These Dwarf Reveals Are Getting to Be Quite a Hobbit!

?(Go ahead and hate me for the article title; I certainly do.) Peter Jackson revealed the final three Hobbit dwarves this weekend, including Balin and Dwalin (both above) and leader Thorin Oakenshield (below). Balin looks like a garden gnome; I’m not sure why he’s so elderly, but he certainly looks dwarven. Dwalin — well, it’s weird because he’s so much taller than Balin, and I never really thought about a bald fantasy dwarf before, but he looks pretty tough and I’m sure he’ll be fine when standing next to Gandalf. But as for Thorin:

?I don’t think he looks like a dwarf at all. Seriously, he could have been any of the humans in the original LotR trilogy, at least based on this pic. I’m sure he’ll be fine as well; it’s probably just because the picture’s a close-up, and at any rate, I think we can trust Peter Jackson to know what he’s doing at this point. 

Now that all the Hobbit dwarves have been revealed, though, I will say this: I’m really impressed with how different they look. I know for a fact that mass audiences won’t be able to remember any of their names — hell, I couldn’t tell you which is which, and I just posted them last week. But by making them so visually distinctive, audiences won’t have to remember their far too similar names. They can tell them all by sight: the triangle-haired one, the hooded one, the old one with the 19th century facial hair; the old one that looks like John Rhys-Davies and the young one that looks like John Rhys-Davies; the orange and oddly happy one and the disturbingly pretty one; the fat one and the one with the silly hat and the one with the skunk hair; and now the Santa Claus one and the tall bald one and… uh… Thorin. Maybe this flies in the face of some Tolkien description or passage I’ve forgotten about, but for the movies and mass audiences, I think it’s a damned smart move. (Via First Showing)