes occurs to me that maybe, just maybe, I have missed something.)

You and others you might name may think poorly of the books, and that is perfectly fine. You don't even have to have a reason, much less a reason we can all agree on. What I take issue with here is trying to validate that opinion (which is quite unnecessary in the first place, since a person is allowed to like or dislike a book simply because it doesn't speak to them in any meaningful way) by making statements about the author and his intentions which are patently not true. Doing so calls everything else that follows on those statements into doubt.

But I feel we have been talking in circles for a while now, and I think we could both find better things to do than debate each other when neither of us is likely to convince the other of a single thing. I know that I have better things to do, and so will no no longer be engaging with you. What you decide is up to you.

I didn't quote a hundred critics, only around three.

They didn't argue that his writing is worthless; rather, he's not so much a professional fictionist as an academic who engaged in world-building.

The hobbits were not so much emasculated as meant to portray ideas in ways that children could understand.

They are all connected to Tolkien's intentions, which I think is to create another "England" in people's minds and to encourage children to appreciate medieval literature. That part was addressed at least twice in what I shared, but I'll give more details on that in the future.

Opinions given by these critics come from Tolkien's words and the content of his fiction.

Sex, in this case, doesn't refer to adoration, romance, or even the sexual act but to desire. I'll try to explain that in a subsequent post, and I think I can do it using Wagner in the future, which was mentioned in Ross' article. For now, I don't think that's something that children or even adolescents can understand, but they will in many ways as they grow older, and especially when they go to uni.

I wasn't studying LOTR in a university class; rather, one of my seniors wanted to use it for her thesis and asked me to act as adviser. I had to go over it again because the last time I read it I was in primary school. After that, I moved to Dostoyevsky in secondary school, and then the mighty Dante when I went to uni.

I think LOTR was no longer considered children's literature by the 1960s because that's when it became more popular worldwide, and gained because college students and young adults were talking about in the states. That was also mentioned in one of the articles, together with Tolkien's reaction.

I don't think poorly of LOTR; if any, I think it's supremely better, together with Roald Dahl's stories, for children compared to Harry Potter. But I still remember those articles about Tolkien--which I still can't find--where writers pointed out that Tolkien was first and foremost a medievalist, and that he intended to create this world of hobbits and elves to not only entertain children but to show them indirectly the beauty of European medieval literature, such that when they grew older they would find the inspiration to encounter the latter, including the Nibelungenleid, Beowulf, the Song of Roland, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and probably all the way to the Renaissance hybrids of Dante, Chaucer, and Boccaccio.

Most important for me is Tolkien's quixotic views of the world, as if he relishes a world like that which he created but is only appreciated in a world that runs contrary to what he desires. That reminds me of one time I gave this unusual reflection about one of the movies to a class of undergrads, i.e., when the film came out and they asked me about it in light of medieval works that we were studying for a Western lit class my (then) leftist/realpolitik views. I think it was about the attack on Gondor, but I can't give more details because I mentioned this two decades ago.

I think I said I would have attacked this way: let the orcs encircle the area and engage in siege tactics, blocking supply lines, and then use the Black Riders to engage in commando tactics using the tunnels. Meanwhile, use the dragons for aerial assault (burn those big trees) and use them to air-drop the Balrogs to engage in mayhem at the walls. And if the enemy was foolish enough to engage in forward assaults, meet them with phalanx and testudo formations, with a weak center and strong, hidden flanks to envelop those who advance and take down each group piecemeal.

Most important, don't terrorize the humans and others. Instead, show them that the future is Mordor, one of industrialization, mechanization, quantification, hierarchies, pecuniary emulation, and McDonaldization.

Why? Because that's our orc world.

 

[Pyan]

I feel we're drifting away from the OP's question:

What do you think of the Film Adaptations of LOTR and the Hobbit? Do like them or hate them and to either choice why?

If you want to discuss the psychological reasons for JRRT's story, the military strategy of Sauron or whatever, please feel free to either open a new thread on the subject, or have a look through the 600-odd threads in the Tolkien forum to see if it's already been covered.

​

 

[paeng]

In that case, I'm critical of the film adaptations because of issues with the source content, which I explained in my first post. But I also find the film adaptations notable because of reasons given in my second post. But I think Tolkien did not like things like media adaptations of his books for reasons given in my third post.

 

[paeng]

From Letter No. 131:

But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story-the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our 'air' (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be 'high', purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.

From

The Return of the King: Tolkien and the new medievalism

www.opendemocracy.net

By the time the second part of the saga, The Two Towers was released last year, the invasions had begun and the nascent 21st century had become eerily similar to Middle Earth. Now, The Return of the King opens around the world at the same time that global news media display images of a defeated enemy undergoing public, intimate, physical inspection as a symbol of his complete submission and degradation.

We are living in times when the public rhetoric is medieval. Politicians and pundits invoke the words good and evil casually, as if the age of reason never happened. They speak proudly of killing, bullet-ridden corpses are triumphantly paraded. And like in Lord of the Rings, we define evil by demographics. The bloodline, the colour of skin, the ethnic background or nationality makes someone immediately suspect.

Research reveals spiritual journey of Tolkien fans

Tolkien fans do not just watch the films and reread the books - they are on a spiritual journey and doing their best to forget the ending, says a study.

www.theguardian.com

They found devotees reread the books, but tried to convince themselves they were seeing the story for the first time (although not knowing one of the most drawn-out and self-indulgent endings in cinema history must be a plus in the case of Lord of the Rings).

...

Fans felt the movie was more than just an escape, but it was more important and enjoyable to those who work in jobs where they feel they have little control over their lives.

Tolkien and the machine

My grandfather was a carpenter, and I don’t think he ever developed much of a sense of trust in machines. I remember him laboring away at our home one summer, transforming our screened-in porch into a…

theconversation.com

The machine’s corrupting power is visible not only in warfare and military conquest, but also in everyday life. For the machine takes something human – the power to produce, which is both creative and life-giving – and transforms it into something dull and enervating. Hobbits like to make things and delight in what they produce – furniture, utensils, carts, simple crops, bread, cheeses, and perhaps above all, ale. But they produce such things for two simple reasons: because they are necessary and because they are a source of pleasure. Labor-saving devices among the hobbits are of the simplest variety, and they make use of their leisure for enjoyment, not to acquire still more.

Men, by contrast, can be duped into supposing that the power to produce is the power to dominate. And domination is possible not only by wielding weapons of war but also by so automating everyday life in the name of saving labor that we become alienated from the very work that defines our lives. Instead of making what we need to live and enjoy life, we simply purchase it; the more wealth we acquire, the more we can afford to purchase. Soon the craftsman at his bench is replaced by a factory full of assembly line laborers. Before long, the laborers are replaced by robots. The joy that comes from making is replaced by a dull ache to consume more.

Why JRR Tolkien’s son hated Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films

Christopher Tolkien was aghast at Jackson's 'action movie for young people' treatment of his father's books. Did he have a point?

www.telegraph.co.uk

That would certainly tally with Christopher Tolkien’s pronouncements when he headed the estate. “Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed by the absurdity of our time,” is how Christopher described the wave of Tolkien-mania unleashed by the Jackson films.

“The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has gone too far for me. Such commercialisation has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of this creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: turning my head away.”

From these and other points, I get this feeling that Tolkien liked trees and England as Avalon, depicted the antagonists in his books in light of industrialization, and generally disliked things like movies, especially adaptations of his works, with his son giving similar arguments.

Meanwhile, it seems that many fans saw the same views against industrialization but are helpless against the same.

With that, I might have to say that I like the movies because I come from a television culture, but like Tolkien and his son I think something's amiss.

 

[Ian Fortytwo]

Watching the films has put me off reading the books. Because the books are better than the films.

 

[paeng]

I get this feeling that Tolkien would have agreed:

Why J.R.R. Tolkien felt “a heartfelt loathing” towards Walt Disney and his movies

J.R.R. Tolkien thought Walt Disney "a cheat" and found his movies "disgusting." He was determined never to let Disney touch The Lord of the Rings. Why?

winteriscoming.net

Christopher Tolkien Trashes Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord Of The Rings,’ Says Films Lack “Beauty And Seriousness” Of The Books

Christopher Tolkien Trashes Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord Of The Rings,’ Says Films Lack “Beauty And Seriousness” Of The Books

www.indiewire.com

Another interesting point is that one reason might be found in the books themselves:

Tolkien’s Middle-Earth wasn't a place. It was a time in (English) history.

The fellowship's journey through Middle-Earth mirrors the modernization and industrialization of the English countryside.

bigthink.com

Tolkien Used This Lord of the Rings Villain as a Slam Against Industrialism

This The Lord of the Rings villain became Tolkien's stand-in for those that disregard nature and fail to see the ramifications of hurting Earth.

www.cbr.com