Book Review: The Art of Turbo

I wasn't expecting much from an art book based on a movie whose main character is a snail. Surprisingly, the art book is quite good. Dreamworks is the company putting out the film Turbo after all.

The snails' character designs are cute. The artists have removed the slime and drawn them in different colours and shapes. They have lots of interesting shells too. The best and funny ones are from the racing snails who have racing engine shells. Glossy shells with exhaust pipes that discharge flames. Another one carries around a dead bumble bee. Nice. There are a few simple human character designs as well. Character designers are Shannon Tindle, Sylvain Deboissy, Takao Noguchi among others.

The scene paintings are beautiful. The composition and the colours are really nice. Some of them are painted by Dominique R. Louis and Mike Hernandez. They are great with light and colours.

The storyboards from Macros Mateu-Mestre look fantastic. Just simple grayscale but effective storyboards with good composition that you can blow them up to any size and they will still look great.

I love the Tacos shop designs also. While heavily stylised, they still look so believable like customers have been eating there for a long time. Then there are the designs for the race track and some of the F1-like racing cars.

There's plenty of commentary from the staff, and a funny foreword by Ryan Renolds who presented himself as an animation noob in front of Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Like I said, surprisingly good art book with a snail on the cover.

The Art of Turbo is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

Visit Amazon to check out more reviews.

If you buy from the links, I get a little commission that helps me get more books to feature.

Here are direct links to the book:
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr | Amazon.it | Amazon.es | Amazon.co.jp | Amazon.cn