[ART BOOK REVIEW] The Art of Ice Age

This summer, Blue Sky Studios released the fifth installment in its Ice Age franchise and, to celebrate, released an entire art book dedicated to the franchise. The Art of Ice Age covers everything Ice Age, including work from the Ice Age animated shorts and TV specials. The book takes you chronologically through the journey of the Ice Age gang starting with the first Ice Age all the way through Collision Course.

Each of the Ice Age films, shorts, and specials has a chapter dedicated to itself. Because this book covers over 10 different films, you obviously don’t get as in-depth as a book that only features the work of one film, but they really made it work in this book. Each feature film gets approximately 40 pages while the shorts and specials get less.

Each film has a selection of concept art, character designs, and sculpts accompanied by quotes from the artists who made the films and occasionally some information on the making of the film. Even though this book has significantly less pages per film than the usual art book does, the work in the book is fantastic and really showcases a great range of diverse art as well as the progression of the film’s visual development process. Another interesting thing about this book is that it features various work from over a decade which really shows the progression of the art departments in animation studios from the early 2000s to now.

Whether you’re a huge fan of the entire Ice Age franchise or just enjoyed the earlier films, The Art of Ice Age has something for everyone. If you want to learn more about the making of these films the opportunity is there but the book’s main focus really lies on the art, so even if there is a film that you didn’t like as much as the others you don’t have to worry, as the art in the book is just really gorgeous, very well made and beautiful to look at.