Book Review: Summer Wars: Material Book

Summer Wars: Material Book is the companion artbook for Summer Wars, the animated movie directed by Mamoru Hosoda. The original edition is サマーウォーズ完全設定資料集 which is in Japanese. Udon has translated the book into English.

The first section looks at the character designs. This film has a rather huge cast, and surprisingly they are all family members, except Kenji. That's 30 characters, including the dog Hayate. The designs are in line art form before they are coloured anime style. Character designer is Yoshiyuki Sadamoto

Next is the world of OZ. It's a rather big world with lots of things going on but the designs here are printed smaller, relatively speaking. All the props that appear are also too small, basically the items that are on the shelves. Then there are the many fun and interesting crowd avatar designs. Avatars with more screen time have additional pages of art. That would be for King Kazuma, Love Machine, Kenji, Natsuki and the others.

The back half of the book covers the environment art which consist the props, pencil layouts of the house and the colour painted versions. The detailed background drawings are mostly of the house, designed to be historic looking, and certainly looks very inviting. It would be so cool to live in such a house.

Also included is an interview with Mamoru Hosoda. Throughout the book are rather brief commentary on the designs.

It's a nice book to get if you're fan of the film.

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The book's a review copy from Udon Entertainment.

Summer Wars: Material Book is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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