Book Review: The Art of Oz The Great and Powerful

The Art of Oz The Great and Powerful is more of a visual companion to the movie rather than an artbook. As an artbook, it falls short but as a visual companion it's wonderful.

The selected artworks included are mainly the concept art for the environment, basically the forests, China land and castles. There aren't a lot of artwork so it's disappointing, but of those included they are beautiful. I was expecting more artwork since the backdrop for the film is mainly computer generated. Surely there would be a lot more artworks to reference from. The magical land of Oz is also a highlight so the book feels lacking when it comes to showing how it's actually created.

Other pictures in the book are the indoor photos of the set, actors and behind the scenes.

The writeup is from Grant Curtis who has produced Sam Raimi's last six project. He also wrote The Spider-man Chronicles which is a book I like very much for the incredibly detailed production diary.

The Oz book covers in detail the production process, stuff like building the sets, integrating with computer graphics, creating the costumes, and more. They would talk about their references, such as getting inspiration for trees from the old Disney animated movies. Another interesting part is on how they manage to bring the China girl to life using a mixture of old school puppetry and computer graphics.

My other quibble is the book's spine. It doesn't seem strong enough for this 256-page paperback. Mine is showing signs of creasing on the spine.

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