I have a soft spot for Sherlock Hound (名探偵ホームズ (Detective Holmes)). It’s a lovely little series of exciting Victorian adventures, appealing canine character designs and beautiful background art… for 6 of its 26-episode run anyway.
Sherlock Hound was the last
television series that Hayao Miyazaki worked on in the early 1980s. He directed 6 good quality episodes before
production was halted by Sherlock Holmes’ owners at Doyle estate, and by the
time the issues were resolved Miyazaki had since moved on to making movies full
time. A gap of 20 episodes needed to be
filled, and so stepped up Kyosuke
Mikuriya. He was a promising director
who’d previously been in charge of the well regarded Ulysses 31 but was sadly
later fated to make crap like Legend of the Four/Dragon Kings. The result was a varying bunch of episodes
that by all measures do not hold up to the spark of the original run.
The Miyazaki episodes however
were pretty well regarded at the time, with compiled versions being double
billings with Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind and Laputa on the big screen. Any and all printed material I’ve seen on the
series has related specifically to Miyazaki’s work, and the artbook is no
exception. Sorry, but the rest of the
series is largely ignored.
Despite being made before the
studio even existed, Art of Holmes is published in same line as the regular
Ghibli artbooks in Japan. Hints at its
troubled history are implied as all pre-production artwork depicts Sherlock as a
floppy-eared hound, and not the tall cropped-eared character seen in the final
work. The rest of the cast evolve much
more naturally inside the book (aside from Mrs. Hudson who spends a brief
period as a human), but there is very little content on the final design of
Sherlock. This may come as a
disappointment to those specifically wanting production artwork on Sherlock’s
final design.
As a side note a similar instance
occurs in the collected storyboards of Sherlock Hound. The episode ‘A Small Client’ is sketched
entirely with an unfamiliar long-eared protagonist, whereas the other 5
episodes have the familiar design. Perhaps
indicates the moment at which the alteration was made in the production?
Aside from that note this is
a lovely artbook. The book is divided into
chapters labelled as Image Boards, Character Design, Backgrounds, Story and
Animation Technique. Pretty much
everything is covered to some extent.
About half of the book’s content is dedicated to delicate watercolour
sketches, with the rest used for either background studies or images from the
final product. There isn’t all that much
text going on, so you get a lot of artwork within its sub-150 pages. These days the book can prove a little
difficult to find, so if the opportunity ever presents itself it’s very much
recommended to fans of either the Hound or anyone into Miyazaki’s pre-Ghibli
work.
