Walt Disney Animation Studios The Archive Series (Walt Disney Animation Archives) [ハードカバー]

The Archive Series: Story is a huge and thick hardcover book. Although the title has the word "story" in it, readers looking for the Disney storytelling process will be sorely disappointed. John Lasseter's foreword is pretty much all the text in the book.

This book is about storyboards.

Over hundreds of storyboard panels are included in the book, for movies and shorter episodes. Some of the titles include The Three Little Pigs, Snow White (1937), Dumbo (1941), Alice in Wonderland (1951), The Jungle Book (1967), Beauty and the Beast(1991) and a whole lot more, including lesser known ones. The latest one is the 2002 Lilo & Stitch. This book is an archive of storyboards created for traditional animation.

There are about 1 to 6 storyboards on each page. There are no captions although a few of them have scene descriptions and scribbles. This archive picks random storyboard sequences from each animation. Unfortunately, most of the storyboard sequences are not complete. Many times I have followed through interesting sequences only to be cut off with a new title on the next page. It's really a minor quibble given the hundreds of thousands of storyboards to choose for the book.

This whole book is an example of masterful application of storyboard techniques, like cutting scenes, composing, moving the (camera) view and stuff like that. But you must already know some basics to see them -- this is not an instructional book. There are also plenty of styles of art to look at. It's valuable resource for anyone into storyboards.

This is a highly quality book that's pretty much worth the money, but a more appropriate title would be "The Archive Series: Storyboards".

(More pictures are available on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)

Great high quality book with large pages that allow the reader to experience the level of detail and care that the artists took with these story boards. Could have used a little extra text in the book in order to describe who drew the particular boards and some back story. Will be purchasing further books in the series.

As others have said, this book focuses on storyboards rather than the actual story of Disney's animated features, but that shouldn't throw anyone off or disappoint them, considering how gorgeous everything in this book is. I had Story on my wish list for a few months, but the second I heard it was out of print, I rushed and got it before Animation, which was going to be my original first purchase in this series. I'm glad I did, as Story has genuine treasures, and every single page here is a masterpiece. Story is also a true art book, as the only real text in the book (aside from labels on the artwork) is an introduction by John Lasseter, and then the final pages and index listing what's on what page and artist credits. There are no pages talking about the storyboard process, how hard something was to explain with storyboards or to put in animated form, nothing of that sort. What you get are huge pictures of the storyboards with their respective notes, if any, and you can take in the artwork in all its glory.

I hate to sound like a Disney fanboy here, but this book really is gorgeous to look at. It single-handedly got me back into drawing, and I enjoyed being taken back in time and seeing bits from some features I hadn't seen in ages. Even the we'll-probably-never-see-it-on-dvd Song of the South is featured in here! So many Disney films and shorts are shown here that it serves as a time capsule of sorts, starting out with Steamboat Willie and ending with Lilo & Stitch. I can't even talk about what my favorite pieces were in here because honestly, that'd be about 90% of the book. Storyboards for the bear fight from The Fox and the Hound, Ferdinand the Bull sitting in the arena with his flower, Pluto on trial in Pluto's Judgment Day...there's so much here! And you gotta love how there are a lot of foldout pages to give more pictures of a given storyboard. Though as pointed out by others, this book doesn't include complete storyboards for scenes- it cuts off and goes on to the next title pretty quickly. But I can't complain, though it would be nice if somehow they managed to get complete storyboards for every Disney film and put out books of those...

If you still haven't picked up Story, you should before prices go through the roof. My only real complaint is that the books in this series are oversized and hang off my book shelf a couple of inches. It doesn't affect the score by any means, and it's not even really a complaint I guess, but I do like having my books be around the same size. Still, Disney fans or animation students NEED to get this. It's a true treasure.