Out of Picture    Volume 1: Art from the Outside Looking In
The 11 artists who contribute short pieces to this anthology, originally published last year in France, are animators associated with Blue Sky Studios, and their artwork bears stylistic hallmarks of the best contemporary animation. Each piece has an exquisitely realized visual aesthetic and command of color, from Tsutsumi's richly modeled three-dimensional constructs in Noche y Dia to Peter de Sève's variation on classic children's book illustration in The Mermaid; Benoit le Pennec's whimsical Floating Holidays is the only piece drawn with fairly traditional comics line work. What comes alive on a big screen, though, doesn't always sit comfortably on the page, and too many of these pieces are undeveloped germs of ideas (Greg Couch's Four & Twenty Blackbirds is a mashup of Mother Goose and The Maltese Falcon that never gets past stating its premise). Others are nearly unreconstructed storyboards (like Andrea Blasich's Yes I Can, in which a young inventor and a dragon build mechanical wings, then go flying) or simply incoherent (like Daniel López Muñoz's pseudoprofound Silent Echoes). Everything comes together in a few stories, especially Michael Knapp's nearly wordless psychological sketch, Newsbreak, but most of this volume is better suited to gazing at than to reading.(Dec.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.