Commentators have compared Peter Jackson's 2001–2003 The Lord of the Rings film trilogy with the book on which it was based, J. R. R. Tolkien's 1954–1955 The Lord of the Rings, remarking that while both have been extremely successful commercially, the film version does not necessarily capture the intended meaning of the book. They have admired Jackson's ability to film the long and complex work at all; the beauty of the cinematography, sets, and costumes; the quality of the music; and the epic scale of his version of Tolkien's story. They have however found the characters and the story greatly weakened by Jackson's emphasis on action and violence at the expense of psychological depth; the loss of Tolkien's emphasis on free will and individual responsibility; and the replacement of Frodo's inner journey by an American monomyth with Aragorn as the hero. Commentators admired the simultaneous use of images, words, and music to convey emotion, evoking the appearance of Middle-earth, creating wonderfully believable creatures, and honouring Tolkien's Catholic vision with images that can work also for non-Christians. Scholars, critics, actors and fans have seen Jackson's version as a success, on its own terms, as an adaptation of Tolkien, and as going beyond Tolkien into a sort of modern folklore. The development of fan films such as Born of Hope and The Hunt for Gollum, and of a modern folklore with characters such as elves, dwarves, wizards, and halflings, all derived from Jackson's rendering of Tolkien, have been viewed as measures of this success. Context Both book and film versions of The Lord of the Rings have been extremely successful in their way, enjoyed by the public and non-academic reviewers alike, attracting the attention of scholars to the differences between them. Tolkien's fantasy novel J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings was published in three volumes in 1954–1955 and has sold over 150 million copies. It has been translated into at least 58 languages. It takes up, according to the edition, around 1000 pages of text. Read out loud in the unabridged audiobook voiced by Rob Inglis, it has a running time of nearly 60 hours. Tolkien was involved in a proposal to make an animated film adaptation by Morton Grady Zimmerman. He was not opposed to the idea: in 1957 he wrote that an abridgement "with some good picture-work would be pleasant". He felt that selective omission