Book Review: Marvel's Ant-Man: The Art of the Movie

Ant-Man's artbook has a similar presentation style like the earlier Marvel film artbooks that came before. As usual, the large hardcover comes with a slipcase. I'm glad to get this a local bookstore because it saved me some shipping cost to offset the higher than usual price of Marvel movie artbooks. The book comes in at 256 pages and it's filled with concept art and commentary from the staff and artists.

The character designs are for Ant-Man, Yellowjacket, Wasp, Hank Pym who are the main characters, and also several pages of art for the different types of ants. Environment designs are for Pym's residence, the secure room at Pym's basement, Pymtech and that's about all. Then there are some pages of storyboards, and a handful of other artworks for props. The main bulk, like 80 percent of the book, are the character designs and the scene paintings.

The Ant-Man designs are pretty cool. While cool, I feel they aren't really iconic. They look like suits worn by sci-fi pilots. Yellowjacket is visually more interesting, at least there are those claw-things coming out from the back. The ants that are carrying interesting tech accessories are rather cute.

Most of the scene paintings are of Ant-Man in some sort of action, whether he's carrying stacks of dollar bills or facing off with huge ants. To create the illusion of something small, or making something appear in macro mode, a lot of background blurring is used. That's to simulate the depth of field effect of camera lens that are used to take macro shot. It does work well the convey the miniature size. However, a lot of artworks have that blurred out effect so if you're someone who likes to see details, then this might be a shortcoming.

The main problem I have would be that many images are printed a bit too dark. Maybe they are drawn too dark to begin with. But it's really difficult to make out the details when it's too dark to see clearly. This is a similar problem with Thor: The Dark World's artbook. Another small issue is some images are blown up too big resulting in pixelation.

It's a good artbook, just that the character designs aren't that strong or striking when compared to other illustrious members of Avengers. Overall, I feel that it lacks the oomph of something special that would make this book even better.

4 out of 5 stars.

Marvel's Ant-Man: The Art of the Movie Slipcase is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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