I love the Spy x Family manga. It is inventive and exciting. The anime was good too. Spy x Family: The Official Anime Guide is a very methodical and dry guide to the characters and the production staff that put together the anime series.
While I didn’t find much to enjoy in Spy x Family: The Official Anime Guide, I can see it appealing to artists and those interested in the nuts and bolts of how an anime is produced. The best part for me was the twenty-one page color gallery. It showed images that I had never seen before of the family advertising various things. The brief two-page guide to the characters contained nothing that even a casual viewer of the family would not already know. However, the staff portion of the book consisted of interviews with the voice actors, producers and even the original manga authors with their thoughts on the anime adaptation. Throughout the book are sketches and illustrations of the characters and even the set backgrounds from the anime. These would be excellent for artists eager to replicate the characters at home.
Overall, even though I didn’t care for the tone of this book, I suspect other readers will value its content. 4 stars!
Thanks to NetGalley and VIZ Media for providing me with an advanced review copy.