The Art Of Heavy Metal
                                             (1981 - New York Zoetrope)  

      (by Carl Macek)   I just happened to watch the Heavy Metal movie once more and that made me pull this book off the shelf.  I remember the original release of the film was somewhat of a disappointment and buying this book back then followed right in line with that.  Artists like Moebius, Bernie Wrightson, Richard Corben, Chris Achilleos, Howard Chaykin & Mike Ploog were all associated in the movie's development, but they are pretty much bit players in this book.  I'm looking at the first edition here - be aware that this book, with a bit of re-jiggering and an additional 16 pages about the film's legacy, was re-released as HEAVY METAL: THE MOVIE in the mid 1990s.  Anyway, this smaller-than-usual 7-by-9-inch edition has 128 pages, with art on both the front & back covers.  Most of the 65 main art pages simply display numerous color animation cell images (12 show six double-page-spreads, most o.k.) with 14 more pages pulling multiple smaller images together.  There is on hand a not-insignificant amount of supplementary materials like concept-drawings, character-roughs & background settings along with the story-boarding, model-sheets, production pictures and a somewhat breathless narrative about the ground-breaking animation artistry at play.  The collaborative exercise such filmmaking is makes it too complex for me to isolate singular names to associate with the movie images, but the other 'well-presented' material does allow me to identify that the collection's highlighted contributors that have one piece each:  Chris Achilleos, Michael Guerin, Mike Ploog, and George Ungar.

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