The Art of the Disney Golden Books
Charles Solomon
Disney Publishing
10/10
Hello, my name’s Jonathan and I’m a Disneyholic. I have an annual pass to Disneyland. I know that the best spot to snag beer is by the zephyrs in California Adventure, and the best food is the lobster nachos at the bar at Ariel’s Grotto. I even got engaged on The Haunted Mansion and celebrated with stuffed baked potatoes at the Harbor Galley. Why tell you this? For perspective. Now, when I tell you how great The Art of the Disney Golden Books is, you know that I have some qualifications that qualify me to judge this bad boy.
A lot of you can remember the Golden books, some more easily than others. The little cardboard books with the golden spine adorned my grandma’s bookshelf, mixed in with Barry Manilow records and weird little mushroom sculptures. I remember The Jungle Book and Peter and The Wolf books, especially. Now, thanks to illustration historian Charles Solomon, I found a renewed appreciation for them, reading about their original illustrators, writers, and even the mediums (which apparently were watercolors and gouache, the latter of which sent me and my fiance on a Wikipedia binge). Throughout the book are interviews with artists spanning the history of the Golden Books, interesting tidbits, and, of course, images from the eighty years of the Golden Books.
Since I have not been a real child in some time, I actually wasn’t aware that they still made these bad boys. Included is art from Disney’s partner in awesomeness, Pixar. All of my favorites are here, Wall-E, Stitch, Sully and Mike Wazowski, all being adorably painted by artists once inspired by the original Golden Books. While a lot of art books make me want to tear out the pages to stick in frames as some ghetto version of buying a print, The Art of the Disney Golden Books has enough substance and gravitas within it to spare it such a fate.