Book Review: The Art of Mr. Peabody and Sherman

This is a nice companion artbook to the movie Mr Peabody and Sherman. I like the cover which has the 1960s style cartoon characters walking through the door and turning into characters with more detail.

The film and artbook is the modern day adaptation of the 1960s cartoon animation Peabody's Improbable History segments from the television animated series Rocky and Bullwinkle. It's pretty well done and quite fun to see how the simple and classic characters are interpreted for big screen, and also how the historical characters turn out, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Cleopatra and many more.

The artbook features a mixture of character designs, environment art, scene paintings and props. The art direction is very much influence by the cartoon animation, the designs are still stylized but with more details added. The designs are great. The artworks are mostly full coloured, but it feels like they would also work well visually if everything were to be drawn with just pen and ink like for newspaper comics, where you can't use too much detail.

I like the environment designs, such as for Peabody's place which is really modern, sleek and yet has a sense of retro, and Sherman's room is really cosy and filled with stuff just like kids. There are also designs for the places they visited in history, such as Egypt, Florence, Troy, etc. I wish there could be more.

At the end of the book is a Q&A session featuring Mr Peabody and Sherman talking about the technical aspect of making of one sequence in the movie. It's a simplified version of the really complicated work that DreamWorks Animation do to create the movie using 3D.

Wonderful book.

Note that there are two publishers for the book. Publisher Insight Editions are the ones distributing for USA, and publisher Titan Books for other places.

The Art of Mr. Peabody and Sherman (publisher Insight Editions) is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

The Art of Mr. Peabody & Sherman (publisher Titan Books) is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

The Art of Mr. Peabody and Sherman