With the recent rewatch of the movie, and our tour of the Harry Potter studios, my mind was full of questions about the creature design. Luckily, I already had this book on hand, so have now spent some time reading through.
As a collection of beautiful sketches, colour plates, and concept designs, the book is a success, but it lacks any real depth. Most interesting is how scatter-gun the design process on the creatures (in particular) appeared to be. Personally, I would have expected the process to go something like this:
- What has J. K. Rowling already written/described/drawn canonically?
- What other creatures already designed for the previous films are clear analogues or related species?
- What is the origin of the species in the real world i.e. myth, folklore, fable or real creature?
- Are there any further constraints?
Once you have all that information, the actual design just becomes a paint-by-numbers (to a degree).
Given the actual, settled designs, most of which I feel were impressive and accurate to my own understanding of the lore, the sheer variety of completely different designs is baffling. Don't get me wrong, they're still interesting and I love seeing them, but should the bowtruckle ever have been considered a form of aye-aye? In a world of already designed hippogriffs, would the thunderbird ever be anything other than eagle-like in form?
At the same time, reference notes and intentions (or explanations in general) are largely lacking. So it's a great showcase of cool drawings, but as an actual reference book or addition to the spec-bio lexicon, it definitely fails. And if you feel that these are much too-high standards for a tie-in book to a film, I politely refer you to most of Weta Workshop's tie-in output. For King-Kong they produced the wonderful, though slightly overly fanciful, The World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island; for Avatar, Cameron's An Activist's Survival Guide is equally fascinating, whilst taking a totally different approach. Both are full of stunning concept art, but they also show the design process more clearly, even if created as "in universe" books – which should arguably be even more fantasy based than The Art of the Film.
And then there's the niggling feeling that the source material may have just been ignored. I loved the design and brief cameo of the Diricawl in the film, but having now seen the concept pieces, I'm reminded that the original Fantastic Beasts book had led me to believe that the Dodo and Diricawl were the same species. It was a wonderful little nod to the closeness of the two worlds, but the fact that the movie bird looks nothing like a Dodo then becomes problematic and a real missed opportunity to highlight a fantastic idea. Not least of all becoming an issue for canonical references moving forward!
Which is all to say that I enjoyed the book and it sits proudly alongside my growing collection of film-design reference books, but I do hope that we get a proper Wizarding World book about the natural history or anatomical design of these creatures in the future!