The Art of Puss in Boots, by Ramin Zahed.  Foreword by Guillermo Del Toro.

San Rafael, CA, Insight Editions, November 2011, 152 pages, 978-1-60887-034-9, $39.95.

The Art of Puss In Boots. Images © 2011 Dreamworks Animation.

This is the official “making of” coffee-table art book for DreamWorks’ Puss in Boots feature, released last October 28^th.  If you have seen the movie by now (and who hasn’t?), you will want this book for its documentation of all the conceptual art behind the theatrical feature.

The book is written by animation veteran Ramin Zahed, the editor of the industry’s Animation Magazine.  But, as the last page makes clear, it is also the product of DreamWorks Animation’s publicity department, which made sure that it has been crammed full of the film’s production art while all that was still available.

The Art of Puss in Boots has almost no finished frame stills, and no publicity photos of the cast’s celebrity voice actors.  It is almost all full-color conceptual sketches and character designs, background and set designs, matte paintings, and related mostly-digital art paintings by lead character designer Patrick Maté and his staff. (There are a few black-&-white snippets of storyboard art here and there.)  Each image is credited to its artist, and there is shop-talk from Maté and his artists.  (The digital sketch used as this book’s cover, from the Cat Cantina sequence, is by Ronald A. Kurniawan.)

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