Book Review: Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water: Creating a Fairy Tale for Troubled Times

All the film production books for Guillermo Del Toro related movies that I've featured has been terrific so far, and I'm glad to see that the same quality here with this book.

The Shape of Water: Creating a Fairy Tale for Troubled Times is a rather comprehensive making-of book that's filled with plenty of stories, artworks and fantastic behind the scene photography.

The 160-page book is split into three parts, talking about the characters, making of the creature and the filming process which goes through the main acts of the movie in sequence.

Much is written about the complexity of the characters. There's a lot of details. For example, there are two page bio of Zelda D. Fuller, Giles Dupoint and Dimitri Antonovich Mosenkov written by Guillermo Del Toro himself. Those include things like age, family tree, secret dreams, likes, dislikes, and stories of the lives that made them who they are in the movie.

Set design in Guillermo Del Toro's films has always been amazing. Now you get to read about how the sets are designed, the offices, water tanks, how the creature's costume was made. There are also hand written notes and drawings from Guillermo Del Toro.

The coverage on the creature's costume is extensive. It talks about the design process, like how it must designed for the colours to look right because some scenes are dark and there are underwater scenes that affect colours. There are photos of the life size maquette, photos of the different stages of putting on the costume, the material used to construct the costume suit, the wear and tear the costumes suffer during filming, e.g. water damage.

It's interesting to read about the various aspects of filming. For example, it talks about how tiring it was for Doug Jones, the actor inside the creature costume, how he has to kneel for extended periods during filming, and how the crew would massage his legs to prevent them from going numb. There's also info on how the dance dream sequence was filmed. Needless to say, the book is full of spoilers as it covers almost everything.

It's a fantastic companion to the film. Highly recommended to the fans as well as those who love reading about movie production.

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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.

Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water: Creating a Fairy Tale for Troubled Times 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.