Every Ghibli artbook (well, most of them) have the same structure. Big white books with hardcover, and usually a lot of useful information inside. When I first saw "Howl's moving castle" artbook I was really exited - so much materials, so much inspiration to receive from it! But seems like with Spirited Away something went wrong.
Frame from the "Spirited Away"
This is how most of the images in it look. It's the same fail as it was with the second "Hobbit" artbook. When you buy one you expect to see sketches, works in process, watercolor sketches and character development stages. Well, not just the frames from the cartoon/movie. But that's exactly what happend with the second "Hobbit", and Spirited away too. Well, if Hobbit fail was absolute - no art at all, only frames, Spirited Away have a few pages of everything I said before, but it's just about 40 pages from 240 in total.
Artbook cover
Though the cover looked good indeed, and promised like "there's a lot of watercolors in me". Too bad that this time it wasn't so. In fact the best and most concept like drawing is this one on the cover, all the rest are less complicated, and nearly with no structure. And again - the second part of book includes just a hole scenario dialogs. What for, I wonder?
Art by Hayao Miyazaki
For some of the main characters there's a motion list. But again, only really a few.
What can I say in general... May be this artbook is the biggest disappointment I yet met in such books. Usually I really recommend to have ones, but this time I wrote the review to show how it must not look. I'll keep it, f course, but seems like "Never again", at least not before I see all the pages, so I can make a decision.
Art by Hayao Miyazaki
P.S. I put all the artists names under the drawings. I did it with big letters. So I put the source. I see a single comment pretending that it's my art - the one who wrote it will be burned on inquisition fire. I'm already tired of the ones who just write "nice art you have" without reading the post. It's OK not to read everything, but it's not OK to not even look at the post. And it's the only possibility I can imagine for not to notice the sources.
Thank you for voting and commenting:)
Love, Inber