You probably already know the premise (or even the whole story) of The Hobbit, but I’ll talk about it first, just in case you don’t. The Hobbit is an adventure story and the first part of the main story of the Middle-earth series, and tells of the adventure of Bilbo Baggins, a creature known as a Hobbit, who embarks on an adventure with a wise and old wizard named Gandalf, as well as a bunch of dwarves. On this adventure, their main task is to reach this place called the Lonely Mountain, where there is supposed to be a bunch of treasure and gold to be found. However, it’s not as easy as it may sound, as the group encounters many obstacles along the way, not to mention that there is a deadly dragon living underneath the mountain, a legend by the name of Smaug.

I went into this expecting to moderately enjoy it for its charm, considering it was a very low-budget animated attempt at telling this story made in the 1970s, but as you can tell from my rating, it was anything but for me. I had to pretty much nitpick for positives here, and the only one I could come up with was that there are at least two decently amusing scenes, being the two arguably most famous ones from the book that I won’t spoil. That was it, though; the entire rest of this film was an absolute chore for me to watch, and I’m surprised I even made it all the way through, even though it’s literally not even an hour and a half.

First off, the way this film tries to tell this story is quite pathetic. I get that this was low-budget and made for TV, but I think they could have at least tried a little bit harder than they did. With the exception of the two iconic scenes, basically the entire rest of the story is just montaged through so much to the point that I would have a hard time believing anyone who hadn’t read the book would even really understand what was happening. The film barely even makes it super clear what this story is even about in the first place. It might just be some of the worst pacing I’ve ever encountered in a movie.

Adding to that, none of the characters were translated from the page to the screen here in a way that was interesting or compelling at all. I quite literally mean it when I say that no one even really gets hardly a hint of a character arc, or even really something that makes them interesting, so I couldn’t have cared any less about any of them. Not even Bilbo Baggins is very interesting here at all, and Thorin, another character who is supposed to have an arc, isn’t either. The dwarves are also barely distinguishable from one another in terms of their characters, because pretty much none of them with the exception of Thorin, get any standout moments.

Yet again, I understand that this is low budget, but I was not a fan of the animation whatsoever. It’s some of the worst and most ugly designed animation I’ve probably ever seen, almost to a baffling degree. I mean, the character designs are just terrible, and they couldn’t have made Bilbo any more hideous. Literally all of the dwarves look the same, too, so even if they were distinct from one another in terms of their characters, it would still be hard to track along with who any of them were.

The voice acting was pretty funny, too. All of the voice cast sounds like they couldn’t have cared less about this movie, and to be honest, I don’t think they did. Every single one of the characters, with the exception of maybe Gandalf, speaks very monotoned and sounds extremely unenthused during the entire movie. While it is obviously very much a negative, it was quite funny and made this somewhat less treacherous to get through at the end of the day.

The icing on the cake, though, or whatever the opposite of that would be, is the music. Safe to say: not a fan at all. It’s like this country/western sort of style of music, and even that is just off-putting simply because it doesn’t fit the story at all, but even aside from that, it’s a chore to listen to. I’m not kidding when I say that literally every single time a song was about to queue in, I rolled my eyes. The music, not to exaggerate or anything, was almost headache-inducing.

Again, I get that this was made for TV and didn’t have much of a budget, but I don’t think anyone who worked on this gave it their best effort.