POLL: Concerning Hobbits

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In the Lord Of The Rings Movies how tall do you perceive the hobbits to be?

Poll Information
This poll contains 1 question(s). 38 user(s) have voted.

Poll Results: Concerning Hobbits (38 votes.)

Concerning Hobbits - Perceived height in the LOTR movies? (Choose 1)
* 2 foot (60 cm) - 0% (0)
* 3 foot (90 cm) - 32% (12)
* 4 foot (120cm) - 45% (17)
* 4 foot 6 inches (140cm) - 13% (5)
* 5 foot (150cm) - 11% (4)
* 5 foot six inches (170cm) - 0% (0)

 

I think they are about 4 foot tall, maybe a bit less. Look at Pippen and Merry when the riders are attacking the Orcs. They are a lot shorter than everyone, and again, it shows them running under the horses. You have to be pretty short to do that.

 

Whoa!

Eerie. I'm right in the middle of converting mp3's for my Rio, and sure enough, LotR is in the mix. Track #2, Concerning Hobbits. That track is one of my favorites on there, along with the nominal IwD/HoW and Time Machine.

Anyways, I've always thought of them as sub-5 foot. Like 4.5feet or so. Basically a Tattoo (Boss! The plane! The plane!), except with all their features in proportion. Other than their large, and bairy (bare/hairy; bairy) feet.

There was some camera lens-work on that movie, you know. They kept real close to Gandalf, and made all the hobbits feet larger with latex wrap-arounds. I think the movie did a fairly good with their size as I imagined it. Vitto Cornelius is the only one that kind of looks strange, but that's only at the very start of the movie, when he's 60 years younger.

 

For me, the films seem to show them as being about half the height of most humans in the films, whaich to me makes them about 3 feet tall at the most I guess.

 

My selection wasn't on there...3 feet, 3 inches. Maybe 4 inches.

 

Not from the movie

from the prologue of Lord of the Rings i am possessing now. (and the title of the prologue is, too, concerning hobbits.)

 

Actually, I have to ask: Why does everyone keep saying that Hobbits have large feet? Nowhere does Tolkien say that!

 

Who says they have large feet?
*looks around*
They have hairy feet, yes. But large feet?

 

3 feet, but I'm influenced by the books.

 

Quite a few people, actually. :/

 

In the movie I actually just get the impression that the hobbits are pretty short humans. 4-5 feet tall. It is only in the instances when they really make an effort to show them off as hobbit size that they look smaller but those instances tend to look pretty odd, like the one when they run under the horse, something just felt wrong in that scene.
Most of the time they really dont come off as all that short and small. I just dont really think about it when looking at the movie, hobbit or human doesnt really matter.

 

In the Two Towers, extended edition, there is an added scene where Merry and Pippin are comparing their heights. Merry claims to be 3 feet, 6 inches, whereas Pippin claims to be 3 feet 7 inches.

 

Hobbits 'do' have large feet in proportion to their size. However they aren't 'huge'.

They're just little plump people, 3' average...

 

lol, I always considered them around 4' high, give or take a few inches.

and the last option is taller than me!

 

He does say that one specific Hobbit has large feet (one of the Proudfoot family) but apart from that as far as I am aware they are always just referred to as having natural leathery soles and thick and curly brown hair.

 

As far as how tall they are, I read an article this morning - actually a review of RotK aimed at those who may not know too much about Tolkien - which described dwarves as about a metre tall, which I think is a bit under 3 feet, and Hobbits as half their height.

 

Well, if you have the Extended Edition of The Two Towers, Merry and Pippen actually talk about how tall they are (while Pip is drinking the Entdraught, no less!).

I think they look to be between 3.5 and 4 feet tall. They look smaller in the far shots when PJ had to use the midget doubles.

 

Klorox, midget is an offensive term. Person of short stature or little person are the proper ways to describe the smaller scale doubles .

I posted this poll because I wanted to know;
For what percentage of movie viewers did the camera height tricks not work.

There are many reasons why the illusion may fail to work, eg.:

1. You have seen the actors who played the hobbits before in other movies.

2. From the smallest detail such as the width of a human hair, or the leaves on a tree, your brain automatically scales the face and body of the actor.

3. As Klorox mentioned, the height of the actors appears to change from scene to scene.


17%, (or 1 in 6) of the people polled so far perceived the hobbit's height to be greater than 4'6", which means for them the illusion did not work.

For me personally, every time the actors height was changed, Peter Jackson might as well have wandered in front of the camera in his 21st-century clothes and have waved, because the effect would have been the same. I was concious that I was watching a special effect, not a special movie.

I sympathize with the delema Peter Jackson must have faced.

Using short actors with Disproportionate Dwarfism, as was done in Willow, would have been wrong because they did not resemble Tolkien's Hobbits in the slightest.

Male actors with Proportionate Dwarfism (similar to Praphaphorn Chansantor who was a scale double in LOTR and a lead in Sean Astin's 'The Long and the Short of it') could have been given one of the four important hobbit roles in the movie, but;

Artifical Growth Homone has been readily available in the USA and Western Europe since 1985. This would make it difficult to recruit Frodo from the 15000-25000 people in the USA which have (treated) Growth Hormome Defficiency (Proportionate Dwarfism).

Frodo & Co. would have to be recruited from the developing world. He would probably be black and not speak english.

Giving a Black man acting lessons, a voice coach and white makeup has already been done by another member of the Jackson Family, with strange and alarming results.

Well fine. We were given a 6'1" dwarf and a 5'6" hobbit. I'm glad some people actally seen a 3 foot hobbit on screen. I'm going to try and watch the movies again in 'an altered state of awareness' in the hope that I will see a three foot hobbit too.

I think the the ultimate test is the question,

If you went toe-to-toe with Sam (only as played by Sean Astin in the movie), would you flatten him as easily as you would a five year old child?

[ December 11, 2003, 03:40: Message edited by: Bluin ]

 

You're kidding right? You know that midget is actually an official term, same as dwarf, that's why it's medical term is dwarfism. I know it may be taken in an offensive manner but so can calling someone short or tall or fat, or if you want to be medical, obese. People may not like it, but there's nothing wrong with the term in itself.

I blame slang and colloquilialisms, there was a time when dumb meant someone who couldn't speak. If you want to call someone a fool, and they are, I have no problem with that- it is the intent behind the word which makes it offensive, not the word itself. I don't think Klorox was trying to be offensive at all.

By the way, I agree with you entirely on the issue of the movie, to me the height of the actors seemed to constantly change. They never seemed too tall, but the changing proportions were a distraction it is true.

 

No, I'm not kidding about the word midget as applied to a person.

To quote Little People of America:

http://www.lpaonline.org/resources_faq.html

As you say Dwarf is a human medical term.

Mr X is an architect.
Mr Y is a dwarf.

What is the difference between those two statements? Mr X is somebody with a job. Mr Y is somebody with a medical condition. One statement is positive the other is negative. Yet we freely refer to people of short stature as dwarfs, and define them by their medical condition, rather than by their contribution to society. That is why some little people object to people calling them dwarfs in everyday (non-medical) situations also.

The word midget is somewhat like the word nigger, in that it is OK for a little person to apply the word midget to himself and his short friends, but it is not OK for people that are not little to apply the the word to him/her.

Anyway, back on topic;

There are some sites on the net belonging to people proporting to be American Little people (trust no one) that include photos of many other American Little people. It makes me wonder if it was really so hard to find four perfectly proportioned American little people that could act sufficiently well (I cannot recall any truly memorable scenes where Mr Woods or Mr Astin was the pivotal character).

[ December 11, 2003, 04:46: Message edited by: Bluin ]