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Written by Sarah Boslaugh Friday, 26 June 2009 07:02

The animation studio behind Robots and Ice Age returns with another collection of visually arresting comics shorts.

240 pgs., color; 26.00

(W & A: various)

Blue Sky Studios began as an advertising and special effects house, but evolved into a full-fledged animation studio producing features (Ice Age, Robots), shorts (including the 1998 Academy Award winner Bunny) and contributions to live-action features  and television programs(Fight Club, Alien Resurrection, The Sopranos). So you might imagine they have some talented artists on their staff, and also that those artists might have some creative ideas which could not be accommodated within the official studio output.

Right on both counts and the result is Out of Picture 2, following up on the success of the first volume of Out of Picture.  The title is a variation on a term referring to material created for a film which doesn't make it into the final product. That's show biz, but it can be heartbreaking to the artist or writer involved to spend weeks working on a character or scene which ends up on the cutting room floor, so to speak.  The Blue Sky artists have appropriated the term "out of picture" to mean something slightly different: an outlet for work which may not fit into any studio project, where they can experiment with ideas and styles and push their creative abilities to the limit.

Fourteen artists contributed to Out of Picture 2: Jason Sadler, Benoir le Pennec, Kyle MacNaughton, Jake Parker, Andrea Blasich, Lizette Vega, Saisuke Tsutsumi, Vincent Nguyen, Willie Real, David Gordon, Nash Dunnigan, Sang Jun Lee, Michael Knapp, and Peter Nguyen. Some have moved on from Blue Sky, while others are still employed there. But if you didn't know their common affiliation you might not guess it: each artist has a unique vision and a wide variety of artistic and narrative approaches are on display in this volume, with not a hint of a prescribed studio style. As a whole Out of Picture 2 acts as a sampler or showcase for the artists included, demonstrating what they can do outside of their studio work.

Art is definitely the strong point in Out of Picture 2, and it's presented to best advantage thanks to the volume's large format (11.9" by 8.8") and high-quality color printing. Many of the artists take advantage by including one or more full-page frames within their stories, and if it weren't a sin to damage a book I'd be tempted to cut some of those pages out for framing: they're really that good. I can't say the same about the narratives however: in some of them nothing much seems to be happening, and others rely on tired old conventions to the point where you wish the artist would just throw in the towel and hire a writer (which may have been against the rules for this volume: I'm not sure). Anyway, if your main interest is in art, you'll love this volume; if it's in narrative, you may find it disappointing.

 But a few stories work on both the narrative and visual levels: my favorite is "The Antler Boy" by Jake Parker which combines a fantastical tale with a social conscience and leaves the conclusion ambiguous, as all good campfire tales should. I also enjoyed Willie Real's "Plane Food," a humorous take on The Twilight Zone's "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" which will push the nostalgia buttons of readers of a certain age who can recall a day when airplane passengers were not packed in like sardines and were actually offered a choice of dinners.

Out of Picture 2 includes a "Development Gallery" containing preliminary sketches for the stories included in this volume, which is sure to appeal to budding artists and recalls the extras often included on DVDs: since the contributors work in animation maybe that's not so surprising after all. Further information about Out of Picture 2 and a preview are available at http://www.outofpicture.com/oopTake2/. | Sarah Boslaugh