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May 9, 2018

Etienne Willem: Artbook Collection. Illustrated – Book Review by Fred Patten

by Pup Matthias

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Etienne Willem: Artbook Collection. Illustrated.
Geneva, Switzerland, Éditions Paquet, July 2017, hardcover, €20,00 (unpaged [94 pages]).

“Etienne Willem is a recognized cartoon author. Author of the semi-realistic crime series Vieille Bruyère and Bas de Soie, from L’épée d’Ardenois, starring animal characters in a medieval context, he is currently directing Les ailes du singe, taking the reader to a new dizzying air universe. A multi-talented author who will still amaze you in this completely new book.” (blurb, machine-translated & corrected)

Dogpatch Press reviewed volumes 3 and 4 of Willem’s 4-volume funny-animal The Sword of Ardenois, set in Medieval Europe, and the first two volumes of his funny-animal The Wings of the Monkey, set in Depression-era New York and Hollywood. (His Old Heather and Silk Stocking, a semi-serious 1920s-‘30s British detective series, isn’t anthropomorphic.)

Now here is a collection of Willem’s work, from rough sketches to model sheets, to parodies of popular dramatic comic-book artists like Frank Frazetta, and one-off drawings like a poster for a comic-book festival in Bastogne, and a beer label for the 2013 Comicsmania Festival in Belfaux-Corminboeuf, Switzerland. (No, I never heard of it, either.) Only about half of these are funny-animal, but his non-animal parodies like a team-up of Doctor Who (“the eleventh Doctor – the best”) and Harley Quinn may be appreciated by some of us, too.

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June 23, 2017

The Art of Cars 3, Foreword by John Lasseter – Book Review by Fred Patten

by Pup Matthias

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

The Art of Cars 3. Foreword by John Lasseter. Preface by Brian Fee.
Introduction by Bill Cone and Jay Shuster.
San Francisco, CA, Chronicle Books, May 2017, hardcover $40.00 (167 [+ 1] pages), Kindle $16.19.

This is the official de luxe coffee-table art book of the Disney•Pixar animated film Cars 3, released on June 16, 2017. It presents sample storyboards, pastels, digital paintings, preliminary character designs, computer models, and more, usually in full color; plus research photographs of the actual racing cars and the Daytona Speedway that were a main inspiration for the 99-minute feature film.

It has been acknowledged that these “art of” books featuring animated films are money-losers, subsidized by the advertising budgets for those films, made for the promotion of those films and for the morale of the artists and technical crews that produced them. The Art of Cars 3 is full of the art of the animators, layout artists, production designers, story artists, digital renderers, graphic designers, modelers, and others who created Cars 3. As usual for these “art of” books, each piece of art is identified by its artist: Paul Abadilla, Grant Alexander, Bert Berry, Bill Cone, Craig Foster, Louis Gonzales, John Hoffman, Josh Holtsclaw, Katherine Kelly, Noah Klocek, Ivo Kos, Kyle MacNaughton, Scott Morse, George Nguyen, Bob Pauley, Laura Phillips, Jerome Ranft, Xavier Riffault, Tony Rosenast, Andrew Schmidt, Jay Shuster, Garret Taylor, J. P. Vine, and others.

In addition, there are quotes from these artists. “The film opens with an exuberant burst of racing, reintroducing McQueen at the top of his game. The goal was to immerse the audience in the excitement of racing and show the camaraderie between racers. It can be bewildering to know how to begin, but having a temporary piece of music helps set the tempo. Then I’ll thumbnail, usually discarding tons of shots until it starts to flow and build in the right way.” –JP Vine, story artist. (p. 25)

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November 4, 2016

The Art of Trolls, by Jerry Schmitz – Book Review by Fred Patten

by Pup Matthias

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer

The Art of Trolls, by Jerry Schmitz. Foreword by Anna Kendrick.
Petaluma, CA, Cameron + Company, October 2016, hardcover $45.00 (160 pages).

Trolls is a 92-minute 3D computer-animated musical comedy fantasy feature film from DreamWorks Animation, released on November 4^th, 2016. The Art of Trolls is a coffee-table, full-color art book describing that film, and its making, in detail. Jerry Schmitz, the book’s author, is a Hollywood PR, marketing, brand management, and awards consultant veteran who has written several other The Art of animation books before. The foreword is by Anna Kendrick, the voice actress of Princess Poppy, one of the film’s two stars.

From a furry viewpoint, Trolls and this book are dubious subjects. No anthropomorphic animals appear in either. Yet the trolls aren’t human, either. If you consider humans to be a species of animals, then trolls qualify as anthros. Anyway, here it is. You decide if it is of interest to you.

The Art of Trolls is a de luxe art book about the film and its making, with detailed visual samples and background information. For those interested in the film, this book is worth getting for the names of all the characters alone. The rejected preliminary designs of the main characters will be fascinating, also.

The popular troll dolls as a merchandising phenomenon were created by Danish woodcutter and fisherman Thomas Dam in 1959, when he could not afford to buy a Christmas gift for his young daughter Lila. She showed the wooden dolls to her friends in Gjøl, Denmark; they all wanted troll dolls; Dam realized their potential; and he and his family created the Dam Things company to mass-produce them in plastic. Troll dolls became one of the biggest toy fads in the U.S. from 1963 to 1965, and have never stopped selling well. DreamWorks Animation licensed the rights to feature them in a movie in 2013. Here it is.

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November 3, 2016

Conventional Wisdom, by Arthur Drooker – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer

Conventional Wisdom, by Arthur Drooker. Foreword by James Wollcott.
NYC, Glitterati Inc., August 2016, hardcover $50.00 (191 [+ 1] pages).

This is a de luxe coffee-table art book of photographs by Arthur Drooker, an award-winning documentary and fine-art photographer/author whose work has been exhibited since 1980, and whose studies have been called “visual poetry”. For ConventionalWisdom, Drooker spent three years up to 2015 visiting “quirky” conventions throughout the U.S. “held by some unusual interest groups”. Each convention has about twenty pages devoted to it.

Drooker claims in his Introduction that a Convention Industry Council study shows that there are 1.8 million conventions, conferences, meetings, and trade shows in the U.S. every year. This book presents some of the most photographically exotic of these. As you have doubtlessly guessed, furry fandom is one of these unusual interest groups. So are the Bronies. Each is covered by Drooker; Anthrocon at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, and Bronycon at the Baltimore Convention Center. Each convention has an introduction of about four pages by Drooker.

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March 5, 2016

The Art of Zootopia, by Jessica Julius – Book Review by Fred Patten

by Pup Matthias

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

The Art of Zootopia, by Jessica Julius. Preface by John Lasseter. Foreword- Byron Howard, Rich Moore.
San Francisco, CA, Chronicle Books, March 2016, hardcover $40.00 (160 pages), Kindle $16.19.

Here it is! The coffee-table animation-art book that you’ve been waiting for! Note that the blurb says, “This lushly illustrated book offers a behind-the-scenes view of the elaborate artistry involved in creating the film.” The villain is revealed, but if you want the film’s story in detail, get Disney’s Zootopia Junior Noveliation.

The Art of Zootopia presents 160 pages of Zootopia artwork in closeup detail, with commentary by the Disney staff. There are not only finished designs, there are preliminary sketches and models showing early designs that were discarded.

“In an early iteration of the film, prey animals were dominant in Zootopia, so the motifs used in buildings reflected ther reality. We used vegetable patterns, leaf shapes, and flower murals in the architecture. –Dave Goetz, production designer” (p. 21).

“In early versions of the story, this division was overt, with prey animals exploiting their strength in numbers to dominate predators, who were forced to wear collars that prevented accidental expressions of their natural aggression.” (p. 28)

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