Avatar: The Last Airbender : The Art of the Animated Series [ハードカバー]

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!

(There are more pictures of the book on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)

An awesome collection of pre-production art; character designs, props, backgrounds, example of storyboards and animation. This book covers all three seasons, episode by episode, from its pilot episode to the grand finale of Sozin's comet.
It is a beautiful collection, presented in a nice hardcover book. There is so much material, it is almost a shame the publisher didn't do one book for each seasons and printed some of the pictures bigger.

If you're looking to have an inside look at the great artworks produced for this show, this is a must have book for all fans of the series.

For ANY fan of the series, this is an ABSOLUTE must-have. This book is jam-packed with all sorts of goodies, plus stuff I didn't expect to have. I've always loved seeing rough sketches and idea drawings, and this book does not fail to disappoint.

You get a huge treasure trove of backgrounds, paintings, character designs, and notes. It truly is an amazing read.

Like Johane said, it's almost a shame that there isn't a separate book for each season, because there's just so much good stuff in here. It's almost too much - I do wish some of the drawings were bigger. At 184 pages, I cannot help but wonder why the creators of this book didn't just spring for 200. On one page, there is a lineup of portraits of five Fire Lords, but they're so small that I have to use a magnifying glass to really look at all the details of these pictures (the images are no more than a couple of inches high) It would be nice to have several pages - even foldout - so we can examine these images to our fullest pleasure. It is due to the size of some of the images in this book that I cannot give it a perfect 5 stars - I can only give it 4.5 at best.

Still, this is a pretty sweet collectible full of lovely artwork and other goodies that should not fail to disappoint even the most die-hard Avatar fan. And if you have a friend or family member who is an Avatard, believe me, this is a gift that WILL make their day.