This is a lovely art book for the movie Brave. This is number 13 for Pixar if anyone's counting.

The book's 160 pages and it's all filled with art and commentary. The concept art is great and you can really feel that everything really fits well together, the characters, the landscape and the stories. There are character designs, environment drawings, sculpts, storyboards and colorscript.

This is Pixar's first period film. The environment designs are a bit dark but that's because the movie is set in ancient Scotland. It's interesting to see a mythical and worn landscape as designed for animation. The colour choices are quite muted, perhaps to give more contrast to Merida.

The characters and art are delightful to look at. They are so full of personality. They have all sorts of characteristics and shapes that make them stand out. There are a few pages of storyboard sequences that are really great, even without words you know the chemistry between the characters and how they are feeling.

Steve Pilcher is the production designer and there's a lot of his charming drawings included. His pencil drawings really beautiful and dimensional. They really bring the characters and places to life. Other artists included are Carter Goodrich, Steve Purcell, Noah Klocek, Matt Nolte and more.

The book doesn't really talk about the story as a whole, but the text do cover the characters and their development. So there's bits and pieces of spoilers throughout.

Overall, it's a wonderful book put together by author Jenny Lerew. It's a good read with great art.

Highly recommended for fans of Pixar and animation art.

Below are some pictures from the book. I've filtered out all the spoiler parts except for the video. The whole video is a spoiler, so you'll want to skip that if you don't want spoilers.

The Art of Brave is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN) and Book Depository (US | UK)

Steve Pilcher

Environment concepts by Steve Pilcher

Steve Pilcher and Paul Abadilla

Concept art for Castle Dunbroch, Daniel Lopez Munoz and Steve Pilcher

This reminds me of the room in How to Train Your Dragon. Art by Paul Abadilla

The Standing Stones. Noah Klocek and Steve Pilcher

Carter Goodrich's characters are always delightful to look at.

Concept drawings for Merida by Steve Purcell and Matt Nolte.

Daniel Lopez Munoz and Carter Goodrich

Queen Elinor. Art by Steve Pilcher and Carter Goodrich

King Ferguson. Art by Matt Nolte, Steve Pilcher and Tony Fucile

Drawings for animals

More character designs from Matt Nolte and Carter Goodrich

Storyboards of the arrow shooting trailer.

Color scripts by Steve Pilcher, Noah Klocek, huy Nguyen, Armand Baltazar

The whole video below is a spoiler from the first second.

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