Just in time for Christmas!  Although we will have to wait an entire year, until December 14, 2012, to actually see the movie, New Line Cinema just released the trailer for the first part of the two-movie epic The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.  You don’t have to wait any longer–watch it here:

Funnier than The Lord of the Rings trilogy, we get plunged right into introductions with all the stalwart but very typically chummy dwarves, courtesy of our favorite wizard, Gandalf the Grey, played again by the brilliant Ian McKellen.  Not as goosebump inspiring as the awesome trailer for The Lord of the Rings, it doesn’t show us a lot of new sets yet, but the dinner table scene at Bilbo’s looks great.

We did get to see the return of Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, Andy Serkis as Gollum, and Ian Holm as the older Bilbo Baggins.

Cast perfectly as the younger Bilbo Baggins is Martin Freeman (Sherlock, Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead, BBC’s original The Office, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), and we get to see plenty of him in the trailer as the fidgety and typically very Hobbity worrier/soon-to-be adventurer.

But all is not humorous in The Hobbit story, as the plot centers around the re-taking of the The Lonely Mountain by the dwarves under Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage, Robin Hood, Captain America), exiled by a certain rare dragon named Smaug, to be voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy).  The trailer tells this story via song, as sung by the dwarves.  But no peek at the dragon yet.

And if you don’t have all the dwarves straight yet, check out the photos of all of them that we previously posted here.

So what’s missing?  We’ve yet to see a glimpse of Hugo Weaving reprising his role as Elrond the Elf, Orlando Bloom reprising his role as Legolas the Elf, Christopher Lee reprising his role as the wizard Saruman, and newcomer to the series Evangeline Lilly (Lost) as Tauriel and Stephen Fry as the Master of Laketown, home of Bard, to be played by Luke Evans.

And now, as Mr. Petty says, the waiting is the hardest part.