When I was little I had two big obsessions, things I was so crazy about that they were pretty much all I could think about. When I was seven or eight, my dad started reading The Hobbit to me and my brothers as our bedtime story. Of course I became instantly engrossed, and since then I’ve been a huge fan of JRR Tolkien. I loved hearing about the adventures of Bilbo, Gandalf and the dwarves. Naturally, in the thirty years or so since, my appreciation for Tolkien has matured, although I still class myself as a fan (no doubt Jackson’s films have had an influence).

On the other hand, my second huge childhood obsession has faded and disappeared: I used to love Disney and Disney films. For some reason, again when I was around seven or eight or so, I used to insist my mum put videos of things like Aladdin and Beauty And The Beast on for me to watch ad nauseam. I used to watch them for hours and hours, even bursting into tears when they ended. Something about the animation and the songs made me engrossed. Then, when my parents took us to visit Disneyland in California in 1994, I was over the moon.

The great irony of this combination of fixations, I now realise, is that they are pretty much incompatible: as I just heard in this video, Tolkien loathed Disney. It is well known that Professor Tolkien was very much a traditionalist, and relished traditional modes of storytelling. As such, he hated the way Disney cartoons made light of fairy tales like Snow White, rendering the dwarves as bumbling, comedic idiots, rather than the proud mine-digging civilisation he would render them as. He detested the way Disney toned down such stories, seemingly infantilising and patronising audiences. As the video notes, the Hobbit may have been a children’s book, but there is still a gravity to it; it never talks down to readers, and can still be appreciated by adults.

It amuses me that two of the things I was so obsessed with as a kid now seem so at odds with each other. One of Tolkien’s biggest fears was that Disney would get the filming rights to The Hobbit and turn it into a pile of commercial pap. Knowing what I now do about the American film industry, I can certainly see where he was coming from. Fortunately that never happened, and in my opinions the adaptations of Tolkien’s work we now have are as good as they could have been. As storytellers, Tolkien and Disney were the complete antithesis of one another, yet as a child I was captivated by both; they both whisked me to all kinds of magical places. Now, however, I see one as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, and the other as one of the biggest driving forces behind the genericism and commercialism of film.