I actually liked this one more than I assumed from the few things I had seen about it before. Seeing it independent of the Jackson Lord of the Rings movies: First off, being adapted from the books, the story and characters are classic and quite nice. Of course, considering they put two of three LotR book into just about two hours, there's a lot of the story's content missing. But I think the movies does a quite good job, considering that limitation, to show the big, most important parts. The characters look, considering the age of the movie, quite nice, the voice actors do a good job, and several of the drawn backgrounds look really nice. The few calm scenes feel nice as well. The usage of rotoscoped live-action in between looks interesting, certainly an interesting stylistic choice, I personally am not a big fan of the mix of it, though. Especially in the few scenes where drawn and live-action characters are shown together it feels a little uncanny. It's not something that's really bad, though, I personally would just have preferred to stick to the drawn models. Some of the character's movement feels a bit "acted over the top", but even that is kinda entertaining. On the same hand it sadly doesn't offer any really moving or "epic" speeches or emotions, but still, the voice actors do a nice job. So, overall, I think it's not a bad adaption of the two books, again, under the limitation of only having two hours. - Now, of course, in comparison, the Jackson movies are more impressive in every way and I'd certainly go with them. But given time, money and age limitations, this one does a nice job. And it's certainly visible how Jackson was partially inspired by this, and comparing individual scenes, it's nice to see how similar some of them are handled. This movie shows its age, but it's certainly not a bad one. I would've liked to see the third book being adapted like this as well. Sam's still the best buddy!
