Now this is a wonderfully produced book, a habitat by habitat guide to Skull Island - the home of King Kong - and the various creatures and natives of the island.

In each section we find a brief description of the area being covered - from the Crumbling Coastline and Native Village, through the Lowlands and Swamps to the more mountainous regions. And then once the region is described we move onto the creatures themselves, the various slightly altered versions of dinosaurs encountered in the film.

The real joy of this book comes in the form of many paintings done by the various artists at the Weta Workshop, visually this really is a treat. And in reading through this book you get a real idea just how much detail was created for the film itself - how much background material was thought through and visualised prior to the film being shot.

If you were looking at this book as a means of learning how the effects were created you'd be looking in the wrong place, this is much more about the artistic side of the film's development. This concerns how the look was developed in terms of concepts and designs prior to the technical wizardry the made them come to life on the screen.

I've always been a little dubious about film tie in books - excepting further novels set in the worlds created in the movies, I have to admit to always having had a certain liking for Star Trek (and other) novels. But books like production diaries have almost felt like a cash-in gesture.

But when such care is put into creating a tie-in book I cannot describe it just as a cash-in, this adds to the experience.

And I can see another use for this book. In addition to providing background on the island for fans of the film, I can see this book being a wonderful source material for anyone who enjoys role-playing. This would be a great background for a "Dungeons and Dragons" adventure.

Synopsis
Peter Jackson, Academy-Award winning director of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, brings his sweeping cinematic vision to the iconic story of the gigantic ape-monster captured in the wild and brought back to civilization where he meets his tragic fate. True to the spirit both of the original story and the classic 1933 RK0 Pictures version, Peter Jackson's eagerly-awaited film will expand on the chapters of the tale which take place on the mysterious, isolated Skull Island - a world that time forgot, lorded over by one of the most extraordinary creatures ever to walk the earth. From fascinating frame-by-frame storyboards to glorious full-colour paintings, this book is a lavish visual tribute to the fabulous movie art which created the world of Skull Island and its fauna and brought them to vivid, stupendous life on the cinema screen.