Who else thought this was more faithful to the book?

The animated version was WAY more faithful, and captured the mood of this little humble party of lucky adventurers much better. Jackson's trilogy ramps up the battles so much that you can't believe EVERYONE lives through the first movie. The animated one moves at a nice pace and has more of that Tolkien feel. I'll always love it!

Yeah, even if it's noticeably compressed. I don't dislike Jackson's trilogy but it does feel stretched and padded out compared to the book, and less focused on the title character.

I think the list of who doesn't feel this way would be shorter.

I still consider this to be one of the most faithful fantasy adaptions I ever saw. I wasn't that impressed with the Jackson version.

I rewatched this after seeing the Jackson movies and this is better by far. The pacing and tone are consistent and tell the story succinctly and with a clear goal in mind (children's fantasy film - Bilbo is the protagonist) instead of getting lost down length-padding cul-de-sacs.

The cartoon has several weak spots. The lack of the Arkenstone and Beorn hurts the world of the story a bit, particularly the Arkenstone, which greater forwards Bilbo and Thorin's stories. The design of the wood elves is also deplorable. They look like the California Raisins on cocaine.

But the positives outweigh the negatives. The vocal performances are, on the whole, excellent, and of particular excellence is Brother Theodore as Gollum. His strange creature of the caves I still find to be a match for Serkis' excellent performance, and I kinda prefer Theodore. If he had been using Jackson's script, I think his tone would have been superior.

In some ways the cartoon followed the book exactly, but I was not pleased with its portrayal of Smaug or the wood elves. Smaug was not supposed to look like a cat, dammit! And who came up with the idea of making the Elves of Mirkwood look like mutants? Otherwise, it was a very good cartoon, and my brother loved it when we were kids.

Peter Jackson's films did a much better job portraying the elves properly, as well as delivering a spectacularly terrifying dragon. Some parts of the narrative, we could have done without, and they really didn't have to stretch it out to three films. In fact, I don't know why they waited until the third film to kill Smaug. They could have had the battle with him end in the second one. But no, they had to have that made-up chase between him and the Company in the old Dwarven halls, and then leave us hanging with the dragon going off to take his revenge on Lake Town, and Bilbo saying "What have we done?"

However, the third film delivered the Battle of Five Armies that the novel and the cartoon both denied us, though I really think it was stretched out a lot.

I preferred this version

Gotta love the cartoon's depiction of the battle sequence, it's just a bunch of random dots moving around and colliding into each other, LOL