Genre Films Books

The Art of WALL.E

Tim Hauser

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Missed opportunity 3 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

First of all let me say that my rating doesn't have anything to do with Wall-e which is a great movie or Pixar which I love.

Here I'm rating this book only. Regrettably, I must say that "The Art of Wall-e" is a missed opportunity. It could have featured many more drawings about wall-e (the actual character) and its genesis. Out of its 160 pages this book manages to devote to the design of this robot and to drawings showing how wall-e "works" a mere 4 pages (pages 48-49 and 52-53).

Also, at page 102 we are told that "there were nine revisions of Eve" and yet, we are only shown that robot more or less as it appears in the movie instead of as a work in progress which would have been much more interesting and stimulating by giving the reader insight into the artists' creative process.

Unlike the previous "Art of" books about Pixar movies, this one doesn't really delve into the evolution of art direction or characters in a major way (except for the humans in the movie) as if what we see in the movie weren't the result of several iterations (as it most definitely is).

In short, great art but much left to be desired.

Editorial Review:

Pixar Animation Studios, the innovators behind Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Ratatouille, has again reinvented the genre with WALL E. When a robot searching for a connection finds EVE, a sleek female probe-droid from outer space, he embarks on an adventure-filled journey across the galaxy. Inspired by classic films, and a brave venture in its own right, WALL E is set to awe audiences this summer. The Art of WALL E includes more than 250 imaginative pieces of concept art, including storyboards, full-color pastels, digital and pencil sketches, character studies, color scripts, and more. The astute text—featuring quotes from the director, artists, animators, and production team—unearths the filmmakers' historical inspirations and reveals a studio confidently pushing the limits of animation.

The Art of Kung Fu Panda

Tracey Miller-Zarneke

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

SWEET! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I'm pretty picky when it comes to art books, especially when the art style isn't what I'm looking for. This book, however, has various styles that I actually enjoyed, and it isn't even in a style I'm particularly fond of either! What makes it so interesting, you ask? Well, for one, you get to see and understand why the producers chose the particular art style for the movie, and it makes a lot of sense.

If you've seen the movie already, you know how the intro movie goes (all in 2D at first), the author explains why they chose to go with that style and how they came up with the idea.

From 2D sketches from various character designers to the final 3D output of the characaters and environments, you won't be disappointed at how they all turned out. Most of them didn't make in the movie, but you eventually find out why. Some of the art is so good, you won't even be able to tell if it's 2D or 3D. Vibrant colors fill up the pages in this book, and the overall design for the cover inside and out will make you want to come back to this book, even if it's just for fun or for your personal reference to character/environment design. PICK THIS ONE UP!

The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation

Ollie Johnston, Frank Thomas

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 61 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The love produces animation! That book exhibition that! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

The love produces animation! That book exhibition that! That amazes of book! That fantastic thing is the friendship and the production of those two geniuses of the animation! The life and the those two men's art is a thing that contemplates in all us, impassioned by animation. They are my life examples, and one day I would like cannot at least to arrive close to what did. That book, and the dvd about the life of the two, is obligatory things in any school, or shelf peculiar of any person that has feelings and sensibility to understand the beautiful things of the life. Wonderful? Spectacular? Grandiose? I don't have as defining that book. He is more than any definition that somebody can create. It is the love transformed in cartoons overflowing for the pages of that wonderful book. I will buy more a, to be in the shelf without nobody opens it, and my descendants only can you make it for they know a time and such some brilliant people and magics as these highlighted in that spectacular book.

The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company

David A. Price

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Product Description

The roller-coaster rags-to-riches story behind the phenomenal success of Pixar Animation Studios: the first in-depth look at the company that forever changed the film industry and the "fraternity of geeks" who shaped it.

The Pixar Touch is a story of technical innovation that revolutionized animation, transforming hand-drawn cel animation to computer-generated 3-D graphics. It's a triumphant business story of a company that began with a dream, remained true to the ideals of its founders—antibureaucratic and artist driven—and ended up a multibillion-dollar success.

We meet Pixar's technical genius and founding CEO, Ed Catmull, who dreamed of becoming an animator, inspired by Disney's Peter Pan and Pinocchio, realized he would never be good enough, and instead enrolled in the then new field of computer science at the University of Utah. It was Catmull who founded the computer graphics lab at the New York Institute of Technology and who wound up at Lucasfilm during the first Star Wars trilogy, running the computer graphics department, and found a patron in Steve Jobs, just ousted from Apple Computer, who bought Pixar for five million dollars. Catmull went on to win four Academy Awards for his technical feats and helped to create some of the key computer-generated imagery software that animators rely on today.

Price also writes about John Lasseter, who catapulted himself from unemployed animator to one of the most powerful figures in American filmmaking; animation was the only thing he ever wanted to do (he was inspired by Disney's The Sword in the Stone), and Price's book shows how Lasseter transformed computer animation from a novelty into an art form. The author writes as well about Steve Jobs, as volatile a figure as a Shakespearean monarch . . .

Based on interviews with dozens of insiders, The Pixar Touch examines the early wildcat years when computer animation was thought of as the lunatic fringe of the medium.

We see the studio at work today; how its writers, directors, and animators make their astonishing, and astonishingly popular, films.

The book also delves into Pixar's corporate feuds: between Lasseter and his former champion, Jeffrey Katzenberg (A Bug's Life vs. Antz), and between Jobs and Michael Eisner. And finally it explores Pixar's complex relationship with the Walt Disney Company as it transformed itself from a Disney satellite into the $7.4 billion jewel in the Disney crown.

Little-Known Facts from The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company by David Price

• Pixar, not Apple, made Steve Jobs a billionaire. Jobs bought Pixar in 1986 from Lucasfilm for $5 million. In 1995, the week after the release of Toy Story, Pixar went public and Jobs's stock was worth $1.1 billion.

• Ed Catmull, Pixar's co-founder, dreamed as a youth of becoming an animator, but decided in high school that he couldn't draw well enough. Instead, he became an early visionary of computer animation as a graduate student in the 1970's. "Computer animation was sort of on the lunatic fringe at that time," remembered Fred Parke, a fellow Ph.D. student in Catmull's class at the University of Utah.

• When John Lasseter joined Pixar—which was then the computer graphics department of George Lucas's Lucasfilm—he had just been fired from his dream job as an animator at Disney. He became the first person to apply classic Disney character animation principles to computer animation.

• Before it became an animation studio, Pixar went through years of struggle and multi-million-dollar losses. It started as a computer company and John Lasseter's short films, such as Luxo Jr. and Tin Toy, were promotional films to help sell the company's computers.

• Pixar was almost bought by…Microsoft? Yep: Jobs remained worried about the company's finances even after Pixar made a deal with the Walt Disney Co. in 1991 to produce Toy Story, Pixar's first feature film. The Pixar Touch details the effort to sell Pixar to Bill Gates's company while Toy Story was in production.

• When writing Toy Story, to find inspiration for the relationship between Buzz and Woody, Lasseter and his story department screened classic "buddy" movies, including 48 Hrs., The Defiant Ones, Midnight Run, and Thelma & Louise.

• John Lasseter has instilled an intense commitment to research in the studio's creative staff. To prepare for the scene in Finding Nemo in which the fish characters Marlin and Dory become trapped in a whale, two members of the art department climbed inside a dead gray whale that had been stranded north of Marin, California.

• To learn how to make a realistic French kitchen, the producer and first director of Ratatouille worked as apprentices at an elite French restaurant in the Napa Valley.

• Pixar deliberately avoided making the humans in The Incredibles look too realistic. They knew that as animated human characters became too close to lifelike, audiences would actually perceive them as repulsive. The phenomenon, known as the "uncanny valley," had been predicted by a Japanese robotics researcher as early as 1970. Thus, the details of human skin, such as pores and hair follicles, were left out of The Incredibles' characters in favor of a more cartoonlike appearance.

• The signature of most Pixar feature films is characters who appeal to children (toys, fish, monsters…), but who have adult-like personalities and are dealing with adult-like problems.

• Prior to the acquisition of Pixar by Disney in 2006, Lasseter loathed the idea of Disney making sequels to Pixar films without Pixar's involvement—as Disney's contract with Pixar allowed it to do. "These were the people that put out Cinderella II," Lasseter remarked.

• Pixar is more than an animation studio. Pixar's innovations in computer graphics technology pervade movies today. Special-effects houses like Industrial Light & Magic (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) use Pixar's software to create out-of-this-world places and characters.

(Photo © Simon Bruty)

The Lost Journal of Indiana Jones

Henry Jones

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A very cool collectible 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

The premise behind the journal is that it was given to Indy by Henry Jones Sr to record his experiences. What you get is the highlights of Indy's career from early (The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles) to the films and a little in between (continuity from video games). The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull pages are a bit light especially the stuff about Mutt Williams (I'm avoid spoilers, but I find it hard to believe that Indy makes just one comment about him). The pages have illustrations from the movies, including grail diary pages, translations, and little notes from the KGB people that have supposedly found the book.

This is a must for Indy fans.

Editorial Review:

URGENT!

JUST RELEASED:
THE LOST JOURNAL OF INDIANA JONES™

The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation is pleased to release one of its most prized holdings, the heretofore "lost" journal of Dr. Henry "Indiana" Jones, Jr., which was obscured within the KGB's collection for years before passing into the Russian Federation's possession. From Jones's notes on his youthful encounters with the likes of Lawrence of Arabia and Teddy Roosevelt, through his adulthood adventures with the Thuggee Cult, the Nazis, and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, this journal covers nearly fifty years in his life, spanning from 1908 to 1957. Dr. Jones's snapshots, sketches, press clippings, and entries recording his personal thoughts are all revealed in this volume, giving new insight into one of the most enigmatic adventurers of the twentieth century.

Hellboy II: The Art of the Movie

Guillermo del Toro, Mike Mignola, Sergio Sandoval, Francisco Ruis Velasco

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Once again astounding imagery graces the pages of Del Toro's cinematic vision 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Anyone who purchased the first Art of HELLBOY will not be disappointed by this "sequel". Mike Mignola & Wayne Barlowe are now joined by the talents of Francisco Ruiz Valasco & Stephen Scott. Guillermo Del Toro again includes his notebook sketches for some evolutionary insight between his imagining to finished character. The complete & final script is once again included. As impressive as this book is I must admit I am even more eager about the forthcoming Monsters of Hellboy II. But this book does stand alone quite easily for anyone, Either for fans of the series or anyone interested in design.

Editorial Review:

The anticipation is ratcheting up for one of this summer's biggest action-adventure events, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and Dark Horse is taking you behind the scenes! As we delved into the original box-office hit, this 200-page tome likewise presents the most extensive look into the film's evolution, from early concept art and diary sketches, to photos of the final props, sets, and filming. A unique look at filmmaking and the art of graphic novels. Del Toro and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola once again bring their world-renowned talents to bear on a brand-new chapter in Hellboy's history - a visual feast only they could produce. Get your sneak peek well before the celluloid hits the screen!

Dangerous Lover (Avon Red)

Lisa Marie Rice

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

PRECIOUS LOVER 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Excellent! I agree totaly with the reviewers who thought this story ended at the right time! After all it was the time of the salvation of love... Both characters were very decent people in my opinion. Caroline was a premature and caring mother for her own dying brother and Jack never gave up his love and gratitute for Caroline, his first and only one passion. Poignant, full of action, and intense sensual and unforgettable love...

Editorial Review:

"I don't want to be alone tonight."

Caroline Lake can hardly believe she would ever say these words to someone she'd never met before. When a tall, dark stranger arrives wanting to rent a room in her beautiful empty shell of a mansion, she hesitates. Though she is in dire financial straits, the man looks dangerous—dangerously sexy. She's overwhelmed by the desire he sparks in her—hotter than anything she's ever felt before, making her ache to experience his sensuous touch. But who is this armed and mysterious man with danger following in his wake? He's not who she thinks he is . . .

Jack Prescott has wanted Caroline forever. He has spent the past twelve years dreaming of her, desiring her, while fighting in some of the worst hellholes on earth. Now he's back, with twenty million dollars in blood diamonds and a relentless enemy stalking him. But this time Jack's determined that nothing will stop him from finally making Caroline his.

To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios

Karen Paik

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Geat content but quite some 'bad digitized' pictures 3 out of 5 stars.
4 of 7 people found this review helpful.

The content of the book is as high quality and colorfull as the company it describes. Also the author did a good job at documenting the history of the company.

However, in the making of this book someone made a couple of mistakes. There are tens of images which have unacceptable 'pixelation' (i.e. blockiness due to overstretching of digital images). Especially the full page spread on p. 220 jumps out with pixels blown up to almost milimeter size!

This is quite dissappointing to me, especially as it is the artwork of a company which spearheads the way in digital imaging! I can imagine this is a slap in the face of some of the artitst and it would definitely not pass through their quality system if the book was produced by Pixar.

Overall the majority of the images in the book are very well reproduced, so I take the couple of handfull of bad apples for granted.

Editorial Review:

In 1986, gifted animator John Lasseter, technology guru Ed Catmull, and visionary Steve Jobs founded Pixar Animation Studios. Their goal: create a computer animated feature, despite predictions that it could never be done. An unprecedented catalog of blockbuster films later, the studio is honoring its history in this deluxe volume. From its fledgling days under George Lucas to ten demanding years creating Toy Story to the merger with Disney, each milestone is vibrantly detailed. Interviews with Pixar directors, producers, animators, voice talent, and industry insiders, as well as concept art, storyboards, and snapshots illuminate a history that is both definitive and enthralling.

Cartoon Animation (The Collector's Series)

Preston Blair

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

All animators should have this book! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I bought this book several years ago, around 1999, and for its price (or whatever) it's the best book an animator can begin with. Along with The Illusion of Life, it is a must have book for all animators. It taught me the differences between the "cute" types and the "screwball" types, showed how the stopwatch and metronome are used, and even a few things about clean-up. If you love cartoons, by all means GET THIS BOOK!

Editorial Review:

This is the one sourcebook that cartooning and animation enthusiasts have been clamoring about for years! A time-tested classic, this tried-and-true reference is often used as a textbook in cartooning workshops, and beginning and professional cartoonists alike are known to have copies of Cartoon Animation in their libraries. In this comprehensive title, famed animator Preston Blair shares his expertise on how to develop a cartoon character, create dynamic movement, and coordinate dialogue with action. Topics include character development, line of action, dialogue, timing, and, of course, animation! This valuable resource provides all the inspiration and information you need to begin drawing your own animated characters.

Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal

Vern

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Textbook on Seagal Movies 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Most books like this one are slim one-joke affairs that primarily are made up of plot synopisis culled from press releases or IMDB. Vern has put all of those to shame with his SEAGALOGY. He doesn't skimp on content or fills pages with worthless filler. It is also hilariously funny without being obvious. He has a respect for Seagal and it shows through. If I could get my department chair to approve a course looking at the cinematic ouvre of Steven Seagal, SEAGALOGY would be my textbook.

Editorial Review:

Vern, the self-styled ‘outlaw film critic’, is known to millions for his hilarious reviews on the Ain’t It Cool News website, and is described by Hellboy director Guillermo Del Toro as “equal parts Hell’s Angels and Pauline Kael... a national treasure!”

Now, finally, Vern is ready to unleash his magnum opus: an in-depth study of the world's only aikido instructor turned movie star/director/writer/blues guitarist/energy drink inventor — the ass-kicking auteur Steven Seagal. From Above the Law to his Mountain Dew commercials, his entire career is covered in Vern’s inimitable style.

As Vern himself puts it, Seagalogy is “a book that will shake the very foundations of film criticism, break their wrists and then throw them through a window."