September 4, 2024

My first Nobuteru Yuuki art book, which as of writing this, just arrived yesterday! I've been a fan of his art for as long as I can remember, seeing it as some of the most quintessential fantasy anime styles, hands down.

This art book is an impressive B4 size (roughly 10"x13", or 25x33 cm), which makes it the tallest art book in my collection to date! It's slightly on the shorter size for the page count, though, coming in at just under 100 pages. Of those, 48 pages are dedicated to Record of Lodoss War, 14 pages to The Five Star Stories, 24 pages to The Weathering Continent, and 7 pages to Vaelber Saga.

Right away we're treated to this transluscent title page that lets us preview the artwork behind it. I love pages like this, but I'm always so afraid I'll accidentally tear it just from turning it over. Thankfully that doesn't seem to be the case in this book, as the transluscent paper feels more durable than, say, tracing paper.

PHANTASIEN begins with artwork for Record of Lodoss War, which is also the largest section in the book. Seriously, it takes up roughly half of the entire book! So it's great if you're looking for Lodoss OVA artwork and don't have any other books for it.

One of the things I love about PHANTASIEN is that it includes a rough version of almost every single art piece featured in its pages. I love seeing these stellar artworks in a "messier" form with the shadows and highlights broken down in wildly apparent colors. Plus it details what that artwork was used for, which is nice additional info to have! I'm always curious if an artwork was used for a magazine, a special book, or even just to slap on merchandise. And it seems like many of the artworks in this book were used for magazines.

Now, I'm going to simply feature a few of my favorite artworks throughout the book. And I apologize for the photo quality. Between my budget phone camera and the photo downscaling to save storage space, these really do not do justice toward the quality of the art book.

Here's where the Five Star Stories section begins, which is one of the smallest. Unfortunately, I don't know much about this series, but it's been on my radar for a couple of decades now, so I should really change that. Additionally, this was my favorite artwork from the section, so this is all I have shown here. Maybe I'll go back and add more once I've watched the film.

The next section is for The Weathering Continent, one of my favorites despite having experienced nothing more than the movie (but I'll be all over the novels as soon as I can understand them worth a damn). This section is the second largest after Lodoss, but is still about half its length.

I have almost no complaints about this art book, except for one; this spread. I know it's common practice to print a large artwork across two pages instead of fitting it horizontally to one, but it doesn't mean I dislike it any less. This is such a gorgeous piece interrupted by the binding. At the very least, it's far from the worst example I've ever seen of this, and is in a fairly inoffensive spot. That said, it still gets under my skin.

The last section is for Vaelber Saga, Nobuteru Yuuki's personal manga work from '88~'94. It's the shortest section, which I suppose makes sense as it was three volumes and while I'm sure there's a fair few illustrations for it, this book focuses entirely on cell-shaded artworks. I know very little about this series, but I'm very intrigued by it. Unfortunately, it's locked behind the language barrier, so it'll be some time before I can experience it.

So there's a little preview of PHANTASIEN! It's a gorgeous art book that I wish I had gotten years ago, but am so glad to finally have. Truthfully, I didn't know what to expect when I bought it other than "a collection of Nobuteru Yuuki artworks", so I'm quite pleased! It didn't cover as many titles as I thought, but this did come out in 1995, so he had many more works to come. Hopefully I can find other art books of his in the near future, both traditionally published and doujin. (Though I fully expect a good few will break the bank. ^^; )