Book Review: The Art of Mr Hublot

Mr Hublot is a Luxembourgish animated short film directed by Laurent Witz and Alexandre Espigares, and produced by ZEILT Productions. The 11-minute film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 2014.

The main character Mr Hublot is actually inspired and based on the character design sculptures by Stephane Halleux. These sculptures are created with spare parts, recycled objects and joined together with imagination to form characters and daily objects. It's sort of like steampunk creations but Halleux's sculptures has more of a sense of life and more stylised as though they were designed with animation in mind. The sculptures look like they can be used for stop-motion animation, but the film is actually in 3D.

This book is the art and making of the film. Collected within are the beautiful concept artworks of the characters and environment, storyboards, sculptures, colour scripts and scene paintings. There are lots of accompanying commentary that talks about the film production, the characters, inspiration and technicalities. The commentary, however, will make more sense to those who've already watched the film because it does talk about story elements at times.

I particularly like the design of the urban city called Luxcity. The concept sketches and paintings are really detailed. There are wireframe renderings as well as the finalised textured look. I love architecture and the chaotic look and amount of details gives the city a nice sense of character in itself.

This is a fantastic book that goes behind to scenes to show you what it takes and the complexity to create a film like this, a film that took 3 years to produce.

It's a visually beautiful book with its unique stylized look.

The book's written in French and English. It's a 150-page large format hardcover. You can only get it from the film's website at https://www.mrhublot.com