Pixarpedia: An Early Review

I’m happy to give you Pixar Fanboy’s first book review: Pixarpedia: A Complete Guide to the World of Pixar…and Beyond!. Pixarpedia is a book being released by DK Publishing on August 31st. They were kind enough to send me a review copy early, and I’m glad they did. This book is a delight, and a must have for all Pixar fans, young and old.

It’s a very large, hardcover book with beautiful glossy pages filled edge-to-edge with photos. It’s around 350 pages long, and features a forward by Andrew Stanton. Pixarpedia is divided into three parts. The first contains:

The Foreword by Andrew Stanton
In the Beginning – A brief history of Pixar
Making Movies – general knowledge about Pixar
How to Make a Pixar Movie
Timeline – a timeline of Pixar’s work from 1986-2011

The second and largets section of the book is The Movies…. In this section, each Pixar feature film and many of their shorts are given their own chapters. The final section of the book , …and Beyond, is filled with themed pages and behind the scenes facts for each film.

Being an encyclopedia of sorts, Pixarpedia has a lot of information. For all my fellow Pixar Fanboys, a lot of it will already be known, but there is also a lot of interesting facts and anecdotes that I hadn’t read before. Each film’s section starts out with a beautiful two-page spread introduction, and then goes straight into character bios and descriptions of locations and organizations. It’s fun to read about the minor characters in the films. For example, I never knew Bob Parr’s boss at Insuracare was named Gilbert Huph. Ironically, Lee Unkrich’s revelation about Woody’s last name Pride isn’t featured in the book.

Besides the character bios, we’re treated to the occasional map and diagram, like the above spread of Nomanisan Island from The Incredibles.

The …and Beyond! collects information based on themes in Pixar films, such as friendship, love, villains, supporting characters, and more. The book just briefly mentions Toy Story 3 and Cars 2, with no mention of any of Pixar’s upcoming films. I guess we’ll have to wait for volume 2 for that!

It takes a long time to read every bit of information in Pixarpedia, but it is worth it. Even if you know a lot of the information presented, it’s nice to have such a great looking book sitting on your coffee table. There is no doubt that between The Art of Up, Pixarpedia, and The Pixar Treasures, this is a great year for Pixar book fans.

Pixarpedia is being released on August 31st, so head on over to Amazon and preorder your copy today for only $26.40!