The first official images have been released from Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, and they are reassuringly familiar.  The first shows Martin Freeman as the young Bilbo Baggins.  Freeman, who played Tim in the original U.K. version of The Office and Doctor Watson in the BBC’s spiffy new Sherlock Holmes series, sports, according to Jackson, “the biggest Hobbit feet we’ve had so far.”  The director continued, “They’re a little hard to walk in, but he’s managed to figure out the perfect Hobbit gait.”

 

The second image, which was released to Entertainment Weekly, shows Ian McKellen as Gandolph reclining against a tree.  The masterful actor is smoking a pipe and looking pretty much exactly like he did in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.  The first of the two Hobbit movies will hit theaters in December of 2012, and it should truly look spectacular since Jackson is shooting the film in 3-D at 48 frames-per-second, which is twice the normal frame rate and should provide an unparalleled smoothness to the image.

 

The final image shows Jackson directing Martin Freeman and provides (if you click on the image) the first actual glimpse of those oversize hairy Hobbit clodhoppers.