Book Review: The Art and Making of Pacific Rim Uprising

This movie companion Pacific Rim's sequel is a decent art and making of book, but not as good as the first book though.

This book is a mix of concept art and film production stories. Let's talk about the concept art first.

There is a generous amount of concept art for the drivesuits, Jaegers, Kaijus, weapons and environments such as interiors, sets and damaged cityscapes. The designs look great. For me, it's always fun to look at robot or mecha designs, and there are plenty of them. To see the giant robots and monsters battle each other against the backdrop of the cityscape is something people are willing to pay money for. The juxtaposition of Jaegers standing or crashing beside buildings is enough to create the sense of awe.

While the designs are good, the style used to render the designs is more CGI compared to the first book. The style here is rougher. The first book has more sketches, and the designs and scenes were better drawn and coloured. The art is still good though and there are plenty to see, together with a mix of behind the scenes photography.

The writeup is detailed and lengthy. It talks about the film production process, how the sequel came about, character development and the story (spoilers obviously). Those who want to learn more about how the film was made should enjoy the insightful text.

Oh, throughout the book, there are little booklets pasted onto the pages that show off additional designs. For example, one is a size comparison chart for the Jaegers and Kaijus. Another has unused Jaeger concepts. There are more of such attachments which is sort of unnecessary because they would have just design those into the page layout. The idea of such booklets was cool when it was first used but when you really think about it, they are just ornaments.

Overall, this is quite a substantial book with lots of content and one that's still worth getting for fans of the films or people who collect such artbooks. It would have been terrific if it could match the quality of the first book though, which was one of my favourite art books for that year.

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

The Art and Making of Pacific Rim Uprising is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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