The Art of Kung Fu Panda 2 [ハードカバー]

I love the first film and its art book. This second art book is almost awesome-ness volume 2. If you're unable to get the first art book for whatever reasons, you should definitely get the second art book while it's still in stock.

It's a hardcover 156-page art book. The concept art is fantastic. It consists of character designs, background paintings and storyboards. Everything's printed big. The commentary are on the story and characters so that's always interesting.

Nicolas Marlet is still the character designer. There are additional character designs here, those that didn't make it the first film, and those created for the second film. The new gang of characters are mainly the bad guys. There are lots of sketches of expressions and characters in their kung fu stance. Mr Ping, Po's dad, is also given coverage as the history of Po is uncovered.

The background art is inspired by Chinese towns, architecture and paintings. The set design is wonderful. It's really cool to see old Chinese buildings designed and used in animated films, to great effect I must add.

Now for the disappointing thing about the book, the binding is bad. After reading for a while, the pages came off the spine and now hanging by the threads that hold them together. I was hoping this would not happen because the Rango art book I bought also came with a bad binding, also published by Insights edition. Again, maybe I received a copy from a bad printing batch - I said that in the other review too.

Anyway, if you're getting this book in UK or Europe, it's distributed by Titan Books. The prices are slightly different. Not sure about the binding quality for that.

Overall, it's awesome-ness with a bit of letdown. Sounds strange? Yes, unfortunately. -1 star for the binding.

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

As the other reviewers have mentioned, the layout and printing are as good as the first Art of KFP title. The sketches are all reminiscent of the first title also, and I am particularly excited to see Lord Shen in action. I'm much more pumped to see the movie now that I have looked through the book. I am giving it 5 stars because I have not had the binding issue that Parka mentioned, and my copy does not show signs of irregular cutting as another reviewer mentioned. I'm not sure why there are variations from one copy to the next. Hope this helps.

Definitely five stars to the content of this book! Artistically, it's impressive and fresh. From a design point of view, it is quite unique in it's character designs (of course, Nico Marlet!). From an animators point of view it's been really awesome to analyze the gesture drawings and storyboards included in the art book. The paintings, which most are digital instead of traditional like it used to be, are simply amazing. Before this art book, the Art of How To Train Your Dragon used to be my Dreamwork's favorite art book, but now this one has come so close, so close that in fact I can say that this is my new personal favorite pretty much along with HTTYD, actually now that I think of it I can't really decide which I like the most. Both are fantastic!

(Note: before purchasing this art book I read several customer comments about the binding quality and it's issues, from my experience the binding is still good, but I have noticed it feels like if it's starting to give the issue mentioned on other comments, I don't know, maybe I'm just being too much of a paranoid.)