Taurinor wrote:I personally found the way The Hobbit movies were done very disrespectful to the Professor's work. Not so much on Weta's end of it ...
I think the design of a lot of the characters in "The Hobbit" films were disrespectful to Tolkien's work, but I also think that a lot of them were what Jackson inherited from Guillermo del Toro. I enjoy del Toro's films, but I think the Hobbit films would have been even worse had he completed the project.
However, Jackson's not off the hook- I know that he instructed designers to use medical texts showing diseased testicles as the basis for the Goblin King.
I don't know who created the design for and wrote the scenes for Radagast, but they took Tolkien's St. Francis of Assizi and turned him into a bag-lady stoner with bird guano in his beard.
Del Toro did the juvenile stuff like the hatchet in the forehead, and things like Oin using a hearing horn (oyen means 'they listen' in Spanish- he thought it was a cute play on words, and all it was was a set up for jokes about his disability).
Beorn was completely miscast and conceptualized. He shouldn't have looked like Sonic the Hedgehog. A stocky, naturally hirsute actor should have been cast, not a wiry guy.
Tolkien may be fairly deemed to have had some racist descriptions in the books (slant-eyed Southrons, etc.), but Jackson really does suffer from lookism. The evil Dunlanders, Grima, and later the Mayor of Laketown and JarJar, er, Alfrid all have dark hard and crooked, scummy teeth and were depicted as kind of dirty and greasy.