Abstract
This chapter analyses audience reactions to the Hobbit trilogy’s usual visual aesthetic, produced through the combination of high frame rate, 3D and extensive use of computer-generated imagery. While intended to facilitate and intensify viewers’ experience of pleasurable re-immersion in Middle-earth, the combination of these technologies produced contradictory effects and visual artefacts that some viewers considered jarring and displeasing. The chapter shows that critical reactions to The Hobbit’s visual aesthetic were variously informed by individual commitments to a more traditional cinematic aesthetic, appreciation for The Lord of the Rings’ ‘gritty’ realism and an apparent clash between the technologies themselves, the latter of which generated a hyperreality paradox, disrupting narrative immersion for a small but significant number of respondents.
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Michelle, C., Davis, C.H., Hardy, A.L., Hight, C. (2017). Pioneering Cinematic Technologies and The Hobbit’s Hyperreality Paradox. In: Fans, Blockbusterisation, and the Transformation of Cinematic Desire. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59616-1_7
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