By day, the men and women of Blue Sky Studios animate blockbuster movies like ICE AGE, ROBOTS and HORTON HEARS A WHO! But the stories they tell in those films aren’t their own; those they have saved for OUT OF PICTURE: ART FROM THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN — VOLUME 1.

This oversized, themeless, anything-goes anthology is a unique project that straddles the genres of “art book” and “graphic novel,” allowing its 11 contributors to exercise — and perhaps exorcise — their personal creative demons that their day job of animating a character to be voiced by John Leguizamo just doesn’t offer.

Daisuke Tsutsumi’s “Noche y Dia” exhibits a dreamlike quality as a woman talks to her therapist, and snatches of her life come back to her, especially of a markedly surreal encounter at a theme park. Greg Couch has fun turning nursery rhymes into noir in the too-short “Four & Twenty Blackbirds.”

Michael Knapp’s “Newsbreak” sends a couch potato into a land of tentacled monsters once he switches off the sedation of the boob tube, while the old man in Benoit Le Pennec’s “Floating Holidays” has a most amazing dream that ends as all amazing dreams do: too soon, and just as the moment when things start to get really good.

War informs “Silent Echoes,” from Daniel López Muñoz, while Peter de Séve plays on the opposite end of the serious spectrum with his jovial pirate tale “The Mermaid.” David Gordon has the book’s highlight with “The Wedding Present,” which tracks the whereabouts of a terrorist bomb. It plays out like an episode of 24, but starring fluffy rabbits and stuffed bears.

Andrea Blasich’s “Yes, I Can” is a wordless episode featuring a da Vinci-like inventor and a dragon that yearns to fly. Vincent Nguyen explores “Domesticity” with oddball and often nightmarish images. Nash Dunnigan’s “Night School” is the truest comic of the bunch, while Robert Mackenzie captures the wonder and worry of a child alone in the city in “Around the Corner.”

Villard’s edition is actually a reprint of an earlier release, but now with a sizable “Development Gallery” of sketches, tests, details and other miscellany that demonstrate how the artists arrived at their pieces and the things they left behind along the way. (Among the most notable observations: Dunnigan should have left “Night School” colored, rather than the black-and-white version he ended up with.)

There’s nary an untalented artist in the bunch among the OUT OF PICTURE gang, but note that this project is most interested in images and ideas. It’s not so much about telling stories than the possibilities inherent in doing so. Imagination runs wild; sometimes it can’t be tamed into convention. VOLUME 2 is close behind. —Rod Lott

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