The huge Harry Potter fan I could not miss out on The Creature Vault (or The Big Book of Creatures in French) It is with great pleasure that I have this sort of laminated artbook, finding pleasure I had tried to devour Film Wizardry. Moreover, even if the two books do not belong to the same publishing house, I was very pleasantly surprised to find that they were the same size (that said, I speak of the first original to red cover) and married very well in my library.
I do not necessarily expect to find in The Creature Vault what I discovered. Indeed, it is a book that relates a lot to the movies, the design of the creatures, and I do not necessarily expect that. In fact, I thought it would be an object imitating a course book, a textbook way a little closer to the world of books to that of movies.
I'm not disappointed so far, however, I find the idea of our projects offer the first preparatory sketches excellent! You will discover not only the fantastic animals, but also intelligent creatures which form a separate people, such as centaurs, goblins and creatures of the water. I was surprised to find pages devoted to Animagus, which were illustrated very precisely, clearly explaining the morphing realized work, for example (for Wormtail, Sirius and McGonagall!)
You will, every page on a new creature, a small inset called Fast Facts remembering what tome appeared the creature for the first time, where can we find a short description taken directly from the books ... but also a design detail or anecdote about it.
I am however unable to speak well of you Acromantula and pages devoted to Aragog, pages I just preferred to spend after a start-heart terrible. Arachnophobes, please also pass you some detailed pages of sketches of giant spiders, as well as various studies to achieve the result appearing in the third film ... Brrr! I still shudder ... But these few horrible pages are soon offset by dozens more where you will see how the words of JK Rowling came alive thanks to talented illustrators. (This paragraph so that the target arachnophobes, um)
The book is divided into nine parts, called chapters: The forest dwellers (like centaurs or hypogriffes ...), lakes (our dear strangulots, for example ...) and heaven (where there are dragons ...), the "undesirable" (such as trolls or gnomes charming ...), the shifters (such as animagus and épouvanteurs ...), the "world of work" (ie owls mail or house elves ...) the dark forces (or awful wicked, coincidentally the dementors or inferi ...), the familiar (Hedwig Nagini through Scabbers or Fawkes ... ) and finally the greenhouse (Mandragores, Devil Net, Whomping Willow ... All these plants a little more alive than the others!)
Some parts are clearly more interesting or more developed than others, and I was rather pleased with the choices made. I first said I would have preferred a different book for everything is more flora than fauna but ultimately, I think it's fine. The interesting plants are rare in the world created by JK Rowling and those put forward here are definitely the best, no offense to Neville.
I do not want to say too much either, nor show too, in case you want to keep the pleasure of discovery. I can only encourage you to rush about the book upon its release, advising you still VO for its more affordable price. My only tiny flat will be a childish caprice spoiled accustomed to the goodies present in this kind of book here, you will have a small illustrated booklet on postal owls and a poster ... That I I forgot to take pictures, but you can see in this short video (link on the blog) Well, as I said, it's not so bad!
This is, in my eyes, a must-have for fans of Harry Potter. The Creature Vault object is a beautiful book, well done and very interesting. In addition, two books of the same genre released in 2015: The Character Vault (an encyclopedia on the characters) and The Book of Magical Places (a kind of atlas magical places) history to fill our shelves beautiful magical books!
