Book Review: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind: Watercolor Impressions

Submitted by  Teoh Yi Chie on  April 14, 2010 - 12:47 pm

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind: Watercolor Impressions

Here's the other art book for Nausicaa, the other being The Art of Nausicaa. This one collects all the art created using watercolour for both the manga and film.

About half of the book is on the manga. There aren't any comic panels but you'll see a lot of covers, such as those he did for Animage, a Japanese anime and entertainment magazine. The covers are printed huge, often fullpage. Very beautiful and feels very different from the mainstream manga with the use of watercolour. If you remove the dust jacket, you'll see some of the Animage covers that have been published.

For the film section, there are storyboards, background concept art and character designs. Since I've the other art book as well, I see a bit of duplication of drawings, but printed in different sizes.

There's plenty of accompanying commentary for the art. He talks about everything from his thoughts on drawing covers, which he dislikes, and drawing Nausicaa (character) out of character, which he dislike even more. You'll find a lot of interesting stuff regarding clashes with his artistic vision for the manga and film at that time. At the back is a longer piece of interview which looks at how the idea of making Nausicaa came about.

All the drawings that appear in this book are drawn by Miyazaki, dating way back to 1982. It's amazing to see how far Miyazaki has come.

Nausicaa and Miyazaki fans will find this book to be a nice collectible.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind: Watercolor Impressions is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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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.es | Amazon.co.jp | Amazon.cn

The original Japanese version is also available at:
amazon.co.jp | CDJapan.co.jp

Here's the Amazon Japan buying guide for your reference.

Tags
studio ghibli
art book reviews
watercolour
asian art books
hayao miyazaki

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