Pixar Director Enrico Casarosa’s Comics and Books

Introduction

One of the things I loved about attending San Diego Comic-Con in the 2000s was the number of animators that would be there.

They sold art books, instructional books, and even a few comics. I grabbed a pile of them at the time. I love the way animators draw their characters with such life and action. It’s unlike a lot of what we see from the more posed comic book artists.

Amongst the group was a young Pixar (by way of Blue Sky) storyboard artist by the name of Enrico Casarosa. He still works at Pixar. He wrote and directed the short, “La Luna” in 2011, which ran in front of “Brave.”

This year, he follows that up with his first feature, “Luca”.

In the mid-2000s, he was well known for starting the “Sketchcrawl” movement, where artists would take walks and draw what they saw. (Photographers have something similar called a “Photowalk.“) Social media was still a few years away from taking over completely, so maybe Sketchcrawl didn’t hit the heights of things like “Inktober,” but it was still pretty popular in several art communities of its day.

In fact, Casarosa’s Twitter handle is still @SketchCrawl.

In addition to that, Casarosa did some comic work in the 2000s, alongside a couple of art books. It turns out that I have some of those in my collection.

This article, then, is an attempt to come up with The Ultimate Enrico Casarosa Comics Bibliography and Review.

One Quick Note

There are links to Amazon below for some of these books. I am an Amazon Affiliate and stand to make an affiliate fee for any purchases you make from those links. It won’t cost you any extra, and those funds would be put to use keeping the lights on here.

There are also a lot of links to Stuart Ng Books. I am not an affiliate there, nor is he a sponsor (though perhaps he should be). But show him some love, because he has an amazing store. Tell him I sent you. It won’t get you anything, but businesses do love finding out where their customers are coming from…

“9-11: Artists Respond, Volume 1” (Dark Horse Comics – 2001)

Casarosa’s contribution, “The Sky Was So Blue That Day”, is a black and white four page story showing some people/aliens/anthropomorphs gathering around a small pair of rectangular towers that grow with the power of everyone coming together.

It’s a good preview of what you’ll see a lot of in Casarosa’s work moving forward. He’s doing gray washes. The panels are all squares and rectangles that fit together neatly to fill the page and tell the story so well. It’s a mix of more human-like characters and animal-based aliens, so you do see a bit of the anthropomorphic nature of his future work with “The Adventures of Mia.”

It even ends with a very low angle fish-eye lens kind of shot that Casarosa usually pulls out about once in each book to great effect. Here, it’s the final page splash.

It’s a touching short story that sums up much of the attitude and feeling of camaraderie of the day.

“The Art of Mia” (2002)

This is a 40 page black and white sketchbook featuring Casarosa’s cat aviatrix, Mia, who we’ll be talking about a lot very soon.

This one is not in my collection, so I don’t have a review for you. I’m sure it’s very pretty, though.

“The Art of Mia” is available at Stuart Ng Books.

“Fragments” by Enrico Casarosa and Ronnie Del Carmen (2003)

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This is an art book by Casarosa and his Pixar pal, Ronnie Del Carmen. Pipeline readers might recognize Del Carmen’s name from the credits of the 90s’ legendary “Batman: The Animated Series”, as well as a few related comics for DC.

“Fragments” is a small (6 1/4″ x 8 1/4″) paperback thing with, incredibly enough, a dust jacket over a plain white cover. It’s a 96 page flip book, split equally between the two artists.

On Casarosa’s side, the contents are all loose sketches, experiments, paintings, figure drawings, and more.

It’s all people. It looks absolutely nothing like everything else I’m going to talk about in this article. If you’re looking for more of the cartoony style or the Miyazaki-influenced style of Casarosa, you won’t find it here.

There are occasional bits of text where Casarosa talks about things like the importance of speed in his drawing. Being a storyboard artist at the time made that a high priority. It also helps keep the energy of his initial drawings for this book.

He also talks about constantly trying to push his forms and usually failing. That’s a pretty common self-critique amongst artists, who mostly never realize that they are pushing themselves, just never as far as they wanted to see. It’s the human condition: to get out of a trained pattern, you need to reach for the extreme just to get moderate results.

He also talks about how he dreams of having a gallery show someday, but that this book will have to suffice for now. We’ll come back to that in just a bit… (Spoilers: There’s good news there.)

There’s some interesting pages, in particular, where Casarosa works with just an ink brush, but waters it down to help create the tones in the drawings. They’re not all professional, slick drawings, but that’s also not the point of them.

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There’s a section where he draws on his influences from his studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. Those pages are the most interesting to me. I love the way he can indicate folds in clothing with such simple squiggles, even with such bold brush marks. I like the flat colors he uses and the bits of textures and shadows he throws in.

It’s an interesting book but, again, a very experimental one. It’s an Art Book, but not the kind you might buy with all the visual development stuff from a Disney film. This is more a sketchbook collection of observational life drawings.

It’s a nice way to round out your overall picture of an artist, but probably the last book you’d necessarily need.

“The Adventures of Mia” #1 (2003)

This is the first of only two issues that Casarosa ever completed of “The Adventures of Mia.”

Picture The Rocketeer with funny animals and a strong Hayao Miyazaki influence. The lead character is Mia, a hot shot pilot (who has cat qualities) who can take on all comers. The lead story in this issue centers on a plane race where she takes on a cadre of misogynistic, over-confident pilots.

It’s a great blend of artistic skills and storytelling chops that really sells this comic. You can’t open it up without being drawn into Casarosa’s world. His lush ink washed pages don’t take any shortcuts, from the opening half splash page introducing the busy small town where the action is set to take place, to the plane race, itself, filled with planes banking and careening around obstacles and over mountains.

His panel borders are all hand drawn, rounded rectangles and squares that fit together and fill the page completely. He’s put thought into his layouts. This isn’t a collection of drawings, it’s a sequence of images.

Underlying it all, though, is Casarosa’s sense of storytelling, honed to a sharp point from his years as a storyboard artist. This comic has some of the clearest comics storytelling I’ve ever seen with scenes that could be very confusing in lesser hands.

The plane chase is particularly strong, but even a talking heads scene in a crowded bar is instructive in the way it moves and distances the camera to optimal effect.

That’s followed by a shorter story featuring Mia from ten years earlier, and a two page educational feature, “Mia’s Pioneers of Aviation”, where Mia introduces the reader to a legendary aviatrix.

The thing that I loved the most, artistically, in this book are the airplanes. Casarosa draws them very well from all sort of angles. But the planes have their own unique style. It’s obvious that Casarosa has a Miyazaki influence, and that shows most in these aircraft. They have this wonderful happy, animated, bouncy look to them. They’re rounder and proportioned in cuter ways than your typical aircraft. Getting to see them flying and racing around is half the fun of the book.

Casarosa also shows surprising restraint and maturity as a comic book writer. His dialogue and caption work is just enough to clarify any story points. The book never gets overly verbose. Casarosa explains things where necessary in very short, direct ways. He lets his art speak for itself the rest of the time.

The lettering is done on the computer, but the balloons and tails are all hand drawn. It feels very European. The balloons are more rectangular than oval in shape, and there’s plenty of open space in them around the letterforms. It’s almost like the way translated titles often have extra space in balloons when the translation uses fewer words than the original language.

I even like the font, which is a narrow, tight font that takes up less space than the usual squarer fonts that get used for dialogue.

The ironic thing is that Casarosa doesn’t need to worry about making as much room as possible for his dialogue. Like I said before, he’s very economical.

“The Adventures of Mia” #1 is a great start to the series, filled with imagination, likeable lead characters, and expert storytelling.

“Fragments: Intermezzo” (2004)

I’m stealing the description from StuartNgBooks.com for this one:

A long out-of-print book of charcoal gesture & life drawings of feale nudes, with some paintings in acrylics. Beautiful artwork by this Pixar storyboard artist.

This is another art book from Casarosa. I imagine he published it to have something to sell at San Diego Comic-Con that year.

I don’t know much more than that, but wanted to include it here for completionism’s sake. It sounds a lot like the first “Fragments” books, only solo.

It’s available on Amazon or StuartNgBooks.com.

“The Adventures of Mia” #2 (2004)

This is the first part of a new story arc, ruined only by the fact that a third issue never came out.

It starts with Mia flying one of her father’s planes to test a new part. That goes on for four pages and doesn’t have any immediate point to the main plot other than to re-introduce Mia as a lead character, her father, and Casarosa’s magical ability to show planes flying in cool ways.

No, really, these four pages are gorgeous. The plane, itself, is super cute, but Casarosa’s use of a fish eye lens feeling on the opening splash (and a second not that much later), his extreme close-up of a hand on a lever to indicate a change in speed, and Mia’s smile as she enjoys this all — it’s all just great storytelling.

Casarosa goes beyond his storyboard training in this sequence. He adapts those lessons to the comics page format, which is different. He varies panel shapes and sizes in interesting ways. If a plane is flying straight down to the ground, he has a vertical panel to emphasize that directionality. A thin horizontal panel is used to show the plane skim across the water to a landing. That gives the reader’s eyes a chance to coast along with the plane in its own direction.

After that strong start, we move into the action set piece of the comic. A daring spy has infiltrated a nearby Italian air base to steal a plane. This is during the Il Duce era, so it’s ok to root for the spy here.

It’s a great sequence of events, again, as the tension grows through the sequence and the actions grow stronger, too. The spy starts by running and hiding, but then is forced into physical violence, before things escalate and he’s driving a plane around the hangar to take out cars shooting at him.

Eventually, the spy’s storyline and Mia’s comes crashing together. I probably shouldn’t worry about spoilers too much here, but I’ll leave it at that, anyway.

This issue is also in Casarosa’s ink washed style. You can still see the Miyazaki influence on the planes. It’s a beautiful piece of work.

There’s no back-up story in this book, as the main story fills up nearly the entire issue. There are two pages of guest pin-ups from the likes of Bengal, CBR Idol contestant L. Frank Weber (he lost to Jonathan Hickman and Patrick Scherberger), and Kazu Kibuishi, amongst others.

Mia Trails Her Father

Just to give you a concrete idea of how good the storytelling is, I have to show you these two pages, because they go back to something I said about the first issue. Casarosa doesn’t need many words to tell his story, and is very good telling it visually.

This silent sequence starts on the previous page’s last tier, with Mia following her father after he’s left the house…

…before carrying on for two more pages:

It’s just over two pages of Mia trailing her father, staying just far enough behind him that he doesn’t know she’s there. I don’t care if it’s necessary for the sequence to go on that long at all. I’m sure someone could make the case that Casarosa devotes far too much valuable comic book space for this sequence.

And I’d have to agree that the left side panel stacking on that first full page is a bit unfortunate.

However, he makes it sing. I will allow it if the artist is as good as Casarosa is in composing his panels and laying out the sequence.

Look carefully at the various ways that Casarosa draws Mia at work. Take a look at all the angles and techniques he uses. He has silhouettes, up angles, overhead views, the rule of thirds, and more.

He thinks of multiple ways to conceive of the same idea while visually exploring the world of the characters. That means you get beautiful panels of the city with its bridges and waterways, its rooftops, and its countryside.

This is exactly the kind of work you’d expect from a storyboarder — lots of fresh ideas on the same theme with great composition and storytelling.

It’s the little things like this that make for great comic artists.

Wait, This Book Was Done In Color?!?

While Googling around for more information on this series, I discovered something very surprising to me. Casarosa watercolored these pages in full color. Here’s an example. (Warning: That’s a Pinterest link. You may need to log in. Annoying.)

These are not ink washes. He painted the whole comic in color and then reproduced them in black and white. I can’t argue with the process because it works so well, but I can’t think of another example of a comic creator doing that.

And, to be honest, while I like the color version of the pages just fine, I think I prefer the black and white version.

Flight, Volume 1: “Air and Water” (2004)

The 2004 San Diego Comic-Con saw the debut and quick sell-through of a pair of very good books. The first was Jeff Smith’s “Bone: One Volume Edition”, collecting the entire series into one glue-straining (stitches-straining?) book.

The other happened over near the Image Comics booth, where a pack of creators debuted the first “Flight” anthology book.

It was the brainchild of Kazu Kibuishi, who brought in a number of his comics and animation friends to tell short stories, many of which vaguely/kinda/sorta went for a “flight” theme.

The book series would go on for 8 volumes and a pair of spin-off books, “Explorer” and “Mystery Boxes.” The main series picked up steam so fast that it got picked up by a book publisher and left Image after two books.

Casarosa’s contribution is only four pages long, but it leads off the book. The “story” centers on a poem about flight by Kean Soo, with a nod to Antoine de Saint Exupery. (He’s the guy who gave the world “The Little Prince.”)

If you liked “Mia,” you’ll like this story. It’s four pages of an airplane taking off, but in color! The first two pages are lots of smaller panels of various sizes, both square and rectangular. The pilot looks like Mia’s father with that bushy moustache. It probably is him, but I can’t confirm it.

The poem is written out along the margins of the comic. The panel shapes and layout are often dictated by the motion being described or the shape of the object featured in the panel.

In the section above, you can see how a change in direction for the wing’s aileron is seen in a wide panel, and how a look inside the cockpit at the top uses a fish eye lens, as if Casarosa actually put a camera in there to capture the scene.

The second two pages are a huge double page spread showing the plane lifting out of the water.

It’s the perfect little anthology story. Very short, to the point, and more about a feeling than a plot. It fits very well into a book called “Flight,” even if that was never meant to be the series’ theme.

You can still pick it up on Amazon from various vendors.

“Sketch Crawling” Volume 1 (2005)

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This small (5 1/2″ x 7 1/2″) 40 page, square bound sketchbook with cardstock covers features Casarosa’s “An Unabashedly Autobiographical 24 Hour Comic.” In it, Casarosa draws the most mundane parts of a mundane life for a mundane day and makes it interesting.

This shouldn’t work for me. Nothing happens in this book. He wakes up, runs around San Francisco, meets some friends, has some coffee, and that’s it.

But there are three things working in his favor here:

First, there’s a good sense of joke delivery. The opening two page sequence has him dreaming of waking up at an appropriately early time, before finally doing all of those actions hours later. It’s a silent sequence told solely with his drawings. It’s a great use of the medium.

Second, everything he draws is cute. The people in this book are not chibi style, but they do have smaller bodies, big heads, and less detail in-between. His watercolors add an interesting element that you don’t see in too many comics, let alone a time constrained one like this.

Third, and most importantly, he introduces two angels over his shoulders. They’re not doing the Good Angel/Not-at-All-Bad Angel route kind of thing you normally see. One is naked with a halo while the other is a more street level angel with wings. The halo-toting angel turns out to be more cynical about Enrico’s life than the other. It’s fun inversion. But they both still have their moments of reality where they lose a little bit of faith in their subject.

The bulk of the humor from this book comes from those two, often making fun of the main character for everything from the amount of coffee he drinks to the lack of a life he leads.

They also provide an opportunity for including dialogue in a book which doesn’t often have a plot-related need for it.

There’s a five page follow-up to the main comic in which he explains the making of the comic and how the timing worked out. Mostly, it’s the two angels on his shoulder narrating what happened while squabbling about what the story is supposed to be about. (It’s titled “The Epilogue to the Unabashed 24 Hour Comics.”)

The drawing of the 24 page comic was completed inside of the 24 hours in the 24 Hour Comic rule book, but he went a bit over that limit to add the watercolors.

The images in this book are great reproductions of the final pages. They’re slightly yellowed and you can see all the warps on the paper from the amount of water he soaked it with to paint it.

The book is filled out with his watercolors of past Sketchcrawls through the city of San Francisco. I’d love to see more of those. He has a great eye for both detail and simplification. He gets all the parts of the scene in the image’s line art, and the watercoloring provides all the texture, colors, and lighting.

You stare at it too long and you start to notice that the people are very roughly sketched in as shapes and blocks of colors and that the lines on the siding of a building are incomplete and not perfectly architecturally aligned.

But none of that matters. The bones are all there, and that’s the important part of a Sketchcrawl. He’s drawing what he sees and he does it exceedingly well. There are a couple of great perspective shots, such as the street corner that’s triangle shaped that he draws from a window above it all.

The book is entirely hand lettered in the same style as Casarosa will also use later in “The Venice Chronicles,” so I’ll save my commentary on that for there.

There are a few misspellings and awkward English phrasings that I’ll chalk up to English being Casarosa’s second language. He was born in Genoa, Italy, and moved to American in his twenties to attend school in New York City — at both the School the Visual Arts and the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Add in the pressure to complete a comic in 24 hours, and some things will slip through. That’s OK; it keeps the book more honest.

The book was a limited edition to 500 copies. (I have #275.) The spine on it is very tight. I think it’s a combination of the number of pages and the weight of the paperstock, along with the square binding. It makes for a book that you need to pry the pages open to read. It’s slightly awkward to read that way, and darn near impossible to get good images from if you’re writing a review of the book.

But it looks awesome. Casarosa always picks paper for his projects that show off the art in the best possible light.

Stuart Ng has a copy in stock.

“3 Trees Make a Forest” (2007)

In the 2003 “Fragments” art book, Casarosa dreamed of doing an art show one day, but said that that book would have to suffice for now.

The good news is, he did have a show eventually. Titled “3 Trees Make a Forest”, it was held in November/December 2005 at the Nucleus Gallery in Alhambra, CA.

The Nucleus Gallery does lots of shows from animators and comic artists, amongst lots of other artists. Casarosa and Del Carmen were showing there with their friend, a Japanese artist by the name of Tadahiro Uesugi. Uesugi would later work on “Coraline” and “Big Hero 6” on the development side of things.

I’m not sure if they were giving these cards away at San Diego in 2006 after the show or in 2005 as a promotion for the show, but I still have mine:

Casarosa took part in four different events at the Nucleus Gallery, including one with the artists of the Flight Anthology books.

The website for the gallery still has some of his art (that has long since sold) on display.

“Three Trees Makes a Forest” is a 128 page hardcover book version of that Studio Nucleus gallery showing. It’s long out of print, but used copies are available if you know where to look. (cough cough Amazon cough cough) It looks beautiful, but I don’t have it.

Amusingly, some of the negative reviews of the book on Amazon were from people complaining that it was a book of drawings featuring people, and not the woods. They didn’t understand that the “Three Trees” thing is a metaphor, not a literal description of the book’s contents.

In fact, here’s how Casarosa explained it on his blog back in the day:

But what the heck does that title mean you might ask? Well the Japanese character for forest ? pronounced “mori” is made of 3 repeated characters ? pronounced “ki”, which singularly mean tree. So three trees do make a forest see? As I started doodling sketches for possible titles for the show something started to stick with me about this concept. The trees form something bigger than a single tree could ever be, the works of the 3 of us coming together will form something more than our singles’ output. Well maybe it’s a little brainy, but this is pretty much how the title formed and though a little strange it quickly grew on all of us. 

I don’t think it’s too brainy. I got it right away. It’s a bit woo-woo/artsy-fartsy, perhaps, but I think it works nicely.

Also, you’ll need to use the Wayback Machine to see Casarosa’s blog. Sadly, he let the domain name go a couple years ago and someone else picked it up for some of their unrelated nonsense. The same thing is true of Del Carmen’s site.

You can see more sample pages from the book at Parkablogs.com

Amazon has third party vendors with copies for sale.

“The Venice Chronicles” (2008)

This is the highlight of the collection. It’s a standalone memoir of Casarosa’s trip to Venice, Italy. He is originally from Italy, and his at-the-time-relatively-new-girlfriend’s parents were house sitting there. So, off they went.

Through the trip, we get to see Venice and other parts of Italy through the eyes, pencils, and watercolors of Casarosa. It’s a good mix of snapshots from a vacation trip and a skilled storyteller struggling with how to tell a story in this format.

The book is meta in many ways. There are times when Casarosa stops to ponder whether anything he’s writing or drawing is interesting. Will anyone care? What’s the point? He brings back his two angel friends to sit on his shoulder and be his conscience.

He also talks about the artifice of the form. The story needs to be told in the moment, but it’s impossible to draw that fast. The story needs to happen, and then he needs to go back later to tell it. Does that make the story less real? Is he, perhaps without realizing it, not telling the whole truth in order to get a better story?

Every time he tries to over-embellish a story in this book, he immediately undercuts it, usually with someone else in the scene pointing out that he’s lying about how events happened. It’s funny, and slightly endearing. He wants to create a book filled with action and adventure and pathos. That isn’t always what real life is, though.

Normally, this kind of navel gazing and meta talk would drive me up a wall, but Casarosa handles it with humor and a self-pitying monologue that makes him more endearing. He wants his book to be better and more real, but the reality of the situation works against him. What to do?

“Just draw,” the good angel tells him. Thankfully, he listened to that advice.

The end result is a book that does feel very loosely compiled, like it’s a collection of nightly journal entries done only for himself. The book has a very loose feel to it. Nothing looks to be carefully composed or tightly detailed. It feels like it was made up as he went along and then had watercolor splashed on it, more often than not. Some pages are even noticeably drawn on different, more yellowed paper.

It’s not a 24 Hour Comic, so it’s tightened up a bit. Things are not quite as loose as they were back then, but that results in a better, more professional product worthy of collecting inside of a hard cover.

I mean, just look at this painting of the apartment they were staying in:

Yeah, that’s no quick sketch…

While Casarosa might have been concerned that nobody was going to take the book seriously or believe what he had to say, I think the style in which he did it helped his cause a lot. It wasn’t super polished. It always feels of the moment.

He draws a cute caricature of himself, notable for having a large head with a big hat perched on top of it. But it’s all in pencil with bold splashes of color from the watercolors. There are moments that sneak in here and there where Casarosa stops to do a plein air type of painting of his surroundings. Those always work very well, but they’re also more detailed and tighter than his sequential work.

One final story note: With a slight bit of admittedly morbid curiosity, I looked Casarosa up on Google. Yes, the relatively new girlfriend he went to Italy with nearly 20 years ago is his wife to this day.

I love a happy ending.

If there’s one thing that does slightly bother me about the book, it would be the lettering. I like that he did it by hand and used a pencil for it. I think computer lettering would have been too jarring for this style of art and storytelling.

But — Casarosa’s hand writing isn’t always the clearest, and sometimes it feels like lettering is an afterthought, thrown in where it can fit and eraser be damned!

Eh, nobody is perfect.

The book itself is a thick, but smaller hardcover (8.5″ x 6.5″) with possibly the heaviest stock of plain white paper I’ve ever seen a comic printed at. The pages don’t bend. It’s like turning over a stack of playing cards anytime you turn the page. I kept flipping back to make sure I hadn’t just turned two pages.

This is the heaviest 144 page book I’ve ever hefted.

It gives you the feeling that you’re paging through his sketchbook more than reading a reproduction of it in a more mass produced form.

Again, it’s out of print, but StuartNgBooks.com has copies, as does Amazon. The prices are pretty close to cover. It’s worth it.

“Sketchtravel” (2011)

I only learned about this one while researching this article, but this is a fascinating book I’d love to get my hands on.

This is a sketchbook that traveled the world for five years, being physically handed off from artist to artist. In the end, the list of contributors is a jaw-dropping accumulation of names from comics and animation, including Casarosa, Pierre Alary, Juanjo Guarnido, Glen Keane (!), James Jean, Bill Plympton, Jerome Opena, Mike Mignola, and many more.

There was a documentary about it, but you can watch this short 20 minute interview that will give you an idea of the scope of the project.

The original book was auctioned off at the end of 2011 to benefit a literacy charity. It brought in 70,000 Euros. Not too shabby.

Casarosa’s contribution was a great page showing himself (in the same style as “The Venice Chronicles”) practicing yoga, with all the right little marks in the drawing to show us where he’s feeling the pain. I know I’ve seen that image passed around the internet before somewhere, but now I know where it comes from.

They did a limited edition facsimile edition of the book afterwards. It’s $150 at Stuart Ng, if your pockets are deeper than mine.

Or keep an eye on Amazon, where copies can be had pretty cheaply for the basic hardcover edition.

“La Luna” (2012)

This is not a comic book. It’s the children’s picture book version of Casarosa’s Oscar-nominated “La Luna” Pixar short. It runs 40 pages long.

Judging by the credits for the book, Casarosa did the drawings for it. There’s a credited writer and designer, so I’m pretty sure that means he drew it, since his name is on the cover.

The book is drawn in ink, then watercolored for the backgrounds and characters.

It’s out of print now, but there are Kindle and Google Play digital versions available at a more reasonable cost.

The short, itself, is available on Disney+.

The Trailer for “Luca” (2021)

Having looked at all this art now, I see Pixar’s trailer for Luca in a new light.

I can’t help but see those backgrounds of a small waterside town in Italy the same way Casarosa draws Venice and all the other parts of Italy he visited in “The Venice Chronicles.”

The proportions of the kids remind me of the way he drew the characters in that book, too — large heads with distinct shapes on top of relatively smaller bodies.

The whole style of the movie feels very Casarosa-ish, much like “Lilo and Stitch” could have only been designed by Chris Sanders.

I’m only disappointed that there’s no airplanes in this film. I’d love to see Casarosa do a plane-based movie of some sort — no, not a “Cars” spin-off. Let him lean into his Miyazaki influences. Bring Jake Parker in to help with the design work. I think those two share a lot of influences and could put something interesting together.

The Art of Luca

There is, thankfully, an art book for the movie coming at the end of June 2021. It’s from the fine folks at Chronicle, who put together a lot of these types of books for Disney movies. It’s a hardcover edition with 176 pages.

If you order from Stuart Ng Books soon, you can get it with a signed bookplate by Casarosa.

Recommended?

If you can find a copy, I’d definitely recommend “The Venice Chronicles.” It’s a wonderful travelogue with good gags, great watercolor work, and a personal story that has a happy ending

When I saw the “Luca” trailer, I thought that that would be all I’d be reviewing for this article. The rest of this article comes as a combination of happenstance — “oh, look at what other books I have in that box” — and research.

I’m also a masochist who likes to let a project expand past my breaking point.

Mostly, I’m just reminded of how quickly time flies by that a storyboard guy I met at a convention nearly 15 years ago is now a full fledged director for Pixar. That’s pretty cool.

(I had nowhere else to put the above image, but didn’t want it to go to waste, so here it is.)

And, even better, he’s done a couple of great comics. “The Adventures of Mia”, sadly, will likely never be completed, but those two comics are wonderful examples of a kind of storytelling that we don’t see enough of in North America.

If you can track those down, they’re worth a look. I see them listed on-line anywhere from $4 to $20 a shot. I hope someday, when Casarosa is between projects, he considers putting those two issues up digitally for sale. I’m sure it’s far down his list of things to ever bother with, but I figure it’s a more likely thing to happen than him drawing issue #3…

Or imagine a publisher packaging the two issues together along with the contents of the sketchbook, and being able to slap a “By the Director of PIXAR’s ‘Luca'” stick on the cover — ! It’s too late to put those wheels in motion, and who knows if the original files are easily available anymore.

But it would be cool!

P.S. Ronnie Del Carmen, Casarosa’s partner on sketchbooks and gallery shows, left Pixar last summer and is currently directing an unannounced project at Netflix.