Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
FIlled with Awesomeness, 29 Sep 2008
After watching the film I was blown away by the pure artistic nature of the film and went about searching for the art book.
I was drawn in immediately, the book itself is presented beautifully, showing off larger scale work which can be folded out into double page spreads as well as smaller thumbnail work of character sketches and development throughout the story, including storyboards.
The text is not tedious to read and is an interesting insight into the development of a story, it is well placed and does not over crowd the book.
A great book to own for any fan of them film.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Shooting Darts of Awesome-ness and More, 13 Feb 2009
Length:: 0:41 Mins
This book shot darts of awesome-ness into my eyes! (Man, that was cheesy.)
It also screamed "character design" after you flip through the pages. Nicolas Marlet designed all these beautiful characters in the world of Kung Fu Panda. Pages after pages were devoted to character design.
Each major character had their own chapters and comes with an interesting background story, explaining how the characters came from research, went into concept, and then designed.
Every prop and design had a purpose and meant something relating to Chinese history. The artists understand body language very well, and they show it by posing the characters to reflect that knowledge.
Large frames were printed throughout the pages, depicting movie scenes. The level of detail was very high if you look at the drawings done on the set. Even the title typography of the book was designed to mimic Chinese words.
This book is worth getting even if you haven't watched Kung Fu Panda. It's inspiring for anyone who loves art, or work with art.
There are more pictures on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for my blog's link.
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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nicolas Marlet's illustrations make this book, a beautiful book but I do miss the earlier 'Art of' editions...., 16 Jul 2008
Firstly, I really cannot stress enough how beautiful Nicolas Marlet's illustrations are, he creates wonderful characters and anyone who loves character art cannot help but enjoy the mans illustrative comic talent. I would have bought the book alone for his drawings and if Dreamworks had had the insight to print all his sketch books relating to Kung Fu Panda I would have bought that also. I love his work, free and inspirational and anyone who can make others laugh in a few simple lines has a gift. So I highly recommend this book to all you illustrators and animators, a beautiful drawing can say more about how a character is to be animated than any text and Marlet's work must have been very influential to the films evolution.
Ever since I was a kid, I'd buy an animation art book almost yearly. The Art of The Lion King was probably the first art book of this type I ever had given to me and it kindled my love of animation art all the more, finally in these pages were beautiful concept illustrations, story board art works, inspirational paintings and final prints from the film, all of which were bound up in beautifully presented cloth covered large scale folio editions (originally printed by Hyperion). Books like these emphasised the storytelling process the Disney studios believed in and presented imagery which spoke volumes above the text, since the key to all great artistic works be it in animation, illustration, theatre design or film is the artists ability to simply draw from life, observe it, relish it and understand it -- and from that process you have great storytelling, you need imagination naturally and that's the art part, how you see marks you out ........... these books just need to show us more art when the film was evolving as that is inspirational and they could be designed better.
This is a fine book but doesn't really live up to my expectations when compared to what came before. It is smaller, I can't see the point in printing images which are the size of postage stamps on these pages and I want to see more final, well chosen film prints and pencil, painterly, illustrations than any image which has a digital smooth feel, ultimately this lack texture and evokes little.
But buy the book for Nicolas Marlet's illustrations, they live up to the films impact!
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