14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Impressions, indeed!, November 25, 2007
This review is from: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind: Watercolor Impressions (Studio Ghibli Library) (Hardcover)
I ordered this more out of curiosity than anything else, expecting a fairly slim volume on a par with the Nausicaa comics: instead, it comes in as a pretty hefty tome, with many of Miyazaki's covers and "thinking out loud on paper" moments. His commentary (mainly captions to each image) is humble and reveals an intriguing glimpse into the mind of one of Japan's most famous and prolific Anime directors. I mean seriously, you'd never read a Pixar or Disney director apologies about "I didn't want to do a magazine cover, but the art director was insistent", or even revealing his intent to use Oni as main characters early in preproduction (yeah, those never made it to the final film).
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful impressions, April 14, 2010
This review is from: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind: Watercolor Impressions (Studio Ghibli Library) (Hardcover)
Length:: 0:32 Mins
Here's the other art book for Nausicaa, the other being The Art of Nausicaa, which is in Japanese and not available to English as it wasn't translated. This one collects all the art created using watercolour for both the manga and film.
About half of the book is on the manga. There aren't any comic panels but you'll see a lot of covers, such as those he did for Animage, a Japanese anime and entertainment magazine. The covers are printed huge, often fullpage. Very beautiful and feels very different from the mainstream manga with the use of watercolour. If you remove the dust jacket, you'll see some of the Animage covers that have been published.
For the film section, there are storyboards, background concept art and character designs. Since I've the other art book as well, I see a bit of duplication of drawings, but printed in different sizes.
There's plenty of accompanying commentary for the art. He talks about everything from his thoughts on drawing covers, which he dislikes, and drawing Nausicaa (character) out of character, which he dislike even more. You'll find a lot of interesting stuff regarding clashes with his artistic vision for the manga and film at that time. At the back is a longer piece of interview which looks at how the idea of making Nausicaa came about.
All the drawings that appear in this book are drawn by Miyazaki, dating way back to 1982. It's amazing to see how far Miyazaki has come.
Nausicaa and Miyazaki fans will find this book to be a nice collectible.
(There are more pictures of the book on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A rare and interesting look into Miyazaki's Nausicaa, October 17, 2008
This review is from: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind: Watercolor Impressions (Studio Ghibli Library) (Hardcover)
This book is excellent. It combines great concept art, poster art and background info on the Nausicaa movie and manga by Hayao Miyazaki. The attention to detail and research undertaken to create Nausicaa and the world she inhabits is breath taking. The progression of basic ideas (wanting to do a Japanese period drama anime of 'Beauty and the Beast') to final concept (creating 'Nausicaa' as we see her today) was especially interesting to me. This book is a high-quality coffee-table book. The only downside is that many of Miyazaki's comments on his work are especially self-deprecating. Cheer up mate! Highly recommended. 10/10
I don't know if the other Art of Nausicaa book found at Amazon is similar or the same. Can anyone help there?
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