Book Review: The Art of Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted

This is another good art book from Dreamworks and Insight Editions. I like this more than the first book, which is pretty good as well.

Designs for the main characters are already in the first book so they aren't repeated here. What's included are designs for new animals they meet from the circus, the villains and the miscellaneous crowd. The character designs from Craig Kellman are quite funny. For the villains, they look like cartoons, as with their 3D models.

Character designs are about one third of the book. The rest are concept art for locations, storyboards and props like trains, planes, automobiles, banana shooting machine guns, etc.

The Zoosters are now trying to find their way back to New York, and they are traveling with the circus to places like Monte Carlo, Monaco, Rome, The Alps and finally back to New York. It's feels very different from the wilderness art of forest in Africa. Beautiful art from Ken Pak, Lindsey Olivares, Erwin Madrid, Goro Fujita, and other artists.

I like that most of the art are printed quite big. Those printed across two pages are fantastic.

Towards the end, there's an interesting section on the more technical aspects of making the film. It covers stuff like rigging, modeling, visual effects and matte painting.

It's a great art book for the movie.

The Art of Madagascar 3 is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN) and Book Depository (US | UK)