Book Review: Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Art of the Animated Series

Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Art of the Animated Series

This is a wonderful art book for a spellbinding animation series. Making the series took 6 years, hundreds of artists, and hundreds of thousands of drawings. This book showcases a selection of some really beautiful illustrations.

There are loads of character and background designs inside, in sketches and in their finished coloured form. The main characters like Aang and others come with cool animation sequences created with pencils. Also included are many of the discarded concepts which were difficult to animate or doesn't suit the story. Appa had some really awesome spiral horns but were discarded, unfortunately. The character drawings are superb. Just by looking at their different expressions you can pretty much guess their characteristics.

Besides the characters which includes the town folks and soldiers, there are also drawings for many miscellaneous stuff like storyboards, airships, hybrid animals, wanted posters, promotional posters, chibi (or super deformed) style and random doodles from meetings.

Did I mention the background paintings? The world created is so beautiful!

The whole book is annotated heavily by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino. They talk about everything on production, from creating the pilot episode to Nickelodeon approving the final season. You can see and read about their influences and inspiration everywhere, from Buddhism, Studio Ghibli, Gainax, Chinese martial arts, etc. It's very interesting to see how they apply what they learned from research to their drawings and animation.

This is a fantastic art book for the series and fans, which should appeal to anyone who hasn't watch the series. Good art appeals to all.

Highly recommended!

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Avatar: The Last Airbender (The Art of the Animated Series) is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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11 Comments

Overall, the series was

Overall, the series was AMAZING. Best animated series to come out of the US in a long long time. So, i have no doubt the book will be good... just wish they would end the series better... like they were forced to. :S

I have always been a huge fan

I have always been a huge fan of AVATAR. This show is seriously awesome
It has been my dream to get my hand on this artbook. Thank you so much for the review.
I have purchased it from Amazon and can't wait for the arrival! *patiently wait*

I have searched for a blog full of artbooks review since forever! I am really glad I come across
your blog! Great review! Hope you do more reviews for anime artbooks especially c: <3

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