cover image Out of Picture, Volume 1: Art from the Outside Looking In

Out of Picture, Volume 1: Art from the Outside Looking In

, and various. . Villard, $19.95 (160pp) ISBN 978-0-345-49872-4

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.)