Book Review: The Boy and the Beast Artbook

This is nice companion book fro 2015's animated film The Boy and the Beast.

It's a large format paperback with 208 pages. The book uses two paper quality, the bright white paper for coloured art and the newsprint like paper for sketches and text.

The content is split up into three sections. The first covers the environment art and they are arranged in chronological order. I love Japanese background art and the ones in the book look beautiful. However, in terms of design, it's actually not too radical as most are still Japanese inspired suburbs. The art style is very similar to those from the Kusanagi artbooks.

The middle section contains the character profile line art, storyboards and plenty of writeup. All the text are in Japanese.

The final section talks about the special effects and how different parts of the film are made. For example, they have a walkthrough of how textures are applied to the 3D models, and how other scenes are painted. It also talks about how the crowds of people are added.

It's a good companion overall for fans of the film. You'll get more from the book if you know Japanese.

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