I paused at what looked like an image of a double-bitted medieval hatchet. “That’s Smaug,” del Toro said. It was an overhead view: “See, he’s like a flying axe.” I turned to a lateral image of the dragon. Smaug’s body, as del Toro had imagined it, was unusually long and thin. The bones of its wings were articulated on the dorsal side, giving the creature a slithery softness across its belly. Smaug’s front legs looked disproportionately small, like those of a T. rex.
Whereas Jackson’s compositions had been framed by the azure New Zealand sky, del Toro planned to employ digital “sky replacement,” for a more “painterly effect.” Sometimes, instead of shooting in an actual forest, he wanted to shoot amid artificial trees that mimicked the “drawings in Tolkien’s book.” In his journal, I spied many creatures with no precedent in Tolkien, such as an armor-plated troll that curls into a ball of metal plates. Del Toro said that it would be boring to make a slavish adaptation. “Hellboy,” he noted, was based on a popular comic-book series, but he had liberally changed the story line, and the demon had become an emotionally clumsy nerd. “I am Hellboy,” he said.
Even the major characters of “The Hobbit” bore del Toro’s watermark. In one sketch, the dwarf Thorin, depicted in battle, wore a surreal helmet that appeared to be sprouting antlers. “They’re thorns—his name is Thorin, after all,” he said. The flourish reminded me of a similar arboreal creature in “Hellboy II,” which was slightly worrying.
The Hobbit
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