Book Review: The Art of Cars 2

This is a wonderful art book to the sequel of Cars. It's packed with sketches, storyboards, character designs, background drawings and also discarded concepts. There are plenty of new characters and bigger locations.

The visual contrast is huge, compared to The Art of Cars, as the characters travel to different race tracks around the world. There's a noticeable lack of traditional medium art with lots of digital paint over set renders, but the digital art looks great too. The grayscale pencil digital sketches look nice and detailed.

The environment designs are beautiful and extremely scenic. Lightning McQueen will be racing in three different countries, namely Tokyo, London and Italy, and other places.

It's interesting to see familiar places getting transformed into a car-friendly world. Even the famous Notre Dame and Lourve are redesigned to take on some automobile motif. Races in Tokyo and London are adapted to the cities. A new city was created for the Italian track with finesse to match the amazing architecture. Discarded concepts include Germany's Black Forest, Prague, a port and other buildings.

The character designs are lovely. Other than cars, there are now also boats, cranes and planes. Lightning McQueen has a new cooler design, one of a lightning turning into a flame. Mater has several makeovers as well. There are a few spies, those cars with guns fitted under their hood or on the wheels, geisha, sumo cars and the iconic London bus. There are some lemon cars as well, the automotive anomalies who are the bad guys in the film.

The book is spoiler-free as it talks only about the characters and places designed.

Highly recommended for Pixar fans and collectors.

-

The Art of Cars 2 is available on Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | JP | CN)Basheer Graphic Books

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.co.jp | Amazon.cn

This book was borrowed from Basheer Graphic Books for review purposes. You can order the book from them. Check with Basheer on Facebook or visit their website.