The Art of Spirited Away

Just received this book. It was delivered in a minion box, which is a plus. It already put a big smile on my face when I opened the mailbox.
A great book with tons of illustrations; quality paper, thick and smooth ; a lot of behind scene explanation involving film making and character creation.
I could not stop turning the pages. A must have if you are a Miyazaki or Studio Ghibli fan. This is the fast time I ever write a review about a product, within 10 minutes after opening up the package. I cannot wait to share with other fans. Please see my attached photos for your reference.

After watching "Spirited Away", I bought the art book companion as an impulse buy. However, now that I think about it, I find myself constantly turning through its pages, even more so than I watch the movie. Hayao Miyazaki created a masterpiece in "Spirited Away", set in a wonderland-esque realm - a Japanese Bath House for the gods and spirits of Japanese mythology. This guide takes its reader through the Miyazaki's creation with great artistic detail and intriguing notations and comments.
For those who have fallen in love with "Spirited Away", as I have, this book offers insight to the multi-layered plots and characters of the film. Readers are graced with early archetural diagrams and sketches of the film's settings, along with galleries of the breath-taking final products. Also, we are offered conceptual drawlings of the cast of characters, from the early images of Yubaba and her gigantic baby to some of the minor characters and apparitions: the No Face, the bouncing heads, Haku and the silver dragon, etc.
The art and designs are a treat for both young and old, whether you have seen the film or not. As an added bonus, the collection also offers the American screenplay dialogues and detailed descriptions of the Spirit World.
This is a must have for fans of the movie, fans of anime or fans of mythology and Asian folklore. Miyazaki's true gift is creating limitless images that spark the imagination. His work in this book rivals the original fantasies and concepts within Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass". There is nothing disappointing about it.

I purchased this book thinking that it would include detailed sketches and concepts for the creation of Spirited Away. While, the book did have these elements it had far fewer than one might suspect from the cover. In fact most of the art work were stills from the movie.

Which, to me came as a great disappointment. If I wanted to see the final art of the movie I would watch the movie. Buy this book if you really love the quality of the animated scenes. Don't buy this if you feel you can gain great insight into how it was made.

Although I do have a few complaints about the book, I really liked it. Most of my complaints involved wanting more - more artist commentary, more concept drawings, that sort of thing. The book has an introduction written by Hayao Miyazaki, a section with concept sketches, a section with concept sketches, backgrounds, and character designs, and a section explaining how computer graphics were used in the movie. This book even has the movie's screenplay. I really enjoyed the concept sketches, which show how original ideas changed to create the final product. For instance, a sketch of Zeniba and Yubaba shows how much Zeniba's design changed - she looks more normally proportioned than her sister. Later in the book, there is an explanation for why the change in Zeniba's design occurred. I also enjoyed the computer graphics section, because I would never have noticed any of the things they pointed out on my own. I foudn it fascinating, they way they blended cel art and digital art so well.

This was a gift for a granddaughter for Christmas. When she opened this she yelped and hugged it to her chest!!! On her wish list for us was "anything to do with movie "Spirited Away." I will take an educated guess she rates this with five stars! She is in drama in school so was esp excited to see the full screen play in the back.

If you're looking for some pretty pictures to flip through, then you'll like this book.

If you are a concept designer or illustrator looking for inspiration and guidance, then you shouldn't waste your money.

This book doesn't offer you much more than what you would get by just watching the movie. It mostly contains the final designs and artwork - half of which is taken directly from the finished film. The written commentary explains how the appearances of characters and scenes changed in the movie's development but no artwork is included to show the changes. (Actually, I lied, there are exactly two sketches that show differences from the movie: the original Zeniba and the original No Face designs)

20: the number of paragraphs from Takeshige and Ando that explain their thought processes. All other copy merely calls out what the image is.

# of pages per section:
30:watercolor concept sketches, limited to the first chapter
132: the main ART portion. includes commentary and character sketches but I would estimate the ratio of background painting to finished movie stills to be roughly 50:50
12: usage of digital technology
48: screenplay (the dialogue of the movie), last chapter

I love the movie but this book was a disappointment in both content and presentation.

For a art book it has all the standards you expect. Comes with Disney release script in back, plenty of luscious watercolor prints. What is annoying and is true of any art book from Anime from Japan, the US companies may translate all the major stuff in the art books like the articles explaining things, but no one ever bothers to translate the little notes under the conceptual sketches. To me those would be the most fascinating thing, but here I sit with a cell phone taking a picture of the Japanse kanji and using google translate. When I first started buying artbooks, Google and google translate didn't even exist, and yet US companies like VIZ, Dark Horse, Tokyopop(defunct) never translated those little blurbs. But, its a nice addition to my art book collection.

Although I am not a big anime fan in general, I am a huge fan of Miyazaki Hayao's work. The highlight of his movies and comic books is usually the story itself, but in the case of Spirited Away, I think it would be fair to say that the sheer beauty and imagination of the film is just as amazing as the story itself.
For me, Spirited Away was by far the first, and to date only, animated movie that I could call visually stunning. The viewer, be he or she 5, 25, or 65 is as drawn into Miyazaki's world as the protagonist Chihiro is. This book allows you to revisit the movie through its art. Full of concept sketches, character designs, and backgrounds from the movie, this book also includes an introduction by Miyazaki himself as well as frequent commentary by the artists that worked on this film and even an explanation of some of the technology that helped make this such a visually appealing film. The book's price may seem a bit steep, but at around 250 full color, high quality pages I felt I more than got my money's worth.
There has been talk of Miyazaki retiring, but I hope this is not the case. With Spirited Away gaining such popular and critical acclaim in the United States, I hope he continues to work his magic for years to come, continuing to make his impression left not only on Japan, but to the global audience. With the increase in animation technology and the continuing strength of Miyazaki's imagination and storytelling power, it seems that the best is yet to come.

awesome artbook indeed! colors, sketches, paintings, plus the full movie script.. everything is impeccable. the colors are grand. it's a perfect book for studio ghibli lovers, and artists/ illustrators like me! hohoho! :)[[ASIN:1569317771 The Art of Spirited Away]]

[[VIDEOID:681efad87cb2fda2c5e37e702a481ecc]] The book is super organized and it follows all of the events of the movie.
We can see some watercolor paintings that turned up in the movie, storyboards that helps us to get inside the story and the character's model sheets.
At the end of the book we get the whole script of the movie which is very very interesting and peculiar!

This is a very complete edition although there should be a couple of character studies that didn't make the cut or even the work that took each character into the versions we know.
For me that is a bit of a fail on this piece as well as the over amount of movie screens presented. But don't fret because this one is a part of a collection from Studio Ghibli movies and it's mandatory hehe

For anyone who's been studying animation and those who enjoy it, can see at the end of the book kind of an explanation over the 3D process used in the movie.
And I gotta congratulate Viz Media on the great job getting these books translated from Japanese to English language.
So this book gets a score of... 88%!