Book Review: The Art of ONI (Tonko House)

Beautiful characters in a beautiful world

This is the companion artbook for Oni: Thunder God's Tale, the animated series directed by Daisuke Tsutsumi and produced by Tonko House for Netflix.

This artbook is published by BlueSheep. It's a paperback with 224-pages. The paper used is low gloss matte textured and does affect the vibrance of the printed artworks slightly, but not in a bad way. The animated series was released in Japanese and English but the text in this artbook is unfortunately only available in Japanese though.

About 1/5 of the book is filled with film stills. The rest of the book has sketches, storyboards, character designs and behind-the-scenes photos. The art direction, characters and the world look so lovely.

The art in this book is the type that inspires people to be artists and animators. Of course you don't really expect anything less from Daisuke Tsutsumi whose resume includes working 10 years at Blue Sky Studios and 4 years at Pixar as art director. He's also the cofounder of Tonko House studio.

There is plenty to read in this book but because everything's written in Japanese, you will miss out a lot of information. From the photos included, I could tell the book covers the production process, how the project got started, the reception at the premiere, design notes for the characters and world, and 8 lengthy interviews with the staff.

This is a wonderful artbook. I hope there will be an English translated version in the future.

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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 of ONI (Tonko House) is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | AU | 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.