Customer Reviews

The Art of The Incredibles

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I just recieved my copy of this 3rd Pixar-Art-Book in the series (The Art of Monsters Inc and the Art of Finding Nemo were also designed to the same style and dimentions) and Im more than happy!!!

Again there are tons of conceptual drawings, collages and pencil-sketches. Litterally an explosion of colours and talent! The text takes only a small part of the book which is great cause all of us want to see the conceptual artwork (we can always learn tons of info and trivia when the Special DVD set will be out).

Looking at the countless colour studies, again it is Mary Blair that sparkles behind them. It is so touching to see that this new generation of artists, that work with the latest digital technology have so much education and have studied the work of Mary Blair in such a depth that that to anyone who loves her work it almost feels like a Tribute to her amazing sense of colour and design (just check the drawing of the island and you'll see how similar is to the Neverland island of Peter Pan).

Personally I feel that this book is a necesary companion to the movie! All these treasures of the early conceptual drawings reveal another angle of Pixar, a more delicate and sofisticate side, that with the final digital artwork it can't be visible...

Congratulations to this fantastic team of artists and to their boss who give them the Freedom and the time to create all this awesome inspirational artwork!!!
I never saw something similar since Walt Disney left this planet.

The bookbinding is perfect (the Incredibles Logo is embosed to the front cover under the dust-jacket) and the printing is bright and great! A real 5-star artbook!!!

Length:: 0:46 Mins

There's a lot of different artistic style in the book. When Brad Bird came to Pixar, he brought with him his team of artists, those that had worked with him on The Iron Giant.

Each artist produced concept art using different materials and style. There are collage, gouache, digital, marker, acrylic and pastel. Each drawing generates ideas and inspiration. You'll have no idea the movie was created for art so varied. There are no rendered stills from the movie.

The book touches mainly on character design and artistic direction of the movie.

If you want the process of creating The Incredibles, you'll want to grab the DVD instead. There are pretty comprehensive behind the scenes included in the DVD.

(More pictures are available on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)

I'm 13 and I want to make a story with a retro/modern theme. I closely watched the Incredibles and saw that was the theme! So I bought the book, very excited. It arrived. It was used, so it had a few tears and some markings, but thats ok. I read the book rather quickly, which I was upset about because I wish it was longer. It was good, but I felt I was expecting more. More pictures. I noticed there was a lot on Edna's house. I wish there were more pictures on the characters like Mirage, and there was text about creating the characters. Nevertheless, it was a great book and if you want a nice book of retro themed artwork, go ahead and buy this. I'm thinking of buying the postcards and framing them, or putting them in an album.

_The Art of The Incredibles_ is a lot of fun, it's even more fun after you've seen the movie and can read this book to learn about how they did what they did and why they made the artistic choices they made. The descriptions of the creative process and the drawings showing the evolutions of the concepts and characters in the movie are fascinating and often amusing (such as the various conceptions of the character of Edna Mode). If you're a fan of the movie you'll really love this book.

Sure, all of these "Art of" Pixar books are great, and any animator or animation lover should own them. However I was least impressed by this one. It just doesn't seem to have the quality in design or content that all the other Pixar books have. It also doesn't show a good progression from the concept drawings to the final product, and the explainations of plot and character developement is weak. I think a far better book is the Art of Ratatouille book. Tons of ideas, concepts, huge paintings, explainations of used and unused characters, logo designs...that book just has it all. I feel that this one fell flat.

If you collect these art of books like me, I would recommend you get this one because there is good work here...but save it for last, the quality and design are just not up to par with the other pixar books. First I would recommend: The Art of Rataouille, The Art of Finding Nemo, The Art of Pixar Shorts, The art of Monsters Vs. Aliens and The Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs Art book...those are all beautiful top quality books!

First of all, if you love the movie, you just have to get this book. It's a beautiful companion to the film. It's filled with beautiful full-color art from the production of The Incredibles. This art is strongly influenced by 60's era design principles. There is a smooth simplicity to the designs. Also, the use of color is a joy to see. For those who are looking for art from the process of animation, you might be disappointed, because there is none. You wouldn't want to look at process art for computer animation anyway. You'd just see a bunch of cubes and spheres on a computer screen. This book is for those who relish the dream that occurs in the formation of the story and in the development of character and scene designs. To see this pre-production art is an inspiration, and gives insight into what might have been, and how it had developed in the early stages of production. As for text, there isn't much, and a little more would be better. Hopefully we'll get more in depth info on the bonus disk of The Incredibles DVD. In the meantime, all Incredibles fans should pick up this beauty.

The Incredibles is one of my favorite Pixar movies, and I loved the art direction in it. Exaggerated character designs without being too over the top, locations having that classic 50s American look, and the colors were perfect. So getting The Art of The Incredibles, I was expecting a really special art book, full of great art, and some rough drafts and sketches of how the characters and locations came to be. Instead, what I got was a book pretty much full of final drafts and concept art for the settings, and barely anything with the characters. It was pretty disappointing, especially with how much text they cram in here, but for the die hard fans of The Incredibles, it's a decent buy.

The Supers get most of the character design pages, of course, with a couple sketches of extras like the kid who sees Mr. Incredible lift his car in his driveway. All of these are drawn nicely, but more or less seem to be the finished design for the characters. When you compare this to something like The Art of Monsters vs Aliens, where you got to see the evolution of the main characters, it makes you wonder if they just went with the first design that was drawn, or if they just plain didn't want to put them in here for whatever reason. I was really hoping for some good sketches of Elastigirl and Syndrome, and only got a handful of drawings resembling how they look in the movie, nothing else. There's also a small collection of maquettes of the main characters.

But the majority of this book is locations, ranging from small rooms to the vast jungle The Incredibles are taken to, and the city where the rest of the action takes place in. Nearly everything is presented in large squares, and the dimensions are listed below the drawings. While the locations look nice, and I appreciate the work that went into them (especially the more 'modern' ones that are essentially made up of shapes), I kept getting the feeling that everything here was final, and we could've really used some actual drawings without the final touches. For people interested in landscapes and drawing cities, you'll learn a thing or two from this section.

I'm more of a character design person, but like I said, I can appreciate the hard work that goes into designing a location. But would it have hurt to have even 10 more pages of character concept art? Some of the drawings like Gazerbeam's skeleton were just plain stunning, and more pieces like that would've bumped the score up a little for me. In the end, I guess The Art of The Incredibles tries to go along with the time period it styles itself after rather than going for a more standard art book presentation. And while that's pretty cool of them, it sucks that I have to resort to going online for the good stuff that didn't make the cut. Don't pay more than the original retail price for this one.

The Incredibles remains my favorite Pixar film to date. I was very excited to read this book and I very much looked forward to seeing the progression from rough ideas to finished product.

Sadly, this was not what the book delivered.

The art in the book is rough and garish. The few development drawings and maquettes that are included are overshadowed by the gaudy, cut-paper collage versions of the characters that are featured on almost every page. Of all the artists that worked on this film, only a paltry few were chosen to have their work featured in this title and after a few pages the "sameness" of the chosen work dulled any enthusiasm I might have had for it.

I must also agree that the art strikes me as very early pre-production work as it has very little visual relation to what wound up on the screen. There is almost no development or evolution of the characters or sets shown and little to no mention of how these rough versions became the final polished movie. It seems to me to be an illustration of one single moment in the movie's development rather than a comprehensive look at all the art and creativity that went into the film. And a rushed one at that.

This is an interesting coffee-table book, certainly something avid collectors would want in their library. But for those of us looking for an insight into the vast process of creative development in such a wonderful movie . . . I'm afraid we will have to look elsewhere.

This book is all about art. It really showcases the fun the people up at pixar have developing and refining the story and look of what we see on the screen.

I saw _The Incredibles_ in the theatre, & was blown away. When it came out on DVD, I bought it immediately, & have since watched it three more times, something I've done with only a few other films of any sort.

After sitting through that delightful & well-crafted rollercoaster, what stood out most in memory was the artwork in the closing credits. And when I watched the Features & noted the artwork tacked to the walls in the studio, I needed to find out more.

The heroes of this film, for me, are the artists who created apparently most of those angular saturated-color "sketches," Lou Romano (primarily responsible for the closing-credits illustrations) & Teddy Newton (whose techniques of creating "sketches" & panels from cut-out bits of photographs). Between them, they seem to have provided half of what's in the book.

The book looks pricey until you realize that it's entirely on heavy gloss paper. I entirely recommend this to artists of any stripe (advertising, fine arts, computer rendering) & to digital renderers from programmers to detailers -- this shows you what you start with & some tantalizing little bits of evolution. And, it's simply a great bit of fun & visually amazing.