Talking about this book will not be complete without mentioning LAIKA, the animation studio that made ParaNorman. They were founded in 2005 and this is their second film. Coraline (2009) was their first. I think they have tremendous faith in their craft of making stop motion films, especially in today's climate where 3D animated films seem to be more popular.

This 160-page hardcover artbook features a good amount of concept art and behind-the-scenes set photos that made the film possible. Most of the pictures are printed quite big.

It's interesting to see how the characters designed by Heidi Smith were created into actual puppets for animating. The fully clothed and painted puppets look amazing compared to the sketches.

I enjoy looking at the many production photos of the puppets, props, and the studio. You can see the detail that went into casting, molding and making of necessary parts like hair, clothing, metal armature, furniture, and just about everything in the world of ParaNorman. Photos of the tables where they keep working tools are great. There are countless brushes, screwdrivers, pincers, threads and an assortment of instruments whose purpose you can only guess.

The lengthy commentary covers the production process and explains how stop motion films are made nowadays. It might not be surprising to discover that they also use 3D printing for creating props.

It's a nice art and making-of book. Recommended to fans of animation, stop motion and the film.

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

Publisher Chronicle Books has also made this book available as a Kindle ebook. I bought it to see the difference.

The page you see above is loaded with the Amazon Cloud Reader instead of the Kindle app — I'm unable to install the Kindle app on my iPad since I'm not in USA.

The Kindle is best read in vertical format. Multiple pictures on the physical pages are split and presented in smaller numbers on the tablet, in this case it's two per page.

If you turn the tablet into landscape format, the Cloud Reader shows two pages, in this case each page has two pictures.

The quality of the images are alright. They are suppose to be web resolution, meaning they are just big enough to be view on the web without pixelation. The Kindle ebook is 19.6mb.

The moire pattern on the screen of my iPad is created by my camera, not the image itself.

This is how text and pictures look on a vertical page.

Font size can be changed.

Again, if you turn it landscape, it shows two pages on one screen, with smaller images.

It's probably obvious you should not buy this book to read on a black and white Kindle.

This is a screenshot of the web browser on my computer. Since there's more resolution, the Cloud Reader is able to display more images.

Here are some takeaway points on the Kindle ebook edition.

Landscape pictures will appear much smaller, and portrait pictures will appear bigger. The more interesting layout of the book is replaced by simpler flowing text and pictures. I'm not sure if I like this format. Perhaps it might be better if they were to release it in PDF so as to retain the layout.

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This book is available at:
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