The Art of Missing Link
was kind of a missed opportunity. I went and saw the movie which was really good, but the Art of book was not very impressive when it comes to showing character designs and the stuff that I love to see. First off you have some very talented Character Design artists who have done some amazing designs for all of these characters, Their design style feels like Ronald Searle which I love and I wanted to see more of it. But sadly there are very few pictures for each of the characters and some of the pictures are the size of a 2 stamps small. The prioritization and importance of the pictures was really off too. For example they crammed Willard Stenk and his gang (a total of 4 characters which were my favorite characters in the film) all on to 1 page. which means there were 9 small pictures crammed onto one page. And then right on the next page you have 1 whole page for the one dog, which has a big model sheet and 4 pictures of the stop motion puppet that they used in the show. (((What The Heck)))The other thing that was sad is that there was very few pictures of designs of each of the characters. I am sure there are a lot more pre-designs and exploration drawings of the characters than the very few they show, and there was a lot of text, that could have been filled up with artwork. in the 176 pages. I Hope in the future if Laika makes another art of books for their next film, it will have more art work, less text, wasted space, and prioritize their artwork a lot better. I don't need to see page after page of color keys, or a still pictures of an animator posing a puppet or someone painting a prop. I wanted to see more artwork that I love
P.S. for those of you that want to see some really good stuff from Juliaon Roles who was a main Character Designer on this film, go to his Tumblr site here - https://juliaon.tumblr.com/ and see what kind of artwork this guy is producing and what types of artwork they could have filled this book with.
I give it a very disappointing 1.5 out of 5
