The Art of Cartoon Saloon: 25 Years is basically everything I could want out of an art book; part retrospective history filled with direct quotes and context, part visual feast packed with archival art going back to the beginning of the animation studio. 304 pages filled with 350 color illustrations total. All killer, no filler.

This stands in stark contrast to, for example, the KPop Demon Hunters art book I reviewed early last month. While I'm thrilled to finally be able to hold said art book in my hands, I am less thrilled by the content inside and its presentation. A much less thin experience; not exactly filler, but not exactly killer, either.

Given that this new art book is about Cartoon Saloon, the studio behind incredible animated works like The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, Wolfwalkers, and more, it would be easy enough to say that the source material lends itself towards an impressive tome, and that's true enough. Anyone that has the gift of sight can see as much. But author and animation historian Charles Solomon does a superb job of giving the connective tissue between the beautiful panels of art meaning, which makes sense given he's been doing this sort of thing long enough to have his own Wikipedia page.

While Solomon's retrospective covers everything from Skunk Fu to Viking Skool to the still-upcoming Julian with fascinating insight and accompanying illustrations, it is actually the earliest chapters about how Cartoon Saloon came to even exist in the first place that have enthralled me. It serves as a fresh reminder that, no matter how impressive a creative vision, all art exists within a larger web of influences and circumstances. It is, in the end, all relative and interconnected.

There's no secret sauce to how Cartoon Saloon came to be or direct causal relationship implied by The Art of Cartoon Saloon: 25 Years, but Solomon does a good job of connecting sequential events together into a series of inflection points that build to the 1999 cofounding of the animation studio by Tomm Moore, Nora Twomey, and Paul Young and then beyond that foundation. The studio's output might be singular, but even that is a synthesis of everything leading up to that point.

For example, would Cartoon Saloon really be the same if it weren't for both Don Bluth founding an Ireland-based animation studio and then its collapse? Without said studio's relationship with Ballyfermot College? Or specifically, without Glen Keane's long presentation at that college while working on Tarzan in Paris? Maybe. But Solomon, with plenty of direct quotes from the Cartoon Saloon cofounders, certainly makes a strong case that all of these ingredients fermenting together helped get the studio where it is today.

It is heartening to look at this history and see it sprawl out, easily traced through Bluth and Keane to Disney and beyond into a tapestry of its own that Cartoon Saloon is only one small and recent part of, but one with its own unique traits and foibles and idiosyncrasies. Cartoon Saloon is not an island, but a part of a larger whole, albeit a bright and fascinating archipelago.

"May I suggest that the arts must never be relegated to the margins, must never be considered peripheral or something to be enjoyed in times of surplus," the foreword written by Michael D. Higgins, the former President of Ireland, to The Art of Cartoon Saloon: 25 Years reads in part. This could be taken as being specifically about Ireland and its culture, but I suspect Higgins chose his words more carefully. A rallying cry, of sorts, for the world — one that resonates with me, certainly. And one, I think, that will resonate with you.

Disclaimer: A copy of this art book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this coverage.