I think The Hobbit was an excellent work in both medium the film and the book(if I don’t compare The Hobbit film to The Lord of the Ring film). However, I found my experience watching and reading distinctively different. While imageries of the film highly satisfied the eye wonder and the tone of sounds and music evoked an epic mood, the book contained many subtle elements that film languages can’t fully convey.
The book brought me a kind of immersion that is unique to all other mediums. What I noticed strongly as I was reading The Hobbit was the presence of Tolkien’s ethereal self. It was as if a mysterious kindness and wisdom of this invisible narrator always surrounded me as I immersed into the adventure. The film did gave me a heartwarming feeling in some parts but it did not occupy the world surrounding me like the novel did. I think it has to do with the way we perceive different mediums. Film watching experience was highly concentrated on what we see and hear, thus, the surrounding environment associate with the overall experience with the medium and embed in our mind. For example, nowadays when I think of my childhood favorite shows I always remember them along with place and time I watched them. Reading experiences were similar to some degrees but in comparison to films, books has a stronger ability to make us ignore the surrounding environment and make us simulate the world in our mind.
Books have an ability to make every elements seems much more intendedly important. Mountains and treasures for example contain much more spiritual significance as they are landmarks of the world and worldly conflicts. Aspects of natures as big as seasons to mundane things like silence become something so lively and deeply interconnected to life. Nature such as Summer has been metaphorically compare to a person kindness, the wilderness felt truly wild, dance and music has truly become representative of culture, riddle has become a truly sacred ritual.
Acting, CGI and music were well made in the film but Middle Earth in the novel felt much more vast and colorful to me. I believe that it is because written words doesn’t only suggest the appearance of subjects but also absence of things surrounding it. Every descriptions of things in the novel also wordlessly described the world around it. This also apply to not only space but time. While several establishing shots were used to suggest a long journey in the film, sentences that describe time lapse in the book actually made it felt like significantly long time has passed because there’s more element of unknown that piled up to imagine.
There was an interesting case of a medium that unintentionally allow us to fill our imagination in the absence of the world surrounding the subject and it was dialogues from translated MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game). As a player, the idea of the world must be achieve from observing the world by traveling through it and connect it with dialogues from non-player characters. Most of the time, translated dialogue would be characters expressing their thoughts and feeling in broken sentences. That make most of the element in the Fantasy game world a fragments of informations and that successfully evoke players imagination to make connections and fill the voids.
For me it was the other way around. I originally watched the movies before I read the books and that might be the problem. With the book, I think it was the POV that it was written in that kept me from fully immersing myself in it. While certain details in the book were sharp, there was other stuff that I almost skimmed over cause I just couldn't get into it. Not to say I didn't enjoy the book, but I felt much more involved with the movie.
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