The Art of Frozen 2

I thought The Art of Frozen 2 would have been lean on character design since the first movie had already solidified the look of the main characters and the art direction for this new film.  I was very happy to know that I was wrong. We see lots of new artwork with a whole new batch of characters that we meet in this new film. There is a lot of character designs and pre-production artwork from these characters.  Out of the 156 page, I would have to say about 40 pages are devoted to character design and pre-production artwork.

I was also really happy to see a return of one of my favorite artists Jin Kim who has been gone and has many of his drawings in the book, as well from artists like Bill Schwab and Brittney Lee. Overall I'm pretty happy with this book.

I give the book a 4.5 out of  5

Also those of you that are really into the art of frozen, they are also selling the Frozen Postcard Box which has 100 collectible postcards with even more art.

Klaus: The Art of the Movie

 

Klaus: The Art of the Movie  Is amazing!!! I am so happy to have this book, and if you are not quick, you will be out of luck because they are almost all gone.  You can still find some here and there on the internet, but you have to find it soon.  The reason why I love this book, is that first of all it has 190 pages and 60 of those pages have an amazing amount of art on each page but not to small that you can hardly see and detail.  They make a very good use of each page with hardly any wast of space.  And don't forget, it has 190 pages which is 30 to 40 more pages than more art of books these day's sadly.

The artwork in this book is so fun to look at too, you get to see pages of character designs for each major character and their progression to the final design, which most people that like these books love to see. "Hint Hint" to any future art of book creators. But wait there's more... You get to see loads of designs from all of the other characters and even the animals from the movie, and I mean loads.  You get to see artwork from Sergio Pablos the director himself, and  from the amazing art team of  Torsten Schrank, Daniel Fernandez, Marcin Jakubowski and Juan Pablo Navas.  I sure hope they make another batch of these book for a second printing, because it is definitely needed because of the high demand.

I give the book a 5 out of  5

If you are at all interested like me in seeing some amazing artwork from Torsten Schrank you need to go to his website. There you will see even more artwork from the film they couldn't fit in the book.

 https://torschrank.com/ 

 

Also go to the actual SPA Studios website who created the movie to see more awesome artwork.

https://www.thespastudios.com/

 

The Art of Toy Story 4

The Art of Toy Story 4  is a pretty good book when it comes to showing character designs, in fact it has almost 50 pages out of the 160 devoted to character design and developing the look for those characters. You also get some nice artwork from Tom Gately and his wonderful ability to capture personality and real life moments that we see day to day.

There are lots of environment and concept art as well as many pages showing storyboard sequences from the movie. There a even a few drawings from Josh Cooley the director, which if you don't know Josh, he is as funny of a person as it gets. He created a children's picture book parody called "Movies R Fun!: A Collection of Cinematic Classics for the Pre-(Film) School Cinephile (Lil' Inappropriate Books)".  You can see his blog here - http://cooleycooley.blogspot.com/ and get an idea of the type of humor this guy has.

I give the book a 4.1 out of  5

The Art Of Missing Link

The Art of Missing Link  was kind of a missed opportunity.  I went and saw the movie which was really good, but the Art of book was not very impressive when it comes to showing character designs and the stuff that I love to see.  First off you have some very talented Character Design artists who have done some amazing designs for all of  these characters, Their design style feels like Ronald Searle which I love and I wanted to see more of it.  But sadly there are very few pictures for each of the characters and some of the pictures are the size of a 2 stamps small. The prioritization and importance of the pictures was really off too.  For example they crammed Willard Stenk and his gang (a total of 4 characters which were my favorite characters in the film) all on to 1 page. which means there were 9 small pictures crammed onto one page.  And then right on the next page you have 1 whole page for the one dog, which has a big model sheet and 4 pictures of the stop motion puppet that they used in the show. (((What The Heck)))

The other thing that was sad is that there was very few pictures of designs of each of the characters. I am sure there are a lot more pre-designs and exploration drawings of the characters than the very few they show, and there was a lot of text, that could have been filled up with artwork. in the 176 pages.  I Hope in the future if Laika makes another art of books for their next film, it will have more art work, less text, wasted space, and prioritize their artwork a lot better. I don't need to see page after page of color keys, or a still pictures of an animator posing a puppet or someone painting a prop.  I wanted to see more artwork that I love

P.S. for those of you that want to see some really good stuff from Juliaon Roles who was a main Character Designer on this film, go to his Tumblr site here - https://juliaon.tumblr.com/  and see what kind of artwork this guy is producing and what types of artwork they could have filled this book with.

I give it a very disappointing 1.5 out of 5

Totally Awesome: The Greatest Cartoons of the Eighties

I was lucky to review the Totally Awesome: The Greatest Cartoons of the Eighties, because this was right down my alley.  One of the best things I loved growing up was waking up on Saturday morning and watching cartoons. I have always wanted to know some of the history and backstory of some of my favorite cartoons like Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends, Transformers, He-Man, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, G.I. Joe, and the Thundercats, and how they came to be. Well this book is exactly that.

Each cartoon series gets about 8 to 10 pages to focus on it's history and some behind the scenes stories with lots of  production art work some come as these interesting mock ups like model sheets, storyboards,  production notes, and artwork which are super cool to look at. If you are a fan of eighties cartoons, than this is a book for you.

What A Fun and TOTALLY AWESOME Book.  

I give it 4.8 out of 5

The Art of Ralph Breaks the Internet

The Art of Ralph Breaks the Internet:  is an AWESOME. Probably one of the best art books due to how many character designs and pre-production on all of the characters they show. Jessica Julius really knows how to make an art of book. She uses limited text and fills her pages with as much art as possible, there is hardly any wasted space. The one major thing that she does that I like is that she finds multiple drawings of the characters before the design is finalized and we get to see a lot of the artists explore each character and see what might have been.  Literally some of the characters have multiple pages with these exploitative drawings. For example there are 5 pages devoted to the character Yesss and with in those pages you have up to 55 character design drawings. With a total of 168 pages, (8 more than the last Wreck it Ralph art book) it has about 70 pages with character designs and rough drawings of the characters. A lot of those drawings that I noticed are from artists Ami Thompson and Mingjue Helen Chen. This book is so worth every penny, especially now that it is on sale as of today for $25.47 over at amazon here on this link - The Art of Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2

What an AWESOME BOOK.  5 out of 5

LIGHTBOX EXPO

Website Here - https://www.lightboxexpo.com/

TICKETS GO ON SALE ON 9:00AM PST, March 6, 2019 

The Grinch in 3D

FORMER NICKELODEON PRODUCER BUTCH HARTMAN LAUNCHES KICKSTARTER

Oaxis Entertainment, a new online streaming service dedicated to non-stop family-focused programming. With the help of the community and Kickstarter, he plans to raise over $250,000 in 30 days to kick-off the project. Funds raised will go towards the development of the subscription-based platform, hiring creative producers and staff to generate original content, and acquiring material that aligns with Oaxis’ family-focused mission. Hartman will launch Oaxis in 2019.

The Art of Incredibles 2  Has a lot more Character Design than the previous art of the Incredibles from the first fil.  With 168 pages I would say about  41 pages with character designs. But I wish they would have put more.  It then has about 22 pages of storyboards, and the rest is of pre-visual artwork like props, buildings, backrounds and other throwaway art that I wonder why they even show. There are many character designs done by Matt Nolte, who I consider one of the best artist out there in the animation industry.  There is also some art from Tony Fucile, and Deanna Marsigliese. So overall I am pretty happy to see a lot of great artwork, but it seems like they withheld so much more character designs that they could have shown. (I'm sorry but I am not to interested in all of the pictures of props and building layouts which is most of the book). But there is another great thing about this book, is that it shows designs of Lucius Best (Frozone's wife) and Kari the babysitter's parents would look like if the would have been in the movie.


I really liked this book, so I am giving it a...  4 out of 5