Book Review: The Art of Animal Crackers

Animal Crackers is a 3D animated film released officially by Netflix in 2020. I've actually not heard of this film until I saw this book. The film actually premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in 2017 but had problems with distribution which led to it being released only in 2020.

I've not watched the film so I can't say much about that but this artbook is fantastic.

This is a large format 156-page hardcover published by Blue Dream Studios, an imprint of IDW.

The book's packed with beautiful concept art for the characters, environments and props. There are character designs from Carter Goodrich, production design from Stefano Tsai, environment and stage design from Armand Serrano (who worked on Zootopia, Big Hero Six and Moana. The character designs look very different from the Pixar-style characters we're used to. There are plenty of sketches and some of the drawings are really detailed and very beautiful especially the environment art.

There's also a lot of text talking about the designs. The font they use for the text is some Comic Sans-like font though. I have to say that.

The last few pages feature coloured sketches from the journals of Scott Christian Sava. These pages document the film production process through a series of sketches. There are even notes about his observations on John Krasinski and Emily Blunt who were doing the voice acting. Slyvester Stallone also gave him some tips. The journal pages are a joy to see and read. This is as behind-the-scenes as behind the scenes content goes.

This is a wonderful companion artbook for the film. Highly recommended.

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

The book's also available from
https://www.gallerynucleus.com/detail/30875/
https://stuartngbooks.com/the-art-of-animal-crackers.html