The latest in this season’s large hardcover Peanuts book onslaught is The Art and Making of The Peanuts Movie, which arrived today. I’ve only had time to flip through it, not to give it a full read… in part, because it has more text than some of the Art of books htat seem to have become de rigueur for new animated films. And it has a slightly larger range of art, since it can cover not just the development art for the animation, the modeling, and the finished result, but also the source inspiration of real Schulz.

It’s a pretty book, of course… but one thing I can tell you is that it’s reassuring. It’s a book about attention to detail, both the background detail and the precision of following Schulz in some respects. The one little bit that really hit me? The paragraph and half-page of art on the topic of Franklin’s shoes. They’d bothered to notice that Franklin doesn’t generally wear the same potato-like shoes that the other boys wear. And was reminded that everything is a decision that has to be made when making a movie – they had to pick what color to make the stripe on his shoe.

I’m posting this pretty late in the day, but if you’re up… the book is officially released tomorrow (Tuesday), so at the moment they still have pre-order pricing of less than $20 on this $35 book, so feel free to go order it.

(Conflict of interest note: This book is published by Titan Books, who are also publishing the UK edition of my upcoming book, The Snoopy Treasures. But no request has been made that I review this, well or otherwise. Too bad, actually, I mighta scored a free copy.)

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