Nancy Beiman's Animated Performance: Bringing imaginary animal, human and fantasy characters to life.

Nancy Beiman's new book "Animated Performance" should find a place on the bookshelf of anyone who creates character based work, whether it's animation, illustration, comic art, writing or portraiture.
Although written particularly for animators, it is not a technical "how to" book, which should be appealing to non animators.
There's no endless dreary theory either.
It's straight forward information that encourages the artist to think about the characters they are working with or creating.
This may sound obvious, but it's not.
A quick glance at the animation landscape should reveal this.
Further and deeper examination of character, and characters relationship to story will hopefully push us to experiment more and to do better work.
Apart from Nancy's text (which, from the little I know her feels just like her throughout), the book is large and packed full of terrific, wonderful illustrations.
I contributed a couple myself and every one of Nancy's are 163 times better than mine.
There are some birdy dinosaurs that I especially like. I also love the stretchy cats.
It's available for pre-order at amazon.com, here.