Battle Cry: The Art of Samurai Champloo (Hardcover)

~ Geneon Entertainment (Author), Alan Wan (Editor), Grace Yang (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

This book is absolutely bursting with amazing art. Battle Cry is by far the most complete book of its kind. It features everything from character designs to finished illustrations and they are presented in the way they were meant to be seen with many full page layouts. The frenetic action and pace of the series is truly captured on these pages. An absolute must have for fans!

Product Details

• Hardcover: 180 pages
• Publisher: ABDOTC Publishing (August 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0978542975
• ISBN-13: 978-0978542979
• Product Dimensions: 10.7 x 9.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #747,904 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good collection of color and line art, November 21, 2008

By	Parka (Singapore) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Amazon Verified Purchase

Length:: 0:27 Mins

Samurai Champloo is one of my favourite anime. It has great action and the hip hop soundtrack is fantastic. I'm glad to say that the art book is pretty good too. It's a well-bind hardcover book that's about 13-inch (monitor measurements).

After reading the foreword, I realised that it was the creator of Cowboy Bebop, Shinichiro Watanabe, who directed this anime. No wonder it's good.

This art book is split into two halves. The first contains colour art and the latter line art. Both feature drawings for the background and characters.

Some of the colour art look very similar to the anime. The character art is, well, just great. I've great difficulty telling if they were actually screen shots from the anime. But most certainly they are not. There are background paintings of the places the three main characters went and others not used. I like particular the splash pages and some of the covers down for their DVDs.

There are plenty of character and background designs for the line art section. One bad thing here. The line art for the three main characters were just rehash from the coloured section without the colour. I was expecting to see more sketches for the main characters, especially Mugen.

There are no captions except for descriptions for the Fuu, Jin and Mugen.

Fans of Samurai Champloo should find this a satisfying book.

There are more pictures of the book on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Samurai Cham-pewey, March 23, 2009

By	Aaron "Cfffntc" (San Jose, Ca) - See all my reviews

Ok so first of all I am a total Samurai Champloo fan, but I am also an artist who collects "Art of" Books. The design of the hardcover is beautiful and the construction is solid. But the decisions that were made in the layout of the book are horrible.

The first part of the book shows really nice background art and environment paintings. Maybe 4 ish pages. The rest of the book consists of clip art from the samurai series which really destroys the consistency of the book. The layout is atrocious. One spread will have a really well thought out composition with detailed artwork to be followed by pixelated images. The print quality is all over the place. One spread has a pixelated image of Mugen pasted over a really beautiful background. Another spread has pixelated images of Jin pasted on a blurry background and the way he is pasted on the background makes him look like he's floating in the air.

The last tenth of the book contains character designs. The entire book is so so and doesn't have your typical feel for an "art of" book. If you want to look at pictures of the characters and love Samurai Champloo then you might enjoy this book for 5 minutes. If not I would recommend something else. Very disappointing book for such an amazing Anime. Does not do Samurai Champloo any justice...shame.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Inconsistent Quality, May 16, 2009

By	S. Fralich (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As another reviewer noted, the overall quality of this book is low for the price. The quality of some of the images, as well as the layout on some pages, is quite poor. If you're pining for anything Samurai Champloo, go ahead and buy it, otherwise, save your money.