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Home > Categories > Books > Pictorial > The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Chronicles review
The ultimate celebration of the first Hobbit movie reveals the full creative vision of the art and design teams with more than 1,000 exclusive images and photos, including designs and concepts that never made it to the big screen.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Chronicles - Art & Design is packed with more than 1,000 images of concept artwork, photographs and development paintings by the artists working behind the scenes to bring Middle-earth to life, each of whom provides detailed and entertaining commentary that reveals the story behind the vision.
As a bonus feature unique to this book, there is a special fold-out map printed in glow-in-the-dark ink and a three-page fold-out replica of Bilbo's contract!
Compiled by Weta Workshop senior concept designer Daniel Falconer, this is the first in a series of lavish hardback books written and designed by the award-winning team at Weta, who are working closely with the production team to guarantee that these books will be bursting with insider information and stunning visual imagery.
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Review by: mizim (Miriam)
Dated: 21st of February, 2013
This is a wonderful companion art book for the movie, The Hobbit, and I like it far more than the Lord of the Rings movie companion books, though to be honest I prefer The Hobbit over Lord of the Rings full stop.
The cover is beautifully embossed with texture and shine. It's 208-pages, it's big and it's heavy, but it is gorgeous, so this makes up for that. To me it has the perfect feel for curling up in my armchair and having a read through, or just looking at all the gorgeous illustration in it. Behind the cover is a copy of Thorin's Map that you can tear out from the book and has a small bit of glow in the dark text on it, perfect for putting up on the wall. At the back of the book is a long gate fold of Bilbo's Burglar contract should you want to read the fine print to know exactly what was on it, or just to look at.
There's a generous amount of concept art included that feature the characters, props and environment. If you are looking for photos of behind the scenes, actors in various stages of costume and make-up then this is not the book for you. There is only a very small amount of photography with the majority being concept art.
Most of this book features all the characters and their clothing and weapons. It's was very interesting to look and see just how many variations of each character there was, and what the different inputs were before the final decision was made as to what a character would look like. I especially enjoyed seeing the stages of the dwarves, from what they started out looking as to what they ended up as on screen.
There is a really good amount of information from those who worked on the film, how they originally thought of an idea, brought it to fruition, altered it slightly and so on and so forth till they had what they considered just right and perfect for the film.
I'm looking forward to another two books like this, as it looks to be that there will be one per movie. I love reading all the little insights into their final decisions an d the art is beautiful.
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