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Kazutaka Miyatake Design Works


Graham

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Quick Review, also cross posted in the Movies & TV Series forum.

OK, I got the Miyatake Design Works (MDW) book yesterday (20th June 2005). It's 113 pages long, which makes it slimmer than the Kawamori Design Works (KDW) book, which had a page count of 157 pages. Paper quality of the MDW book is also different, being rougher than the more glossy pages of the KDW book.

Contents are as follows: -

Pages 3-14: Macross.

Pages: 15-30: DYRL.

Pages: 31-46: Macross Plus.

Pages 47-80: Macross 7.

Pages 81-94: VF-X/VF-X2.

Pages 95-109: Orguss.

pages 110-113: Interviews.

The Macross & DYRL sections of the book feature mostly lineart of ships and destroids. As with the earlier KDW book, both conceptual drawings and finished production lineart is featured. However, in these sections there was very little art that isn't already published in a dozen other Macross art books.

Things start getting a bit better with the Macross Plus section, which features some never before seen conceptual art of the Renegade Powered Armor, Ghost X-9, Guld & Isamu's flight suit designs and also early designs for the first Macross Plus poster. Location settings and buildings also feature. For some strange reason, the Queadluun-Rau is included in the Macross Plus section, rather than in the Macross or DYRL sections!

Moving onto the Macross 7 section, we get a lot of never before seen conceptual art of the Battle 7 ship as well as a lot of production line art of the other ships in the Macross 7 fleet and also the Varauta ships. This ship art is mostly the same as featured in the TIAS Macross 7 books though. Other highlights of the Macross 7 section include art of vehicles, mecha and buildings from Dynamite 7. Art and conceptual art of some of the Varauta mecha, lineart of Emilia's custom Q-Rau from D7 and some protodeviln and creature art.

The next section features ships and enemy mecha from 3 Macross console games (VFX, VF-X2 & DYRL). Included is some never before seen conceptual art of the Macross 13.

The next section covers mecha and ships from Orguss, followed lastly by an interview with Miyatake and Kawamori (in Japanese of course).

Not quite as good as I thought it would be and certainly not worth the 5 year wait IMO. If you have a large collection of Macross artbooks, then you will have most of the art collected here already. While there are a few gems of previously unseen conceptual art included, there's nothing really mindblowing, at least to me.

I was hoping that art of the City 7 Police Mecha from Macross 7 and the combining enemy mecha from the end of Macross M3 (Dreamcast game) would be included in this book, but perhaps they were not designed by Miyatake.

And before anybody asks, there is no Macross Zero artwork featured in this book.

Also, there are no color pages, like there were in the KDW book.

It is however, quite interesting to remove the slip cover and see the DYRL SDF-1 art underneath.

Graham

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so you would suggest this book to anyone who doesn't have any design books featuring Miyatake's works? I would actually get this book simply because I don't have Kawamori's book. and I feel it's actually interesting seeing the refinements and inner-workings of all these mech/ship designs

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Thanks for the review Graham :) Can't wait to get my copy, it's prepairing to ship from HLJ right now!

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