I like the Final Fantasy games a lot. So many rogue knights helping out fractured royal families and then, for no reason: a dragon! But I like the concept art that Yoshitaka Amano did better. It's so beautiful and graceful. He mixes together medieval fantasy shit with Japanese shit and comes up with things that it's hard to understand how he thought it up. How you do dat Yoshitako? If you like pretty drawings this is a good book for you to have. - Nick Gazin...
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Jean Wacquet, who conceived and edited Worlds of Amano, writes in the forward that Yoshitaka Amano's "work spans the divide between high art and popular culture, destroying, in the process, the numerous barriers between the different forms of graphic expression. In this, Amano is a true popular artist, in the fullest sense of the word." Wacquet says it much better than I ever could, and he makes a perfect introduction to this truly fantastic collection of illustrations. Worlds of Amano takes images from the last thirty years of Amano's career, with many of the illustrations collected in this book for the first time. On every page is something to catch your eye, such as the pale beauty of a face or a bright splash of red. Once you pick...
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November 01, 2006: Fairies (Review)
In Fairies, Amano turns his attention to fantasy images, invoking colors and patterns reminiscent of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, yet giving each work a unique flavor. Amano’s fairies are refreshing departure from the cloying fairies that have come to permeate Western visual pop culture. His are mysterious, ethereal, evanescent, unknowable. Erotic, yes, in certain paintings, but they’re not remotely earth-bound. The Seiun Award-winning artist seems to believe in old-fashioned visual storytelling in which the frightening and unknown remain just that. His goblins and changelings have none of the anthropomorphic domestication we usually see at work in Disney cartoons and the like. Not every frightening fantasy creature can or should be tamed....
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