Book Review: The Art of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

I was expecting something similar to the previous book, The Art of Pirates of the Caribbean. Unfortunately, it's not as good.

This is a 160-page hardcover book. The paper is great and they are really generous with the canvas size, opting to print everything big, photos and art, to the extent that it feels like more work could be included.

Character art is scarce. Since the previous art book collects artwork from the first three movies, you won't see those getting duplicated here. There are new zombies, mermaids and a few pirates (two actually with three illustrations total). Thankfully, the zombie pirates look awesome.

Much of the art are paintings of story scenes and the backgrounds. Some of them are printed really huge, covering two pages. A few don't have enough details to go over two pages - I'm comparing this to video games and 3D animated movies background art. The few background paintings that were scaled down to half page sizes look better.

There's not much prop art as well which is quite strange since that this is a prop-heavy movie.

If you love photographs, almost a quarter of the book is filled with them, some taken by Jerry Bruckheimer. Some photos take a whole page to themselves. They look good but I would have preferred more concept art instead.

The commentary comes in the form of script dialogues and descriptions, interesting insights on creating the designs. There are usually two to four paragraphs on a page with plenty of white space.

Nice art book overall, but it really feels like it could use more art - well, the previous art book was packed with art.

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