Profiting from movie merchandise is always a tricky business even if the movie is a surefire hit.  Pop culture retailers are dependent on manufacturers and publishers to come up with well-crafted items that appeal to the demographic shopping in their stores.  Often for films like Pixar's Finding Nemo the majority of the film's tie-in merchandise is intended primarily for children, making it problematic for the animation fans who shop in pop culture stores.  Chronicle Book's sumptuous The Art of Finding Nemo is the exception to that rule.  This 160-page volume traces the creative process behind the subtle, character-and-story-driven visuals that make Pixar films so much more satisfying than most of the computer-animated films from other studios.  Of course it's the storytelling ability of the wizards at Pixar that makes their films so good, but the images that Pixar creates are also in a class by themselves--a fact that this volume clearly demonstrates. With a $40 cover price The Art of Finding Nemo is targeted at the serious animation fan, but it delivers the goods as it closely examines the meticulous Pixar process with everything from impressionistic charcoal and pastel sketches to minutely rendered undersea backgrounds that occasionally include barnacle-encrusted WWII ships and planes and other relics of bygone eras.

As we opined in Best in Shows--2003, Finding Nemo appears to be the best animated 'bet' of the upcoming summer season -- and The Art of Finding Nemo is the best movie-based book we've seen yet this season.  The Art of Finding Nemo, which should ship to retail in April, was listed in the March edition of Diamond's Previews -- and should also be available from other distributors.