Walt Disney Animation Studios The Archive Series #3: Design

These are the most beautiful books. I Purchased all three in this Archive Series For my son who is a Stop motion Animation Student soon to graduate and he absolutely loves them so do I…they are very large table top books, and are so totally worth the price. The Magic of Disney…is in the pages of these books full of dreams and wonderment…Who ever purchases these books…will not be disappointed.

Not very many years ago, a slew of well produced, high quality, large format books appeared to laud and illustrate the Disney animated features appearing at that time. Titles included, “The Art of the Lion King”, “The Art of Mulan” and “The Art of The Hunchback of Notre Dame”. These books were indeed ‘coffee table’ in format and were all the better for it. The information and art work fully utilised the large format and in so doing paid due tribute to the artistry of all involved in the making of those movies. In more recent years the production values have noticeable dropped and more recent animated features, among them such excellent examples as Bolt and Tangled, have been accorded a much reduced “Art of” format for the authors and illustrators to work within. In addition to the reduced size of the book, the weight of the paper and the quality of the printing has never quite seemed as good as it used to be. With this Archive Series however, the publishers have obviously recognised that aficionados of ‘the art of the art’ will expect higher production values and, even though the size of the books is still smaller than the illustrations deserve, the other values seem to have been observed, at last. I look forward to seeing further titles in this excellent series.

Un libro eccellente, come gli altri tre della serie Archives del resto. Uscito nel Novembre 2010 questo ripercorre, attraverso una selezione degli elaborati più significativi (molti dei quali fino ad oggi inediti), il faticoso processo di studio che riguarda proprio il design di personaggi e location dei corto e lungometraggi Disney attraverso gli anni. Acquarelli, pastelli, tempere, matite, digital painting, ecc. sono i mezzi utilizzati per costruire l’impalcatura di un film d’animazione e fissare lo stile grafico dello stesso, prima ancora che abbia inizio la vera fase di produzione.

This title is the longest of the three at 288 pages, and all the other aspects are the same: no table of contents, short introduction, and many many large format pictures beautifully reproduced.

This is a particularly nice title as it contains more color than the other two, Story and Animation. It was a real treat to see some of Mary Blair’s work in addition to many other phenomenal artists. This title contained a lot more landscape work in addition to character.

This is the latest title in the Archive series and I highly recommend buying all three. I’m looking forward to the 4th title to be released, Layout and Background. I’m not sure how many will be released for the series, but these are keepers to be treasured for a lifetime.

If you like Disney, then this book provides superb samples of their work. It’s essentially an image book. And as always I love sketches.

Worth the buy, if your looking for more historical text then don’t.

The Walt Disney Archive Series has already set the bar quite high with the first two entries in this series – Story and Animation. However, the release of Design sets new levels when it comes to quality, content and presentation. This book is packed with beautiful preproduction and design art that includes watercolors, drawings, sketches, color studies, and digital paintings. Some of Eyvind Earle’s paintings for Sleeping Beauty are included as well as Chris Sander’s storybook inspirational art for Lilo and Stitch. There are character design sketches for the Beast and Gaston by Glen Keane and Andreas Deja. There’s several pages covering the Black Cauldron which features two inspirational paintings by James Coleman as well as character sketches by Tim Burton, and there’s much, much more. Though I’ve collected most of the “art of” books from Disney, I haven’t seen many of the works displayed in this book.

While the first two books were amazing, what’s great about Design is that in most of the artwork, all of the elements of character, color, design and background are coming together. It’s almost like flipping through a lavishly illustrated children’s book of many different styles and viewpoints. One could frame much of the work shown in this book and be quite pleased with them hanging on your wall. It really is a terrific book.

Rico em detalhes, lombada em pano, o livro é grande e pesado, qualidade das páginas muito boa.
Recomendo todos os livros dessa série.