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View this post on the web at https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/inside-satoshi-kons-last-unfinished Welcome! It’s another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the slate: 1. What Dreaming Machine was supposed to be. 2. Newsbits from the animation world. Now, let’s go! 1. Machines with dreams In his lifetime, Satoshi Kon never made a commercial hit. Projects like Perfect Blue and Paranoia Agent attracted fans, and became very influential [ https://substack.com/redirect/b5bb6837-6ef9-4333-8c78-7d558723f369?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], and gained legendary status with time. But Kon was still fighting for a breakthrough with the public when he passed away in 2010, at age 46. He spent his last years on the movie that could’ve taken him into the mainstream. Its title is Dreaming Machine. Kon once called it “a ‘road movie’ for robots,” and it was well underway when he died. “A storyboard exists, as do 26 minutes of footage, colored and edited but not voiced,” noted Pascal-Alex Vincent, director of the documentary Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist. There were attempts made to complete the film after Kon’s death, but none succeeded. Still, enough information has come out about Dreaming Machine to get Kon’s basic idea. And, even though the film’s storyboards are mostly sealed away, one page has been published. All together, this stuff reveals an artist in his prime — and in the middle of a really, really interesting movie. With Dreaming Machine, Kon was working with a different type of idea than he’d ever used. It’s about “the future of the future,” he said. What that meant was made clear in the proposal document for the film. Kon wanted to show us: The near future that people around the world once dreamed of. A future world where transparent tubes ran in all directions between skyscrapers, hovercars came and went, and “Astro Boy,” the child of science, wielded his iron arm… This “near future that was supposed to come” has been destroyed. All life has vanished in the future-of-the-future. Humans are long gone — as are animals and plants. What remains is a gutted space-age world, full of cars, buildings and robots that look like the handiwork of a mid-century artist. In essence, Kon was building a retrofuturistic post-apocalypse. Think Fallout, but for Japan. It’s Astro Boy gone wrong. Kon was a child of the ‘60s, and all too familiar with the “shining future” that’d been promised. He mentioned the illustrator Shigeru Komatsuzaki, for example, who spent years conjuring optimistic future-tech worlds. In Dreaming Machine, this kind of world happened, but utopia failed somehow. Kon observed a similar feeling in the 21st century, where things haven’t played out as expected. Even as Kon drew the past’s future in ruins, he wanted to get into the spirit of it. So, he immersed himself in the cartoons of his childhood. In 1960s Japan, animation was often called manga eiga [ https://substack.com/redirect/a4e5c25d-6603-4bbe-bfc2-3bd89dd93a7d?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (cartoon movies) and terebi manga (TV cartoons). By the time Kon started Dreaming Machine, both terms sounded impossibly naive and old-fashioned, and they brought to mind animation in the same vein. But that’s what he hoped to channel. “A story of love and courage, a boy’s growth and adventure,” Kon wrote on his blog in 2002, half-joking. “The royal road of manga eiga.” While working on Dreaming Machine, Kon listened to a 120-track playlist named “Shining Future.” It was four-plus hours of Japanese cartoon themes from the old days: Leo’s Song [ https://substack.com/redirect/a8e96bdc-3e37-4a27-ab90-40cafe88bc28?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], Super Jetter [ https://substack.com/redirect/0fab0d59-61e4-47e4-b778-98d2b69b2560?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. In these shows, Kon wrote, justice and love triumphed over the “bad guys” and scientific progress saved the day. The work still appealed to him, in a way, even though he saw right through it. Especially key was a song from Toei’s Rainbow Sentai Robin (1966–1967). Its name is Robin’s Space Voyage (listen [ https://substack.com/redirect/a364eab2-0e64-4648-888d-6b3e140f917f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]) — a bombastic, self-serious anthem that feels like a Kon-penned parody of ‘60s cartoons, despite being from that time. He loved it. Despite the irony in Dreaming Machine’s cracked retrofuture, there are layers here. “He was really clear … this was a family film that he was trying to make,” recalled Aya Suzuki, an animator on the project. That is, a Satoshi Kon-style family film. “I want to make it a dual-structured movie,” Kon said, “in which children can enjoy it as a fantasy while adults can find the other message in it.” In Kon’s words, this is “a cartoon movie pretending to be for children.” It’s manga eiga deconstructed, but not totally rejected. As mentioned, there are no humans in Dreaming Machine. The characters are all robots. Aya Suzuki noted that they’re leftover “machines that were created by people to do labor.” They’ve kept working in the post-human world. The story opens in “a paradise of electricity,” per Kon. Artwork for the film portrays it as a skyscraper lined with tiled halls, large windows and synthetic plants. Only its top pokes out of the water — it’s a little taller than the buildings around it, the rest drowned by a risen sea. In this sanctuary, a small, headless, nameless robot lives alone. Another robot, Lirico, washes up in paradise one day. She’s a “nanny” machine, Suzuki said, who was “built and programmed to take care of children.” Lirico was styled like a “cuddly toy” by her creators (her design was referenced in part from an actual doll). And she gets the ball rolling by giving that nameless, headless robot a name and a head. He becomes Robin, our hero. There’s symbolism here, as Suzuki pointed out. Kon saw this paradise as his film’s Garden of Eden, and Lirico as its Eve. Not long after Lirico’s arrival, she and Robin are “driven from paradise by a tsunami,” according to the now-offline website for Dreaming Machine. The film’s mix of elements, particularly its biblical references, may recall Pixar’s WALL-E. In fact, Kon panicked when he discovered that film. “While I was developing the script,” he told Impact, “I heard about a movie called WALL-E… and I got a little nervous that it might be similar to mine. I can’t tell you how relieved I was when I learned that the two stories were totally different.” They are different. This is firmly a Kon project, and no one else’s work is quite like his. He may have aimed the film at a broad audience, and hoped to get “as many people as possible watching” (like producer Masao Maruyama said), but the unique sensibility behind Paprika and Tokyo Godfathers is still visible in Dreaming Machine. Leaving paradise, Robin and Lirico find that life outside is harsh. Electricity is scarce, and robots die without it. The two of them are in danger. But they get word of a magical “Land of Electricity” where the power never runs out, and they go on a quest to find it — teaming up with a blue “combat robot” named King. It’s a clear-cut setup, which was Kon’s goal. He wanted to break from the “surreal interaction of reality and dreams” that had come to define him. “[I]t’s not healthy to keep using the same motif again and again, neither for the audience nor creators,” he said in 2009. Instead, Dreaming Machine is an adventure movie. On their road trip across the ruined world, Robin, Lirico and King come across odd characters and challenges — like an army that hoards electricity. And Robin “grows up” as the story progresses. Here’s the proposal again: … he is born as a small child. In his travels, he inherits the parts that allow him to grow from other robots of the same type, and through his experiences he develops wisdom and knowledge, growing from a “boy” to a fine “young man” robot. Along the way, Japanese adults would’ve noticed the nods to the mid-century. Robin and Lirico, after all, take their names from Rainbow Sentai Robin. Meanwhile, one vehicle is based on a ‘50s Cadillac mixed with Ryusei-go from Super Jetter (1965–1966). Kon wrote that it came to resemble a car from Speed Racer. In many respects, Dreaming Machine is Kon’s crowd-pleaser. It even puts music front and center. “It’s not a musical, but it can be said [to be] like a ‘music animation,’ so to speak,” Kon said. He did one scene in which the characters dance to the track Hansen 108 [ https://substack.com/redirect/486d2c7a-cf4a-4b64-b98b-7f7117af9917?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] by Susumu Hirasawa, his longtime composer. The film’s title, actually, came from Hirasawa’s 1990 song Dreaming Machine. He recorded a new version of it for this project. When you listen to the original (here [ https://substack.com/redirect/87a69392-c2b1-47a9-9731-b6668eb77618?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]) and look at the film’s artwork, and think about the world Kon made, something clicks: Dreaming Machine is very strange. It has a zany, warped, almost phantasmagoric soul. It isn’t a safe, warm piece — Kon never was. “When you read the script [for] Dreaming Machine, there’s quite scary stuff in it, and there’s a lot of dark points in it,” Suzuki said. “And there’s a complexity in the narrative as well.” In short, Dreaming Machine is entertainment with teeth. And there’s a real message buried in it, beneath the irony, as the proposal document explains: This work is a very simple adventure story, chiefly an entertainment film. But it doesn’t stop at mere amusement; it is also a story with substance to encourage and share with children and adults living in today’s stressful times. In this work, I would like to convey the simple and healthy way of thinking that “purpose is born by living.” Even if you don’t understand now, if you keep living, purpose and meaning will be born later. That is what humans are capable of, and it is the core theme of this work. Dreaming Machine is sometimes (incorrectly) called The Dream Machine. It’s an important difference, because it hints at what Kon was going for. Madhouse, the film’s studio, once put out a statement that Dreaming Machine is about “the concept of life itself generating dreams and objectives.” Not sleep dreams, but dreams-as-in-goals. Dreaming machines might just be machines with dreams. Kon was on fire with this project — whose script he wrote solo, unlike with his earlier features. And he’d assembled an impressive team: on board were many of his top collaborators, like art director Nobutaka Ike. (Plus, as Suzuki said, the film was intended to train up-and-coming animators, bringing new blood into anime.) Dreaming Machine had every reason to be good. It will probably never be finished. A huge amount of unseen material exists, though. Among other things, Kon managed to draw more than 500 of the film’s 1,500 shots in storyboard form, according to Madhouse insiders Fuuta Takei and Hiroyuki Okada. Judging by the page included above, those boards were Kon’s most complex yet. He’d put more and more effort [ https://substack.com/redirect/177ecb40-67d9-4cc4-95a5-f52c41e25e03?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] into this step over the years, until his boards became comics in their own right. Flipping through the Tokyo Godfathers storyboards, for example, you learn that the film already existed before it was a film. With Dreaming Machine, that might be more true than ever. When Kon died, his career wasn’t done. Really, it had barely started. Reading about Dreaming Machine makes that obvious. “Each of my previous works is indeed a memorable and meaningful one for me,” he said in 2007, as he prepared the film. “But if you ask me which one I love most, I’d say my next project I am already working on is the one.” Reportedly, the surviving material from the production is trapped in a rights dispute. Pascal-Alex Vincent’s documentary about Kon was meant to include Dreaming Machine footage; it was cut. Kyoko Kon, the director’s widow, has floated the idea that the storyboards could be published one day. So far, that hasn’t happened. But Kon’s final film hasn’t disappeared — it’s there in the script and boards and concept art, and stray notes, and animation, and a little music. Whether or not it becomes a completed movie, Dreaming Machine exists somewhere, in some form. And we might one day get to see the shining, demented future that Kon was building. 2. Newsbits In Japan, AC-bu animated an excellent music video [ https://substack.com/redirect/2c757d87-ce1d-4aa1-903c-a7fdcf57bf57?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. After all these years, the group still has it. Suzie in the Garden (2022) is a Czech film done with paint on glass, and it’s now free to watch on YouTube [ https://substack.com/redirect/a984379d-f97d-4eea-9028-37d95c4e59d0?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. In India, Vaibhav Studios of Lamput fame will bring its self-funded feature Return of the Jungle to theaters in May [ https://substack.com/redirect/fb21fcae-1b65-49d1-9fd2-6e226fbf264d?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. The stop-motion feature Hidari, by dwarf studios, will make an in-development appearance [ https://substack.com/redirect/7a374fbd-3a88-48cc-9dff-ac5454cb294a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] next month in France, at Cannes Film Market. In America, a Hollywood artist (Yaron Farkash) is working with an independent team (Studio Ursa) to release the series Catus Magus [ https://substack.com/redirect/3b9dbf4b-b969-4e72-9233-f014f2f89022?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] on YouTube. The Australian animator Alex Grigg posted a video tutorial [ https://substack.com/redirect/1da97ae0-3824-4dfd-9b9c-6c62439716ba?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for Procreate Dreams 2. Later this month, an exhibition [ https://substack.com/redirect/d2906e21-4d2c-4f1b-ac71-2ca447a3cbc1?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] opens in Italy, at Comicon, dedicated to the work of Aurélien Predal. He’s a veteran artist who’s worked on everything from Shaun the Sheep to Genndy Tartakovsky’s canceled Popeye. An exhibition dedicated to Takamura Mukuo, key to the backgrounds of Isao Takahata and Rintaro films (and Sailor Moon), has opened [ https://substack.com/redirect/c98e87a5-1a30-45b1-9d18-d34a063020de?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in Japan. Director Pablo Leon (Remember Us) is developing [ https://substack.com/redirect/cf4849bc-3d94-459b-8360-0ae11735123d?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] a feature film based on the children’s book To the Other Side. Colombia’s Dinamita Animación is involved. Last of all: we looked inside the unusual Kawamoto–Okamoto Puppet Animashow [ https://substack.com/redirect/69f99885-df29-4535-9ca7-05788ece06f2?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], a turning point in the history of indie animation. Until next time! Unsubscribe https://substack.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.x1-Hye2JnJ-qi9ECk5HfoT6fYnrwzHJP-ghAJToSKnU?

View this post on the web at https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-process-is-the-art Welcome! It’s a new Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s the agenda: 1. Notes on process. 2. Newsbits from the animation world. With that, let’s go! 1. Figuring it out If there was a way to make art perfectly to spec and vision with zero time or effort, would you use it? That question was put to Coleen Baik [ https://substack.com/redirect/e1eb68cd-02ee-4860-9345-42e4adcf2da2?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] this year, in slightly different words. Baik is an animator, and her work takes time and effort. Right now, she’s animating on paper. “[I]n the era of ‘let the machine do everything,’ I’m increasingly drawn to do more of the labor myself,” she wrote [ https://substack.com/redirect/11aa6008-a54b-4736-ac5b-8edfb1cdce51?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in her newsletter, The Line Between. When she got that question about the no-effort, no-time alternative, she replied, “What would be the fun in that?” In the 2020s, there’s a lot of discussion around closing the gap between first thought and completed project. Tech companies are making it possible to render a spitballed outline very quickly. Using their tools, the process of creating an image (or a song or a script or a film) shrinks. It doesn’t take much thinking; the machine does the heavy lifting. But art isn’t really about jumping from an idea to a finished piece. Art emerges from process — the middle part, which some companies hope to erase. There’s a famous Ed Catmull line about Pixar’s method. Years ago, he called it “going from suck to nonsuck.” His studio’s best movies didn’t start as its best. “Every time we show a film for the first time,” Catmull admitted, “it sucks.” Early ideas for the likes of Toy Story and WALL-E were often startlingly bad. Made “perfectly to spec and vision with zero time or effort,” the films wouldn’t have been worth watching. The team knew it. What saved these projects was the long, slow, painful, confusing process of their creation, as endless decisions were made and problems solved. The films grew out of the time and effort itself. “In fact,” wrote author Peter Sims in 2011, “directors say that Pixar’s films will suck virtually until the last stage of production — problems are constantly identified and fixed.” Not everyone pushes it that far. Even so, there’s no escaping process. It’s where art happens. Watching a Hayao Miyazaki film, there’s a sense that everything’s in its place. His mastery shows in each shot, musical cue and frame of animation. Yet none of it simply pops into being. Miyazaki doesn’t imagine a movie and execute. All of his productions were made up in large part along the way — down to their storyboards. A Miyazaki film radically evolves as it’s produced, as he and his teams answer creative and technical questions in the moment. His friend Isao Takahata once put it like this: Hayao Miyazaki stopped writing screenplays some time ago. He doesn’t even bother to first finalize the storyboards. As long as he has a revelatory idea for a world structure, and as long as he has a clear image of the appealing protagonists who will be crossing swords with each other in that world, he can plunge into building that world, relying solely on the images and plots he has in mind. After diving into the process, he begins creating the storyboards while doing all his other work, from key animation on down. Using his powers of continuous concentration, the production starts to take on the elements of an endlessly improvised performance. … [H]e throws himself into the one-time, multilayered form of combustion that production itself represents. Something like Princess Mononoke (1997) couldn’t be created otherwise. Miyazaki had starting ideas and followed them — but the project grew in an organic way. Notoriously, he realized that another 15 minutes of film were needed toward the end, with the deadline nearing. Mononoke had become a different, richer story in the making of it, and the earlier plans had to change. Even when Miyazaki draws a single picture, he’s considering the individual lines [ https://substack.com/redirect/b9c385bf-eb6c-4fe9-95f8-08ae0b4684c1?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and their interrelation, figuring the piece out as he goes. Miyazaki’s drawings are defined by the thoughts and feelings and solutions that arise during the process of drawing. His art’s power comes from those things. There’s no shortcut around them. This stuff isn’t unique to Miyazaki or Pixar. Many of the greatest in animation have made similar points. Take Yuri Norstein, one of Miyazaki’s influences. Norstein is an animator-director, and his films from the Soviet era (especially the ones made with Francheska Yarbusova, his wife) remain magical. You might be familiar with Hedgehog in the Fog [ https://substack.com/redirect/89832502-45f2-4d94-8821-9b6024ea9121?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] or Tale of Tales [ https://substack.com/redirect/458a3259-05aa-43f4-9cf4-b65ef4dba029?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] from the 1970s, for example. As with Miyazaki’s work, it’s hard to imagine what could be different about Norstein’s films. What they are, they are perfectly. Yet he’s a deep believer in an organic creative process. Filmmaking, for him, is far more than taking an outline and putting it on the screen. Like he said in the ‘80s: I think a film should be constantly changing, developing. … The film grows of itself while it’s being shot. And during this time I never look at either the treatment or at the shooting script. … But the storyboard, on the other hand, isn’t something you just do at the beginning. You do it every day. It’s alive. And sometimes, out of some little detail, out of some action not foreseen in even the most detailed, strict storyboard, sometimes when you’re already shooting, a whole scene grows, a whole sequence. The poetic, spiritual energy in Norstein’s films wasn’t simply planned. It involved planning — but, again, it was grown. Norstein’s false starts, agonizing, experiments, mistakes, breakthroughs, on-days and off-days led to these creations. “[A]lmost everything that you see on the screen,” noted author Clare Kitson, “is gleaned from either painstaking research to solve a particular problem, or from one of Norstein’s childhood experiences, lodged since then in his memory, or … from a completely fortuitous chance.” In Tale of Tales, for example, the little wolf’s eyes arrived randomly. A friend’s son found a “crumpled ball of paper on the ground,” and it contained a haunting photo of a cat. When Norstein saw its eyes, that was it. They weren’t part of his first idea, but they became an emotional center of the film. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the ‘70s, the American legend Tissa David [ https://substack.com/redirect/df7ca28d-d226-4c00-89a3-5a13afc7205e?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] touched people with this same type of approach. (“Although her name is not familiar to the general public,” wrote historian John Canemaker, “several generations of audiences grew up seeing and responding emotionally to Tissa David’s work.”) David’s animation for the Hubleys [ https://substack.com/redirect/e05538ac-fbf6-458f-9c58-6008975b4b13?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and on Raggedy Ann [ https://substack.com/redirect/df7ca28d-d226-4c00-89a3-5a13afc7205e?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (not to mention in films like Abel’s Island) is still beautiful and original. And that animation was something she discovered in the process of drawing it. David imagined a movement and worked it out frame by frame, detail by detail, with a great deal of improvisation and without reference footage. Over time, scenes grew. Like she said: I never know what will happen in a scene ahead of time. I know what should happen, and what the story calls for. It will happen as I am going on, but how it will happen is just as much a surprise to me as to anyone else. I find out the personalities of the characters in a few scenes and then I let them go the way they feel like. As with Pixar, not everyone takes it as far as Tissa David did. That goes for Miyazaki and Norstein as well. Every artist grapples with process, though. Even limitations play in — navigating time, money, skill level. David often worked within small budgets, which helped to make her one of the finest users of limited animation [ https://substack.com/redirect/efb58faa-9b91-4ca0-a354-6fc4c99944b2?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Miyazaki’s first feature, The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), was only allotted four or five months of production, and solving that impossible problem led to a classic. To put it simply: more goes into making a film, or even a single sketch, than a raw first idea. A project built “perfectly to spec and vision with zero time or effort” wouldn’t contain much — because not much would go into it. The middle part, even if it’s short, is where the real interest blooms. Plus, there’s the other question — the one about who’d want to work that way, even if such tools existed. As Coleen Baik said, “What would be the fun in that?” 2. Newsbits The Pied Piper (1986), a Czech classic, is streaming for free on YouTube [ https://substack.com/redirect/b29c2184-3158-4c55-ac6f-69f4c2e81846?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Australia’s Studio Spud made a very interesting animation test with Moho, bringing a detailed illustration from the ‘40s convincingly to life [ https://substack.com/redirect/3081cd73-09d7-4871-9512-d4c5edaf9674?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Meanwhile, Australia’s Glitch Productions is having a great deal of success [ https://substack.com/redirect/256ba59e-9913-4f4e-8c26-1b8808f5ee3d?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] with ticket presales for the theatrical release of the Amazing Digital Circus finale. In America, new images [ https://substack.com/redirect/f3e84d2a-0e6a-45d8-9928-056d5e6eb16e?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] from Beyond the Spider-Verse dropped — and they take the style of Across even further. Producer Phil Lord posted one [ https://substack.com/redirect/2de2dd12-66b2-4c44-8e4b-52f1ef249cc2?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] with the note, “This is a frame from a movie.” On the topic of Yuri Norstein: the Russian government revoked his trademark [ https://substack.com/redirect/2fc27551-f185-4458-bdb9-4b2642a0ff4e?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] to the bear in Hedgehog in the Fog. It comes as part of his and Yarbusova’s ongoing rights dispute with Soyuzmultfilm. Japanese animator Honami Yano (A Bite of Bone) has returned with a film called Eri — selected [ https://substack.com/redirect/a9ea14a6-9d4a-4cba-9998-f6af0ae10a65?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. See the trailer here [ https://substack.com/redirect/3983cbb3-6ff9-4987-b06a-3480041416ae?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. The Indian feature Baahubali: The Eternal War was picked [ https://substack.com/redirect/5d1526b1-74c5-41cf-8684-7e772bad952c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for an Annecy work-in-progress showcase. Hype for this one is rising. The full list of WIPs is here [ https://substack.com/redirect/8d0896ad-be38-4ae9-9e78-178c6c7b79c9?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. The BFI Film Classics book series is getting a rare entry [ https://substack.com/redirect/c259eedd-f4da-45a2-980e-0a74aaa32d53?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] from the animation world: My Neighbor Totoro. British journalist Andrew Osmond is the author. Japan has seen a rise in full-time employment for animators in recent years. It comes as “anime studios try to secure reliable talent during the anime industry’s persistent labor crunch,” reports Animenomics [ https://substack.com/redirect/d61eb659-0810-409e-a067-7072db06a9ab?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Last of all: we looked into [ https://substack.com/redirect/e469e928-7507-4e9f-b4f7-d28268cbe808?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] Jiří Trnka’s classic film The Cybernetic Grandmother. 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View this post on the web at https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/stepping-inside-upa Welcome! It’s a new Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the slate: 1. Reviving the book Inside UPA. 2. Animation newsbits. With that, let’s go! 1. A creative environment Animation changed in the ‘40s and ‘50s. For years, the Disney studio had ruled. It was the benchmark, with its storybook worlds in which rounded figures moved with endless complexity. Yet some of its artists were feeling stifled. A new generation was rising, and the limits of Walt Disney’s ideas were showing. For one, people chafed against Disney’s way of running his business — his vast “plant” (his word) where his control was total. When his younger crew tried to unionize in the early ‘40s, he warned them, “[I]t’s the law of the universe that the strong shall survive and the weak must fall by the way, and I don’t give a damn what idealistic plan is cooked up, nothing can change that.” The same young people had fresh stories to tell, and fresh visual ideas to try, but they often couldn’t. Although Disney had pushed animation to amazing heights, he liked what he liked, and what he liked was increasingly old-fashioned. In 1943, a new Hollywood animation studio began to absorb the Disney rebels. At first, it took the long, drab name Industrial Film and Poster Service. Then it became United Productions of America. Eventually, most knew it as UPA [ https://substack.com/redirect/f5fc5bb4-f041-42f6-a4ab-4fa1b79a3fd1?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. UPA overturned Disney’s model. The studio was artist-driven, a place for open creativity. It went beyond fairy tales, cartoon animals, realism and hyper-complicated movement. And it was Walt Disney’s political opposite. UPA’s Bill Hurtz referred to himself and his peers as “thinly disguised reds.” There’s a story that someone once sang the Song of the Red Air Fleet [ https://substack.com/redirect/0cb2a533-074a-4ccb-90b9-158bf428396f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in the hall, only to be joined by much of the staff. The most iconic UPA building sat in Burbank at 4440 Lakeside Drive. It was as new as the company’s spirit. “Far from being a monolith [like the Disney studio], it was a fluid and light structure,” wrote author Amid Amidi (now on Substack [ https://substack.com/redirect/d5f6388f-dc53-44e4-a117-3ea362ca702c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]). That structure is gone today. But it’s still possible to step back into it — and into UPA’s other buildings. This is what Amidi’s book Inside UPA (2007) allows. Inside UPA is a photobook about UPA’s spaces and the artists who worked in them. You might call it a companion to Amidi’s Cartoon Modern, which we scanned and posted [ https://substack.com/redirect/7f0a8ce8-ac31-456e-b734-1673cfbfd72f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] with his permission in 2021. But a lot of people haven’t yet seen Inside UPA; its print run was small. So, again with Amidi’s permission, we recently scanned it. And we’re sharing it for free in this issue. With the links below, you can download Inside UPA or read it via browser on the Internet Archive. For a little more on UPA, and what this book contains, read on. Read [ https://substack.com/redirect/c811bb34-d99a-4d91-8eee-0d8ac53a4b85?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]Inside UPA [ https://substack.com/redirect/c811bb34-d99a-4d91-8eee-0d8ac53a4b85?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] Download [ https://substack.com/redirect/4ef57146-1f2b-4238-975d-c3e31dcdf20c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]Inside UPA [ https://substack.com/redirect/4ef57146-1f2b-4238-975d-c3e31dcdf20c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (316 MB) | Backup download link [ https://substack.com/redirect/4a636432-a987-49ee-8fcf-f14cd7db726b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] We’ve mentioned it before: UPA cartoons were different. It showed from an early stage in stuff like Hell-Bent for Election (1944), a pro-FDR film, and The Brotherhood of Man [ https://substack.com/redirect/14509c6f-8668-489e-ae7f-31dc2868fb17?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1946), created to help a union integrate. That latter piece “rip[ped] the hide off Jimcrow,” in the words of The Daily Worker. The contrast with Disney’s work from the same period was visible. “Whereas Disney promoted a sort of small-town conservatism,” a writer once argued, “the artists of UPA were openly leftist and pro-union.” Backing up films like Brotherhood were forward-thinking visuals: modern design, limited animation [ https://substack.com/redirect/e0aabb32-c8b0-4657-a60f-56cab4164633?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and so on. The industry’s younger, often art-school-educated people were excited to test these things. Here’s David Hilberman, a UPA founder: [Y]ou had designers who had art training who were beginning to push out and feel their oats. People who know who Picasso was and could recognize a Matisse across the room. And here they were at Disney, Warners, working with this really corny, cute stuff. They were ready. UPA was the first studio that was run by design people, and we were talking to an adult audience, to our peers. Not the family audience, not the kiddies. So given that the design just came out. By the first half of the ‘50s, UPA pieces like Gerald McBoing-Boing [ https://substack.com/redirect/8933e94d-ab85-445c-9341-dff4d9dbf57d?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], Rooty Toot Toot [ https://substack.com/redirect/f3da3690-7f2a-43df-b35f-79475775bf62?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], Madeline [ https://substack.com/redirect/cf4aa50c-9280-497f-b9d2-e37eb1bd94b7?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and The Tell-Tale Heart [ https://substack.com/redirect/aff3a8a0-37ee-4fa5-a05c-9053c4eddd4b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] stood with the best animated films in the world. That was true in their design, but also in their writing, motion and music. UPA became a new model [ https://substack.com/redirect/8fbec509-bb6d-4f74-ba57-02bff282a797?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], copied worldwide, like Disney had been. “Without exaggeration,” wrote historian Giannalberto Bendazzi, “it can be inferred that the very idea of animation as an art form, in the United States as well as in other countries, became commonplace with UPA.” Most of the studio’s finest films were done at the Lakeside Drive location. It was built to order by John Lautner, a modernist architect. “[M]y challenge there was to get a decent artists’ working space for absolutely minimum money, and I did,” he said. The studio was constructed on the cheap — in the ballpark of $30,000, Lautner recalled. That would be well below $500,000 today. It was a bright, optimistic-looking, mid-century place. As it was underway, word got out that “all offices and artists’ rooms, with glass to the floor, open on a central patio, giving the illusion of working out of doors.” That was another contrast with Disney — a studio of “factory cubicles with artificial light and no view,” according to one director. Calling UPA a “plant” was a stretch. This single-story building, in which everyone was on the same level, felt like an artists’ space. The UPA team moved to 4440 Lakeside Drive in early 1949, in the winter. Even though the windows weren’t fully installed yet, and the crew reportedly lit bonfires to stay warm, the vibe was good from the start. Once the building was finished, it was almost idyllic. Artist T. Hee recalled the experience this way: There were lots of birds flying around, and we’d have our lunches out on the patio, and have music out there, with people bringing their instruments. There was a camaraderie. For lunch people would bring costumes, and we’d dance out there on the grass; everybody had a wonderful time. At UPA, there was no real house style. Its cartoons differed from each other — and from the wider animation world. Historian Adam Abraham noted that “the artists had the flexibility to give each seven-minute film its own look, appropriate to its subject.” The same was true of their sound and movement. Legends worked at this place. Take Bill Melendez, who later oversaw A Charlie Brown Christmas. John Hubley [ https://substack.com/redirect/a49f04eb-f815-49aa-812b-285bd84a2273?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] was designing and directing. The grandmaster of limited animation, Bobe Cannon, was the team’s top animator. Even in the ‘90s, Genndy Tartakovsky was openly pulling [ https://substack.com/redirect/6270b39d-7ab4-41fc-9b26-146589d492e9?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] from Cannon’s ideas (“I don’t think a week goes by that I don’t reference one of [UPA’s] films,” he said in 2012). The studio was popular, too. Films like Gerald McBoing-Boing, watched by some 25 million people by 1952, were magnetic. The Magoo [ https://substack.com/redirect/a9634e16-3339-4867-8a70-c12af9844d43?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] films were a sensation. “[Our approach] hit audiences well; it was critically well received,” said John Hubley. “McBoing was a huge hit. The word started spreading that there was a new look to animation and Disney was finished!” Here’s The New York Times in the early ‘50s: Staffed for the most part by artists with young minds and progressive ideas, whose talents extend beyond the field of the screen cartoon to the fine arts (many of them are exhibited in the galleries of Los Angeles and New York), the UPA studio out in Burbank, Calif., is a West Coast center of artistic industry. The whole place — a cheerful California ranch-type studio building — breathes freedom, imagination and taste. In many ways, UPA became the envy of the industry. Ward Kimball, one of Disney’s Nine Old Men, frequently stopped by. “I’d come over here to work in a minute if I could afford it,” he said. UPA was a leaner operation than the Disney studio; it couldn’t spend the fortunes that Walt Disney did. As Amidi wrote in Inside UPA, the studio “rarely paid above union scale and didn’t offer the amenities or glamour of the major studios like Disney or MGM.” But that didn’t seem to matter: “animation veterans and newcomers alike clamored for the opportunity to work there during the 1950s.” In fact, two of UPA’s top animators had been top animators on Snow White: Art Babbitt and Grim Natwick [ https://substack.com/redirect/fc7a5a1a-0c5d-426f-8024-5e8e9d6608d5?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. You see their mastery of the modernist approach in Rooty Toot Toot. Natwick argued that these films were “new, fresh, lively [and] lovable.” As he remembered, “I loved to work at UPA. They had a crazy system there, an idea, a community spirit. ... It really did innovate something there.” UPA opened a door. Throughout the ‘50s, many honed their craft at the studio’s Burbank and New York branches: Sterling Sturtevant (Magoo), Bill Scott and Shirley Silvey (Rocky and Bullwinkle), Roy Morita [ https://substack.com/redirect/36a9a3f2-8716-4a9d-aca5-a1ecb94d23bf?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], Jimmy Murakami (When the Wind Blows), Gene Deitch (Munro [ https://substack.com/redirect/2c69fd88-4386-493a-bfda-64da5fe13465?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]), Tissa David [ https://substack.com/redirect/384a82e4-31c1-4ec1-a735-234af461b880?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] — the list went on. It should be said that the dream of UPA was relatively short-lived at the studio itself. The political climate put the team in a difficult spot. Bill Melendez later wrote that UPA was “too liberal for the times” and for the “skunks” who ran Hollywood then. Its films, and especially the artists who made them, quickly grew suspect. The FBI was paying visits by the late ‘40s. When the military bought copies of The Brotherhood of Man for the denazification effort in Germany, after the war, it was a controversy. Those screenings were reportedly scuttled “out of fear of rubbing some Southern congressmen the wrong way.” As the Hollywood blacklist project ramped up, many at UPA were targeted for their affiliations on the left, real or imaginary. John Hubley lost his job. Then there was Phil Eastman, who’d worked on Brotherhood and Gerald and Magoo. Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Eastman refused to talk about any ties to communism — citing the Bill of Rights, and a distant relative persecuted in the Salem witch trials. He spoke powerfully. Then a congressman quipped, “[T]here were no witches in Salem. There have been a number of communists identified in Los Angeles.” The hearing destroyed Eastman’s Hollywood career. Political persecution didn’t end UPA overnight. The studio kept doing great work — The Jaywalker [ https://substack.com/redirect/43102be3-05da-498a-bdaf-e8ced64c8cd9?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1956), for instance. But it was a blow, and other blows followed. Lots of people seen in Inside UPA were working elsewhere by 1960. Even so, the spark ignited in 1943, which became a blaze at 4440 Lakeside Drive, kept going. As UPA’s people scattered, they took the experience with them. John Hubley went indie; Bill Melendez became the driving force of the animated Peanuts specials. Phil Eastman switched to children’s books (as P. D. Eastman) and made Go, Dog. Go! and others. Rocky and Bullwinkle was stacked with UPA talent. Tissa David eventually turned into one of the world’s best animators [ https://substack.com/redirect/384a82e4-31c1-4ec1-a735-234af461b880?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. And, again, the list went on. And their work at UPA left a mark on the wider world. You could see it in Disney films like One Hundred and One Dalmatians [ https://substack.com/redirect/f085cfd6-57fa-49d3-af0a-2e4be03b6d15?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], and across the mid-century American industry. The impact of this new kind of animation was no smaller abroad — from Japan [ https://substack.com/redirect/a0bb7f3d-68d8-4719-97b9-2b2ffc864d45?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] to Yugoslavia [ https://substack.com/redirect/06e4cda4-4f55-42f3-ab00-d127b1a8ac8b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. With Inside UPA, you can go inside the environment that allowed these great artists to grow in the first place. Like Amid Amidi wrote a few years ago: Everyone who worked in the building remembered it fondly years later as a place where ideas flowed naturally and creativity flourished. … [T]oday, we can look back on it and remember that animation studios don’t need to look like generic office buildings where businesspeople work. Besides being functional for the purposes of production, an animation studio also has the capacity to be as beautiful, visually stimulating and creative as the work produced inside of it. Lautner’s UPA studio serves as a model for how it can be done. We hope you’ll enjoy checking out Inside UPA. 2. Newsbits Shanghai Animation Film Studio is about to release a feature in Chinese theaters: A Story About Fire. It’s a unique-looking production — see the trailer via Catsuka [ https://substack.com/redirect/b545409f-85be-40a3-b045-be2c87e8859e?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Cartoon Brew reports [ https://substack.com/redirect/5842e7eb-cd34-413a-81a1-5628141dd4c1?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] that the final episode of The Amazing Digital Circus, produced by Glitch in Australia, will premiere “on the big screen across the US in theaters nationwide.” (Also, new data shows [ https://substack.com/redirect/797e834a-af7e-4a64-b2c4-7064b5864394?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] that indie animation is overtaking studio projects for Generations Z and Alpha.) The American artist Josh Fagin appeared [ https://substack.com/redirect/f30a1ef8-4164-4c55-b075-3c1ff1ac5302?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] on John Pomeroy’s channel to discuss his Spirit Jumper [ https://substack.com/redirect/1aa99cec-44d1-4a4b-8c66-d5b464689e65?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] video and reveal the techniques behind it. Junk World is a Japanese feature from last year, done in stop motion. Next month, it hits theaters [ https://substack.com/redirect/23db5957-158f-406d-8c4d-2607fe99f4fc?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in France. An event in America: Los Angeles Filmforum shows the unusual collage films [ https://substack.com/redirect/c852b739-1255-4b30-8900-4c2b1a32c39d?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] of Stacey Steers this coming Tuesday. The venerable Russian studio Soyuzmultfilm is being pushed toward [ https://substack.com/redirect/49eb535a-8591-4a37-88cb-ed97ddd2e4a3?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] a “hybrid” GenAI pipeline. In Britain, the BFI more than doubled [ https://substack.com/redirect/29f1e053-bb91-4961-aa7b-7e78bc3a5ec2?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] the budget of its Global Screen Fund — which covers animation. A Cuban animated film called Double Play recently had its premiere at Havana’s Cine Yara. Animados ICAIC put up photos of the event [ https://substack.com/redirect/0c5dc1a3-da2e-4552-96dc-f56f9f2e2e2b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Mu-Ki-Ra, a full-length film from Colombia, will have its festival debut [ https://substack.com/redirect/d6389f6c-1629-4149-af02-70e9ed33b259?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in a couple of days. You can see it in motion here [ https://substack.com/redirect/20645e5e-7f16-4586-9ca0-d33f00d5462f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Until next time! 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View this post on the web at https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-image-boards-of-hayao-miyazaki Welcome! This is a new issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s our plan this Sunday: 1. Miyazaki’s concept sketches. 2. Animation newsbits. Now, let’s go! 1. Ideas on paper Watching The Boy and the Heron, back in 2023, wasn’t a theater experience like any we’ve had. We were a little speechless when we stood up to go — the credits rolling, white letters on blue. A stranger seated toward the front row had clapped at the ending. Mostly, people were quiet. At age 82, Hayao Miyazaki had reinvented himself again. It was hard to find the director of My Neighbor Totoro in The Boy and the Heron, just as the link between Totoro and The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) had been faint. Miyazaki’s changed and adapted since his career began at Toei Doga in 1963, more than six decades ago. What’s stayed consistent is his habit of sketching ideas. His “image boards.” “An image board is something drawn to prepare for a work,” Miyazaki once explained. They aren’t storyboards — they’re for loose ideas, not strict continuity. He did his first image boards at Toei: “I myself started naturally [drawing them] with Horus.” Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968) was the debut film by the late Isao Takahata — Miyazaki’s close friend, rival, sounding board, foil and in some ways mentor. Miyazaki was a major artist on Horus, and one of several who drew its image boards. As he said: Because they decided the overall feel of the film, and were the material that determined the direction of the story, it was necessary to draw as many as possible. I drew quickly and simply with a pencil and glossed it over with a single color — because it was the process of searching for a direction, I didn’t want to expend a lot of effort on each piece. I used to draw larger, but it got more and more troublesome, so they became smaller and smaller. Loan words from English make up the Japanese term “image board” (imēji bōdo) — but the meaning of “image” drifted in translation. In Japanese, imēji refers to something more like a mental image, an impression, an idea. Which is to say that an image board is concept art. That’s how Miyazaki’s endless Horus pieces were used. He noted that they were stuck to the studio’s walls to give everyone a feel for the project. “People who were participating in the preparation and those who weren’t could freely take a look at it, and go, ‘This is going to be interesting,’ or, ‘This is no good,’ ” Miyazaki remembered. His Horus drawings could be rough, as if he’d jabbed them onto the page in a frenzy. He was young. His fellow artists on the film, like Yoichi Kotabe, often did cleaner work. But Miyazaki’s sketches had an energy, a range and a cinematic eye that jumped out. Recalling his own time on Horus, Yasuo Otsuka wrote, “[N]o matter how much I drew, my drawing skill couldn’t match Miyazaki-san’s.” Soon, Miyazaki’s drawing ability matured further, and that roughness became a purposeful looseness. Horus began in 1965 and premiered in ‘68, and Miyazaki remained at Toei Doga for a few more years. He contributed concept art to Animal Treasure Island (1971) and others — visibly growing as an artist. By 1971, when Miyazaki left Toei to work on Takahata’s unmade Pippi Longstocking [ https://substack.com/redirect/70282d98-12a0-4598-a615-dd31fc697389?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], his image boards had real charm and warmth. The art doesn’t aim for perfection, but the character and atmosphere in it make the project feel real. Image boards like these poured out of Miyazaki during the 1970s. He drew them for actual productions, pitches, pipe dreams. He was establishing himself as an expert at inventing and fleshing out animated worlds — initially, Takahata’s worlds. Along the way, he openly reused and reimagined his own past sketches. Tons of visual ideas from Pippi were recycled outright in Takahata’s Panda! Go, Panda! [ https://substack.com/redirect/f8909cea-22cb-4dcb-9b5a-e8a02df532cd?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1972). A Miyazaki memory of the Panda era: … when I read the wording of the proposal that Isao Takahata-san had quickly written up, I felt my heart swell in anticipation — I could create a wonderful world. The excitement remained without dissipating. Beginning with Heidi: Girl of the Alps [ https://substack.com/redirect/658b13af-c951-46f5-abcc-0c0e82235186?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1974), Miyazaki’s main work under Takahata shifted to layouts. These set up the camera, backgrounds and animation, and the workload was so huge that Miyazaki couldn’t contribute to the creative side. “Heidi was entirely Paku-san’s world,” Miyazaki said, using Takahata’s nickname. He was often too busy drawing to attend Heidi’s meetings. On Takahata projects like 3,000 Leagues in Search of Mother (1976), Miyazaki grew more and more frustrated. They felt like a grind to him. “After Heidi, I didn’t have my whole heart in my work,” he said. Takahata’s shows were moving into naturalism and objectivity, and away from the fantasies of Pippi and Panda. In this era, Miyazaki felt that he “lost sight of [his] own themes.” On the side, though, he kept coming up with ideas and putting them down in image boards, even if they didn’t wind up on TV. Around then, in the mid-1970s, he sketched a certain visual for My Neighbor Totoro. It was the bus stop scene in the rain. Miyazaki dreamed of making something cartoony, fun and wild again, and it manifested on the page. Totoro was born as an extrapolation of Panda. “Panda is a very big-hearted, easygoing character,” Miyazaki later wrote. “He makes those around him happy just by being there, without doing anything in particular. In that respect Totoro and Panda are similar for me.” From there, Miyazaki’s image boards grew, and he became a better and better artist. Yet, at this early stage of his career, he’d already used them to define his most iconic visual. Ultimately, Miyazaki’s frustrations forced him to quit working with Takahata. He moved to the TV series Future Boy Conan (1978), his directorial debut. And a torrent of his suppressed ideas emerged. He drew an almost scary number of image boards for Conan, all zany, off-the-wall creativity. His goal was to build on the bright-eyed fantasies of his childhood years. Back then, animation carried the old-fashioned name manga eiga [ https://substack.com/redirect/89a07441-6466-4e8b-be00-c9a1dee67b64?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in Japan, and its representatives were cartoons like Fleischer’s Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941). “[W]hen I worked on Future Boy Conan, I did not try to make ‘animation’ as we usually think of it, but a manga, or a cartoon film,” he noted. Although satisfying to do, Conan was a middling performer in ratings. Miyazaki bounced from there to his first feature, The Castle of Cagliostro — another attempt at manga eiga. It flopped. He later recalled: The Castle of Cagliostro was like a clearance sale of all I had done on Lupin and during my early Toei days. I don’t think I added anything new. I can understand why people who had followed my work were extremely disillusioned. You can’t use a sullied middle-aged guy to create fresh work that will wow viewers. I realized I should never do this again. Neither did I want to. Even so, I did two more (television series New Lupin episodes 145, 155), and it was hell. With every piece I made it was obvious that I was just trotting out everything I had done before. [laughs] Nineteen eighty was my year of being mired in gloom. Miyazaki was about to turn 40, and he felt washed up. But his creativity hadn’t really run out. In a sense, it was only then being born. His image boards continued in this era: a thousand ideas raced and morphed in his head. As mentioned in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind: Watercolor Impressions, “The drawings Miyazaki accumulated between 1980 and 1982 formed the basis of all his work, from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to Princess Mononoke.” Some of these drawings appeared in the book Hayao Miyazaki Image Board (1983), published when Miyazaki’s career was still struggling. He was involved in the Sherlock Hound [ https://substack.com/redirect/60396b24-7219-47d5-bc74-6121edbf9a4a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] TV series in the early ‘80s — it fell apart after a few episodes, only to be finished by another team. And he got sucked into the vortex of Little Nemo, a feature film that Hollywood wanted to make in collaboration with Japan. “I ended up trying out all the different motifs I’d been carrying around with me,” Miyazaki said of Nemo. Each and every one of them was rejected. But, in the process, he even further developed the ideas in his image boards. This new trove started to be unleashed in Nausicaä (1984), a film far removed from the manic adventure-comedies he’d gotten known for. Once again, his evolution showed in his sketches before it hit the screen. Miyazaki had gained new reference points after Cagliostro — like Heavy Metal magazine artists Mœbius and Richard Corben (Rowlf). Their stuff, with its underground-comix leanings, seeped into his image boards across the early ‘80s. Around the same period, he saw the animation of Frédéric Back [ https://substack.com/redirect/318a2acf-5678-4f48-bccf-4e18300bc02d?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and Yuri Norstein, in which he felt a richness beyond anything he knew from mainstream Japanese animation. It made him feel inadequate, and pushed him. The sense that his films were “manga,” or cartoons, began to put him “in a bad mood.” When Nausicaä reached theaters, it wasn’t simply a cartoon anymore. And that turn had started in his image boards. Soon, one of Miyazaki’s stray sketches of a floating castle, done in the early ‘80s, became the blueprint for Castle in the Sky (1986). In My Neighbor Totoro, two years later, even his bus stop drawing was realized on film — just deeper and richer now. Since the 1960s, Miyazaki has kept to the same pencil-and-watercolor approach, plus the occasional inks, for his image boards. It’s casual, comfortable and fast. To him, he’s just jotting things down. As he said in the ‘90s: … the idea is not to spend an infinite amount of time creating these things, but to do them as quickly as possible. It’s a totally different approach than most people use when painting with transparent watercolors. In what is completely my own style of doing things, I first draw in pencil, and then quickly trace over that with watercolor, all the while trying to render as many images as possible, with as little effort as possible [laughs], as fast as possible. Every Miyazaki movie originates from this jotting habit: his collection, reuse and exploration of ideas on paper. In one proto-Nausicaä image board, you find the same U-shaped arrowhead that appeared over 40 years later in The Boy and the Heron. He’s always been self-deprecating about the art itself. In the ‘00s, he joked about its crudeness in his guide to watercolors [ https://substack.com/redirect/dacf1766-bb22-4d02-aaae-933b99a62568?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. “Forty years of nothing but this!” yells his pig character. Then a caterpillar mocks him: this method is “all he can do.” A dog later says, “I wonder if he could paint a little more properly.” But the energy of Miyazaki’s image boards — the loose pencil lines drawn with no erasing, the splashes of watercolor thrown around the page — shouldn’t be underestimated. At Toei, his concept art was sometimes outdone by others’ work. In the end, he took the lead. By the late ‘80s, a powerfully assured technique was visible in these sketches he tossed off so quickly. There’s a feeling that the Miyazaki of Princess Mononoke, then in his 50s, could draw whatever he needed to draw. That was true in his storyboards as well. Yet so many of his visuals were image boards first, concept sketches on his sketch pile. In 2001, the year Spirited Away premiered, Miyazaki turned 60. He’d felt washed up 21 years before, but this became his biggest hit, and most chaotically creative film, by that time. A lot of its success was right there in pencil and watercolor, where Miyazaki’s ideas had never been wilder or more concretely rendered. You saw the same in his sketches for Howl’s Moving Castle and Ponyo. Every line and form is wobbly, but the impression is sharp, exact and effortless. The artist from Horus, all those decades before, was gone. The page was now an open conduit for Miyazaki’s imagination. When The Boy and the Heron started, Miyazaki was in his mid-70s. The film took seven years. In 2023, ex-Ghibli animator Kenichi Yoshida said in an interview [ https://substack.com/redirect/0569b65a-afee-4f36-95a1-0bcfa9110760?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] that he still met with Miyazaki to chat from time to time. It was different from before, though. “Miyazaki… is an old man now; he’s the same generation as my parents,” said Yoshida. And yet the power of Miyazaki’s ideas had, in many ways, never been stronger. His image boards for The Boy and the Heron show a master’s touch, an absolute clarity of imagination. It’s not the phantasmagoria of Spirited Away, but he could still mesmerize with a sketch, and that lifted the film. An anecdote from the production proves it. When producer Toshio Suzuki was creating the Japanese poster for The Boy and the Heron, something clicked. It wasn’t just him — even Miyazaki agreed, for once. Like Suzuki said a few years ago: … I’ve been doing movies since, what, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and that poster is the first thing Hayao Miyazaki has ever really praised me for. He said, “Suzuki-san, this is amazing.” … He said it was the best I’ve done. That served as a hint. “So, let’s just go with this!” So, no trailers. Absolutely no TV spots. We’ll do it all. No newspaper ads! Suzuki’s mysterious, unplaceable poster helped to lead The Boy and the Heron to Ghibli’s biggest opening in Japan. The film went on to sweep the world. And what appeared on the original Japanese poster is a small snippet — carefully cropped and zoomed — of a Hayao Miyazaki image board. 2. Newsbits We lost Barry Caldwell [ https://substack.com/redirect/9971f880-ed88-4089-b0b5-a5fe611b5458?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (68), the veteran storyboarder. There’s discourse in Nigeria about state support for artists. It turns out that “over $600 million in funding is available to Nigerian animators and comic creators, yet the majority of studios have not applied.” See The ACE [ https://substack.com/redirect/9f18ea6f-5c80-46df-b107-b79e1bc85773?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for more. In America, some of the government’s moves last year to defund PBS and NPR were overturned by the courts [ https://substack.com/redirect/022a59c2-4085-476c-be6b-632a36bb9a74?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. The Palestinian artist Ahmad Adawy won [ https://substack.com/redirect/db2ef1ab-3fba-4cb3-b722-01154e0143c0?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] a Mahmoud Kahil Award for his illustrations. His former animation company, Cube Studio, was based in Gaza. There’s a government plan in Armenia to revive [ https://substack.com/redirect/1a70c90c-b14b-45ce-ac80-943801ed2b78?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] the dormant Armenfilm — a vital studio in the country’s Soviet era. Animator Robert Sahakyants [ https://substack.com/redirect/fc847ac4-3737-4907-8456-11d6a08f83fb?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] made classics like Wow, a Talking Fish! there in the ‘80s. Last weekend in Cuba, the children’s animation workshops hosted by Academia Animaluz continued [ https://substack.com/redirect/ceedeb47-e1e0-4c78-bbf0-3e20eecf5817?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], despite a power outage due to the American blockade. (For more on current life in Cuba, see these accounts [ https://substack.com/redirect/3aef678a-0e3c-4752-9471-0b11ed53a82f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ].) Scholar Pavel Shvedov wrote about [ https://substack.com/redirect/968ee161-218f-4522-8ff1-994378b33f50?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] the loss of the “middle generation” in Russian auteur animation. The recent Suzdalfest was populated mostly by newcomers and seasoned veterans; many of the artists in between have left the country or switched focus. An American theater, Metrograph in Manhattan, is screening Czech animation [ https://substack.com/redirect/f358e66b-e244-4cdf-9ecf-f358d3cbdcf9?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in April — including The Pied Piper and The Revolt of the Toys. We revealed [ https://substack.com/redirect/16e87a2a-902e-41ef-822e-ee67cb944194?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] a few months ago that the lost Mexican feature Roy from Space has been found and is being restored. Deaf Crocodile is now crowdfunding the final parts of the release, and there’s a trailer with footage [ https://substack.com/redirect/b7d217e1-2e41-48cc-a70a-cb558e792b9f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Fonzieland did an interesting profile [ https://substack.com/redirect/a2da273f-e54b-4702-a99b-c06190ae68e5?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] on artist Teri Hendrich Cusumano, who spearheaded labor reforms in American animation but has since left the industry. Last of all: a flashback to the Disney Channel’s miniature festival of animation from around the world [ https://substack.com/redirect/4cce27c4-5afe-4aa5-8a91-edec99452555?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Until next time! 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View this post on the web at https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/truth-and-the-budget-have-the-last Welcome! Glad you could join us. It’s another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the plan: 1. An introduction to two independent greats. 2. Animation newsbits. Now, let’s go! 1. The Hubley films An animated sequence went very, very big on social media last year. It’s about two people in a relationship. At one point [ https://substack.com/redirect/cfaef320-089c-4fe0-be45-527faba3b411?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], they sit in a rowboat. At another, they have an awkward conversation [ https://substack.com/redirect/5e1738f3-1b41-47d3-be2c-4d48b0220c59?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] while wearing masks. Nothing major happens, but their interactions sound natural, unscripted — and they’re animated with artful drawings and a real sense of life. That was enough to hook millions. The clips came from a little-known ‘70s movie called Everybody Rides the Carousel (watch [ https://substack.com/redirect/10c52203-9b6b-475f-89d6-cdf88d35e5d6?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]). It was made for TV, but it doesn’t feel throwaway. In fact, handling this section of the film were two great animators: Barrie Nelson and Tissa David [ https://substack.com/redirect/636be181-32ed-4dbc-a109-e19b9661d47b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Those artists had already worked a lot, on earlier projects, with the directors of Everybody Rides the Carousel. And the sequence turned out so well for a reason. The film was a Hubley production, after all. John and Faith Hubley always brought something special to their work. It was never phoned in — even the ads they made on the side, to pay the bills, were left-field and human. Across the Hubleys’ decades together, their films won three Oscars. And they made those films outside America’s big studios. Back then, from the ‘50s through the ‘70s, an indie animated film wasn’t a simple proposition. It was often impossible to get one funded and distributed. Even the Hubleys had to scramble, deep in debt. “[Y]ou spend a certain percentage — let’s say 20, 30, 40 percent of your day — dealing with matters that have nothing to do with the pure creative,” John said. But they kept doing one of these unusual films each year. John noted that “you have to make what you want to make.” For Faith, the less commercial of the pair, it was non-negotiable. “If you are going to grow, stay alive, remain sensitive and valid, you have to keep working seriously,” she said. “If your value in life is to be always doing what comes along, you are abandoning your responsibility as an artist.” This thinking led them to work like Everybody Rides the Carousel (a lucky commission from a network), whose artistry and humanity still touch people. That film is only a slice of the Hubley story, though. In this issue, we’re putting together an introduction to their careers — and a viewing guide for their films (with links to watch in bold). When the Hubleys married in 1955, they’d already been friends for years. They’d worked together, too. Their first collaboration was the educational film Human Growth (1947). Faith, who edited it, came from Hollywood’s live-action side. John was an animation guy; he designed its animated inserts. Faith took many roles in Hollywood: coordination, script, sound. John was a name at UPA [ https://substack.com/redirect/514920ce-9d8f-46c4-b7f3-13f3a3055535?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], where he did socially engaged and graphically fresh cartoons. Some saw him as a “genius.” With creations like Mr. Magoo [ https://substack.com/redirect/57b290f1-895d-434f-9e72-c9d57fc6028c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], John told modern stories in the language of modern art. He rebelled against what he called Disney’s “18th-century watercolor” aesthetics and “sweet sentimental chipmunks and bunnies.” As the Red Scare began to rage, though, John landed in trouble over his one-time membership to the Communist Party. In 1952, he was blacklisted in Hollywood. So, he opened an advertising studio, Storyboard, as a refuge. When Faith married him, Storyboard’s purpose became indie animation. It was a must for her: “I have much stronger feelings than John about the risks of spending one’s life in advertising,” she said. They promised in their wedding vows to do one film per year, however they could. (“We make one for them,” John noted, “and one for us.”) “As a country, we paid a heavy cost [for the blacklist],” Faith said. “But personally, it allowed us great freedom. I don’t know if Johnny ever would have left Hollywood. I don’t know if we would have had as creative a life.” The Hubleys’ first indie animated film was The Adventures of * [ https://substack.com/redirect/547406b6-8983-47ad-9d3e-a6f47639328b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1957), funded by the Guggenheim. Faith described it as the tale of “a child’s vision, the slow erosion of the vision, and how it can only be regained through the eyes of one’s child.” And, visually, it was revolutionary. Here’s John: Because it was commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum and because they were dedicated to breakthrough art … [it] was mandatory to come up with a new technique in animation. We worked at ways of getting something that was never done and came up with this wax resist. … Take the animation, then we cover the drawing. Turn another piece of paper over and you take a wax candle, like a real paraffin, heavy paraffin and rub it very hard over that shape. And then you wash watercolor ink over it and what happens is you get a natural resist from the wax ... [We were getting] this wonderful texture on this thing and then double-exposing it over backgrounds that were also painted in the same technique … It’s like a painting coming to life. The Adventures of * set the tone for their work together. It would be unorthodox, non-Hollywood — movies like canvases. And it would focus on the real and the human, pushing back against the phony corporatization of the mid-century. That spirit appeared even in the Hubley commercials, made to fund their personal films. Take their major one for Maypo cereal [ https://substack.com/redirect/acacb0c6-937d-41b9-98cf-8ce87d0edcbd?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. John had long hated the “prosaic hard-sell dead spots on the air,” and he felt that ads should have the “human elements” that inspired “people to watch TV shows in the first place.” The Maypo ads derived from unscripted, improvised audio recordings, spliced into narratives. Faith said, “[W]e just loved the idea of doing something natural and truthful with a non-professional actor.” Here, they worked with Mark Hubley, their young child. The campaign seems to have been a tax write-off for a failing product; the Hubleys got lots of money and unusual freedom. But the result, which debuted less than a year before The Adventures of *, had a warm authenticity. People loved it. Maypo’s sales spiked dramatically, and the Hubleys were hired for a whole series of ads — Late for School [ https://substack.com/redirect/b95638ad-5a2c-4756-83db-6d11ae838945?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], Marky’s Sister [ https://substack.com/redirect/b5c2794a-8a62-4def-875c-da6af75df1bb?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], the one about Uncle Ralph [ https://substack.com/redirect/cc56f60d-ef86-42a8-b3ce-a09d6bf06ba4?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. “It supported our personal films,” Faith said. Take The Tender Game [ https://substack.com/redirect/26150a02-98c5-4319-b970-749a1851bd8a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1958), a short romance. Although the Hubleys weren’t animators themselves, they appreciated the form — and they hired legends like Bobe Cannon to make their designs move. Paired with music by Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson, it’s beautiful. The involvement of jazz was key — John and Faith loved it, and they had friends in the jazz world. Benny Carter was a regular collaborator, as was Dizzy Gillespie. (“We have a mutual admiration society,” Gillespie wrote.) The Hubleys’ Harlem Wednesday [ https://substack.com/redirect/9c131d83-bd16-4bad-927a-96440c8e36a2?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], from 1957, is just Carter’s jazz over modern paintings of mid-century Harlem life. But that’s enough. By the time the Hubleys released Moonbird [ https://substack.com/redirect/72bae141-7bcf-4cce-9261-23055e66d863?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1959), their films were clearly different. Once again, it was a visual experiment — paint on paper, double-exposed over backgrounds — with a grounding in reality. It’s based on an edited recording of their sons Mark and Ray (“Hampy”) at play. Bobe Cannon and Ed Smith brought the soundtrack to life with world-class animation. Here was the new breed of animated film — self-funded and personal. Moonbird won the Oscar for animated shorts in 1960, a first for indie animation. As John stood at the podium, he said: I must share this with five people: Bob Cannon, Ed Smith, Faith Elliott and Marky and Hampy. By the early ‘60s, Hubley films were known to those in the know, worldwide. Animators in the USSR looked at their experiments with a touch of envy. The painterliness of films like The Tender Game and Moonbird was a topic of discussion in places like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Disney was popular, but the Hubleys got the respect. It was painful for John, during the UPA years, that his films didn’t win Oscars. With Moonbird, Hubley family productions began to succeed where he’d failed. Animator Shamus Culhane felt that Faith brought “a lyric quality, a subtle tender approach to filmmaking ... a poetic approach” that John didn’t have at UPA. Figuring out exactly what each Hubley contributed to the films is difficult, and it changed project by project. John said that “all of the films, right from the beginning of our stuff, from Guggenheim on up, have always been a very close collaboration, creatively and on every other level.” He hesitated to break it down too much. Faith gave it a try: We collaborate on the story. John does most of the backgrounds and I do some. I do the character rendering. We both work on the soundtracks. As a trained editor, it’s easier for me. The statement, the content, is made jointly. More recently, their son Ray has pointed out just how essential Faith’s sound-editing was. “As I look at it, I see that Faith editing together these improvised dialogue tracks ... it approaches being something like a writer for the films,” he said. Temperamentally, Faith was an energetic go-getter; John was more neurotic and moody. She noted that he was a hypochondriac, and prone to bouts of depression after a project. Plus, the two of them were known to argue relentlessly over their work. (“I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with fighting,” Faith said.) Yet the collaboration only grew stronger. They kept pushing boundaries and making the films that Hollywood couldn’t. Take The Hole [ https://substack.com/redirect/bed2e6f6-7c5a-4f17-80c9-9b3ad69bf467?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1962) — a gorgeous, funny piece based on a conversation between Dizzy Gillespie and George Mathews. It tackles nuclear war with a human touch. It won another Oscar. Despite the praise, the Hubleys’ films mostly struggled. Moonbird didn’t pay off until the ‘70s; The Hole wasn’t widely seen. John’s dream was to make features, but their first, the visually stunning Of Stars and Men [ https://substack.com/redirect/d7836c72-0562-432e-8530-d82d058fd825?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1961), was a flop that wrecked their finances. Even some festival audiences were skeptical. Faith recalled “banging doors and loud hisses” when it screened at Annecy in France. The Hubleys’ studio sank further underwater over the years. But, creatively, they didn’t slow down. Windy Day [ https://substack.com/redirect/9ecf4afb-cd10-482d-ae09-31816b74331b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1968) was a project with their daughters Emily and Georgia, and one of their most impactful films. It was shot on layers of underlit vellum. Meanwhile, Zuckerkandl [ https://substack.com/redirect/e5acb8f7-ab7d-47d2-b807-3d4d9b3a9954?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1968) is a hilarious jab at mid-century America, about a philosopher who argues for “the disentangled life.” A follower of his says: Imagine … a community all the members of which are unconscious. Let neither choice nor thought nor action destroy this paradise, this nest of softly cooing doves, unconcerned by what people will say because they know that people will all say the same thing. Be unconscious. Be detached. Don’t get involved. The Hubley films always had a cause — not always openly stated. Zuckerkandl is one of their loudest, and it feels like a response to the Vietnam War. A few years earlier, Faith had told the press, “We make most of our films funny. Everything is really so futile that all you can do is laugh and do your best.” Hubley productions were small, by necessity and by design. There wasn’t much money to go around, for one — but John and Faith were also resisting the industrial approach. “We try to keep the staff at half a dozen,” Faith said. “This work is highly personal and it suffers terrifically if it gets farmed out to strangers.” They had a stable of people who worked with them again and again. It wasn’t uncommon for a single animator to handle a whole film. That was the case with Tissa David, who animated their Eggs [ https://substack.com/redirect/037177b8-91ee-4705-a3ae-eaccfdee7cde?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1970) and Cockaboody [ https://substack.com/redirect/689bb450-a54c-47c5-82ac-1d08c39841de?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] [ https://substack.com/redirect/689bb450-a54c-47c5-82ac-1d08c39841de?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ](1973) by herself. In the ‘70s, David was a go-to animator for the Hubleys. They used her often in their shorts for Sesame Street and The Electric Company: Glad Gladys [ https://substack.com/redirect/c521e05d-b534-49dc-a3d1-bbb8c7bf18b6?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], Cool Pool Fool [ https://substack.com/redirect/aa4a9738-c964-4bd5-bc5b-1c40b589446f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], Penguin Rhythms [ https://substack.com/redirect/bbe5a20e-52e3-4a60-ad71-0286a44f8085?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], The M Who Came to Dinner [ https://substack.com/redirect/0523e101-a0e1-4f7c-90dc-cf6174cc2f66?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. David was a master at the human warmth the Hubleys needed — and at working with limited frames. She’d learned her craft at UPA, and she stayed committed to the style. As she once said, a low budget: ... does not inhibit me at all. I love simplicity in animation. Even if I had a high budget I would do simple animation. When the opportunity to make Everybody Rides the Carousel came along, the Hubleys hired David to animate a great deal of the film. It’s a semi-educational, feature-length story about people’s development. CBS funded it and gave it a half-year schedule, but John and Faith treated it the same as an indie project, and involved their Yale class in the production. It was one of the Hubleys’ last projects together, before John’s death. And it was among their closest collaborations. Faith said that she had a large hand in directing Bill Littlejohn’s animation (“I wanted to act out some of the characters”), and that more of her own painting appeared on screen than usual. Littlejohn was the Snoopy animator — a top-tier artist. Many were hired to Carousel. Tissa David took the lead on the sixth section, with the young couple. Working alongside her, as mentioned at the start, was Barrie Nelson (Windy Day). And, in that sixth section, you find all the hallmarks of Hubley animation. First, the voices. On YouTube, where the film’s views exploded last year, one commenter wrote, “I love the way they talk so naturally. It doesn’t sound like acting. It sounds like we’re listening to a home movie.” The reason: Carousel was another Hubley improv recording. (One of the actors for the couple was a young Meryl Streep, in her debut film role.) Second, the technique. This isn’t traditional cel animation. Michael Sporn, who worked on Carousel, wrote that David’s scene with the masks was done with vellum, light and multiple exposures. “Each stage [of the film] had its own technique and color scheme,” he noted. Third, the design and animation. The mask scene gets away from Disney’s ideas: once again, it’s like painting in motion. And David’s animation isn’t literal or naturalistic — the characters act with human warmth, but they also transform in unreal ways. All of it was needed for the special “realism” that the scene demanded. John Hubley wrote at the time: In the sequence dealing with intimacy versus isolation, it becomes clear to a couple that their relationship is moving toward a deeper commitment to each other. Each must be prepared to share identity with the other. Each feels threatened, their faces turn inward, and masks appear. The masks continue a superficial relationship while the real faces, still turned inward, voice thoughts and feelings about the conflict. They drift apart, unable to remove the masks. When the two do away with their masks on a second try, and make real efforts at intimacy, they succeed in sharing. They reach maturity; the figures become abstract, Matisse-like. The enactment is a ballet — a series of arms, legs, torsos and heads flowing in a dance of love. A literal love scene at this point would be cartoon-like in the old sense, and would therefore present not realism but a flat and ineffective caricature. … Artists around the world are defying the old “linear shape” order in graphics. Let’s hope they also defy the limitations of the fairy tale and confront contemporary issues. May we be fortunate enough to see the development of visuals that are generated by dramatic and psychological imperatives — to continue to reveal human vulnerability and to increase the understanding of human relationships. Everybody Rides the Carousel fell into obscurity, and it isn’t available in restored condition. Even the version that Criterion streamed a few years ago didn’t look great. The copies that went viral last year are bleary; it’s almost hard to tell what’s happening. But none of that kept people away. The scenes in this sixth part of Carousel are rich with those qualities Faith Hubley mentioned: they’re “natural and truthful.” At a time when the Hubleys aren’t discussed much, and social media seems like a poor fit for their slow and thoughtful films, millions and millions stopped to watch Carousel on Instagram. The honesty, uniqueness and personal touch that the Hubleys fought for decades to keep in their films — the very reasons they went indie — are still reaching people. They had to scramble and struggle for those things, but they’re in there, and they’re immortal. In a Hubley independent production, Faith once said, it was “truth and the budget” that had “the last word.” It’s fortunate for us all that they kept finding enough of both. 2. Newsbits We lost Sam Kieth [ https://substack.com/redirect/66c55483-4f02-4b96-b595-7f516fce1323?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (63), the virtuoso comic artist behind The Maxx, adapted into an animated series in the ‘90s. In America, OpenAI is shutting down [ https://substack.com/redirect/78c002a4-4a26-4125-970e-7ac0a455a003?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] its Sora video generator. (Also, Disney backed out of its billion-dollar investment in the company.) Smear Frame published a fascinating meditation [ https://substack.com/redirect/294f60f4-3f02-4701-9644-a631b685702f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] on the closure of several college animation programs in America. It’s a new animation newsletter we’re following. In Japan, Sunao Katabuchi (In This Corner of the World) put out a short called Map of Fukufuku on YouTube [ https://substack.com/redirect/55f7a78b-d99d-4c55-92f7-4482c3849ba9?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. With 5.6 million views so far, it’s been a hit. Also in Japan, Studio Ponoc reportedly [ https://substack.com/redirect/ab67ee33-cff5-42f5-8bcd-47f601d48d41?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] came on board Mfinda. The team is best known for Mary and the Witch’s Flower. In France, the Annecy Festival revealed [ https://substack.com/redirect/1aea1a1b-244b-4b64-a20a-81360e1453b9?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] its lineup of shorts for 2026. Included are Black Box [ https://substack.com/redirect/519a178a-a49c-48ea-a8d2-b01559d6780d?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] by Anton Dyakov and Winter in March [ https://substack.com/redirect/27c0024c-4538-4b5b-9337-245823b0d90c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] by Natalia Mirzoyan (two members of the Russian animation diaspora), and Night Song [ https://substack.com/redirect/c7e7d832-9193-4fff-8315-a8dd5bc521c8?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] by Karla Castañeda, who worked on del Toro’s Pinocchio. The Glassworker reached Blu-ray [ https://substack.com/redirect/932e49aa-6056-48a3-99bc-b4269bffdcc1?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in Britain. This film is well worth a look — check out our past coverage here [ https://substack.com/redirect/158a0221-adef-4084-a964-e05f51f3d0c0?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and here [ https://substack.com/redirect/f69b2c0d-3de1-47f3-a9b7-f813210e8bc6?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. In Russia, there’s been a fallout from Suzdalfest’s cancellation of the Grand Prix award for Leonid Shmelkov’s Restlessness, seemingly for political reasons. See coverage here [ https://substack.com/redirect/3ec81244-8619-4d2e-8dd1-fbf540c2d66a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and here [ https://substack.com/redirect/cc73f34d-f0f8-49ee-a024-972b5412329d?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. A film from Argentina, Carlos Montaña (2022), just landed on YouTube [ https://substack.com/redirect/89f860ca-7321-4739-a6bc-8323702bfdf9?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Director Ita Romero has spoken about [ https://substack.com/redirect/b9c7158a-fbc8-4e37-991c-8e51545ffdd7?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] the film’s relationship to Argentina’s past and her own father. Last of all: we looked into the trickery [ https://substack.com/redirect/ac5c4988-0572-4053-92f7-fea7233919d8?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] that made Disney’s first features so magical. Until next time! Unsubscribe https://substack.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.BVFtYHeg13nOEBxu3x2ifm-eS_jiQyL89Pr62RB72FQ?

View this post on the web at https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-lamentations-of-a-rocking-chair Welcome! This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s the slate today: 1. On Crac by Frédéric Back. 2. Newsbits. Now, let’s go! 1. Speaking through beauty In 1982, Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki were in the United States. They’d come to work with Hollywood on an animated Little Nemo feature. The experience was a frustrating one. But something good came of it. While in Los Angeles, Takahata went to a screening of The Adolescent (1979), a live-action movie from France. It was touring American theaters as a double bill with an animated short from Canada. Takahata didn’t realize that the short had already won an Oscar earlier in 1982. Its title was Crac (1981). Takahata was floored — “completely captivated,” he later said. He had to watch it again, pulling colleagues along. Miyazaki’s reaction was similar. In his words: It was a shock to both of us. As we trudged home after the film, I remember saying to Takahata-san, “So, I guess we’re failures, aren’t we…” He and Takahata became evangelists for Crac when they got back to Tokyo. Toshio Suzuki, then a magazine editor, heard the raves. “They said that the story, theme and presentation all matched,” he remembered. Even the characters and backgrounds were united in the film’s single, total vision — something Japanese cel animation didn’t do. They’d discovered a filmmaker, Takahata later wrote, whose “content and presentation are inseparably linked.” Crac’s quiet beauty and emotional pull, and its message about the value of rural living in Quebec, strongly resonated with Takahata and Miyazaki. It became one of their favorite films — and biggest influences. From that point, at least a little (often a lot) of this film showed up in their work. Crac is about a rocking chair. It’s also about history, and what it means to be happy. The story begins when a man cuts down a tree and lovingly carves a chair from its wood. It stays in his family for decades. We watch life go on: a wedding celebration, the change of seasons, the birth of children, the games those children play. The chair is part of it all — getting painted, broken and repaired along the way. Then, as modern times arrive, it’s thrown out. Canada’s landscape is destroyed, too, and replaced by factories and identical high-rises. But the chair does find a new life. Although its old world is gone, it survives, and its memories with it. Crac’s story was relevant to Japan — which had experienced these changes itself. It was a coincidence. Director and animator Frédéric Back was aiming much closer to home. He was a European who’d lived in Canada since the ‘40s, and he’d come to love Quebec. Crac was his tribute to a local way of life that had faded away — based on his memories and those of his wife, who’d known the old, rural Canada. It was an era, Back said, when people “had the forests to live off and they lived well by the forest.” As he put it: … I expected the film to please Quebeckers, especially. The big surprise was seeing that Americans found it amusing, and that the Japanese found it interesting, and then seeing it accepted around the world. Frédéric Back was a latecomer to animation. He’d started around 1968, in his mid-40s, and had slowly worked out his own methods. Fantasia was Back’s earliest influence in animation, but his style owed little to Disney. Much of his drawing and timing were intuitive rather than structured, based on a lifetime as a sketch artist and painter. He was an auteur who did films largely alone — an idea he got from Norman McLaren [ https://substack.com/redirect/e47ef292-ed80-4fd3-82aa-2908c0260909?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Unlike McLaren, Back didn’t work for the National Film Board. He had a less prestigious job at Radio-Canada, whose animation department was smaller, scrappier and often under threat of closure. There, he made his name. Back’s Illusion [ https://substack.com/redirect/7f0b33a6-c183-4f9e-afa1-8cb65c2fccc8?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1975) won awards internationally. All Nothing [ https://substack.com/redirect/5ea74844-4c7f-4303-b770-324f18e9c868?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1978) was nominated for an Oscar. The idea for Crac predated those films. He wrote its proposal in 1973, inspired by a story that his young daughter had composed for school. Hers was Les lamentations d’une chaise berçante, or “The Lamentations of a Rocking Chair.” It was an old, handcrafted chair’s tirade against humanity, which had taken it for granted and moved on to mass-produced chairs with “no personality.” The story’s humor and statement appealed to Back. He was an environmentalist, an activist, a tree-planter and an artist with a message — his films always agitated for a better, happier, more just world. Here was a new way to do it. The History of a Rocking Chair was the name of his proposal, but the project ultimately became Crac. As he said: That film deals with nostalgia. The title Crac refers to the speed with which change happens to us. Families breaking up, the move from rural to urban settings ... Especially for young people, the change is subtle. There’s not much to remind them of the past, so near to them. Back’s first outline for Crac shares a lot with the final product, but its last sequence differs (it’s set in an antique store instead of a museum). He gave the story time to come together. “Crac waited six years for its present ending,” he noted. Until then, he was working on other things. Crac’s look, the colored-pencil sketches that became Back’s signature, first emerged during All Nothing. The plan for that project had been to draw on tracing paper — which didn’t work. So, he tested something else: … frosted cels, a material more commonly used by architects and engineers. This allowed me to reduce the size of the drawings and to use colored pencil, which wouldn’t have adhered to the smooth surface of a transparent cel. The semi-transparency of the frosted cel gives a certain texture to the image and enables great freedom of expression. Wax-based colored pencils (I used Prismacolor) came in a wide range of colors and were readily available. With this technique, Back collapsed the stylistic gap between character and background: each one looks like the other. And he got closer to his natural sketching style. In fact, Takahata felt that Back had transferred the art of sketching to animation: the quick, personal drawings of an artist who captures exactly and only what they want to capture, in the moment. Here, impression took over. Crac was a new high for this style. It developed Back’s approach to motion, too. The film often moves in an exaggerated and simplified way, but it still feels studied from life — more like sketched movements than vaudeville. In Takahata’s view, Back hooks the audience with “the attraction of human movement as such,” with “the expression of the most ordinary and everyday human activities.” Of the small team working with Back, a key member was composer Normand Roger — Back gave him much of the credit for the film. There’s no dialogue in Crac, but its folk music plays a storytelling role. For example, it evokes real joy in the dance sequence; and the return of the dance theme at the film’s end is a deep emotional hit. “I worked with traditional musicians who could not read music, but had the real style … they learned by ear very fast,” said [ https://substack.com/redirect/ce9138df-06b8-4ae3-923a-a7fdbb2fdc88?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] Roger. Back spent more than a year and a half producing Crac. There were around 7,000 drawings, each from his hand. He was a hard worker, always staying late at Radio-Canada. A higher-up at the studio remembered him as “sort of the night watchman.” He was a workaholic, a habit driven by his sense of mission. Back had been concerned about animal welfare, war and the environment since his youth — even getting into fights with people who mistreated their horses. He was humble about it, but he was a lifelong activist, and his films were part of it. As he said: I always felt weak in relation to the dimension of injustice. … One must counterbalance violence. One must react. We can’t accept it. When someone is getting a beating in front of you, the worst thing is cowardice. Intervention is necessary. On the surface, Back’s anger is more obscured in Crac than in his earlier work. Still, it’s a film dedicated to the same causes, fueled by the same urgent need to act. After finishing it, Back explained: My films are my gift. I put the very best of myself, of what I believe very deeply, into my work. ... I decided some time ago that I didn’t have enough talent to make revolutionary films. Therefore I would make films that communicate something, films that renew and give new life to the viewer … filmmaking is not just an occupation for me. The gift of Crac came at a severe cost to him. Its colored-pencil process required a fixative on each cel. Just before All Nothing competed at the Oscars in early 1981, while Crac was underway, that fixative got into Back’s right eye. “I washed my eye out with water, because it was 10 or 11 at night and all the drug stores were closed,” he said. It did damage. Surgeries followed, which could have succeeded if he’d rested afterward. Instead, he kept animating and ultimately lost his eye. “I should have stopped working for several months,” he later said, “but I continued.” Nevertheless, Crac came out. It won the Oscar. Back went onstage, in a too-large tuxedo he’d borrowed at the last minute, and accepted his award. He was honored — but, even so, told his producer offstage that it would’ve been better for All Nothing to have won. Its message is more plain. Crac deserved it, though. And its added subtlety only makes Back’s statement more powerful. Takahata and Miyazaki came from a different world, but they were stunned in 1982. It changed the trajectory of their work, in ways more obvious (Yamadas, Kaguya) and less. You can read even My Neighbor Totoro as an answer to Crac. The film’s DNA is inside Studio Ghibli — and inside almost all animation, everywhere. Disney veterans like Glen Keane fell in love with it. Festival-circuit animators like Koji Yamamura fell in love with it. You still see traces of it, even of Back’s approach to staging and transitions, in the work of people who’ve never watched Crac. Back had hit a new level. Exiting the plane after his return from Los Angeles, he found a dozen of Radio-Canada’s executives there to celebrate his arrival. A reporter heard him say, “I just expected my family.” Soon, the Oscar would get him approved to make The Man Who Planted Trees [ https://substack.com/redirect/aa3043e2-d6da-4967-ab22-a90e9e6322b6?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1987), which would win another Oscar and solidify Back’s place as one of the greatest animation artists. Yet artistry was only part of the point. Back’s goal with his films was to inspire action, and beautiful images were his means. It’s hard to come away from Crac unmoved — without a renewed desire to appreciate life, or an awareness of the need for change. Like The Man Who Planted Trees, it’s a film with that power. An earlier version of this article ran in our newsletter, behind the paywall, on August 29, 2024. 2. Newsbits In America, it looks like the Bob Iger era is officially over [ https://substack.com/redirect/f1fb5882-ca2f-44b9-beb7-602ff6b77f22?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. He stepped down as Disney’s CEO this past week. On the other hand, in Japan, Hayao Miyazaki is still working and still talking about another film [ https://substack.com/redirect/513bdcdb-612e-4bf7-b6e4-bf0955722e55?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. His latest project is now complete: gorgeous handmade dioramas dedicated to his past work. See them here [ https://substack.com/redirect/98a60a6c-d5ce-4426-be1d-61e90180b14b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and here [ https://substack.com/redirect/431a8b1e-d1ff-4665-9909-7ea8e199ab9b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Also in Japan, there’s a new animated music video [ https://substack.com/redirect/df0b8f95-cfc9-4aa6-88f2-533dc27f324d?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] from Ryu Kato, whose creations have fascinated us for years. American showrunner Matt Braly gave a revealing interview [ https://substack.com/redirect/86a99487-398c-4cea-b22a-4c8ef8e70425?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] to re:frame about the state of Hollywood. “[T]he value of an individual vision, the auteur vision, it is just in the can,” he said. Braly has gone indie and is currently crowdfunding [ https://substack.com/redirect/80fd0dcb-449d-4779-a8a2-a933f929276b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] a new series. A director from Ukraine, Iryna Tsilyk, received [ https://substack.com/redirect/c19aa8a4-bc5b-4ca1-8faa-d0225ee7d806?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] backing [ https://substack.com/redirect/87f32933-f03f-4184-821e-3f46c4ab5591?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in France for an animated documentary about life during the war. My Life in Versailles, produced in France and Luxembourg, took [ https://substack.com/redirect/75d0bcec-b2e3-46bd-b05c-cd06f9e891c7?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] the grand prize for features at NYICFF. Check out the trailer on YouTube [ https://substack.com/redirect/f1d0c6bb-0bbb-4c8f-aceb-7028910dd701?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Suzdalfest happened [ https://substack.com/redirect/9bddcdb6-9b87-4ac5-b76c-023275f963d8?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in Russia, and the feature prize went to Tied Up by Konstantin Bronzit. Leonid Shmelkov’s dark, surreal movie Restlessness (trailer [ https://substack.com/redirect/fa376443-9546-46db-9287-87f3ed86a512?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]) was strongly praised by festivalgoers but shut out — controversially [ https://substack.com/redirect/ae03c742-3115-4a30-bf80-1cbb4729b95e?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. AnimaxFYB of Ghana won prizes [ https://substack.com/redirect/af23117e-d445-40fd-8915-1707a66c42a9?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in Tokyo, as part of a program by Japan’s industry to train African talent. Two results so far: The Legend of Asebu Amenfi [ https://substack.com/redirect/9c1a8f59-4a50-4a17-99c9-8ca6d5298e5f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and the CR Motion+ film Trials of the Spear [ https://substack.com/redirect/6c692117-a8aa-42c8-b145-2cdeaf807edd?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Animation Magazine published its 2026 list of the rising stars of animation [ https://substack.com/redirect/8dca1fe1-3bcb-44e2-9a92-1c4433306fd6?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Among them is Nadia Darries, co-director of Crocodile Dance [ https://substack.com/redirect/52f2ef78-0db3-4bf4-bbae-003f2bca37b4?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Yugen is a stop-motion film from Mexico. In honor of its premiere, AWN shared videos [ https://substack.com/redirect/3635dc8e-e987-4a35-9d68-97faabfce0b9?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and spoke to director Nayelli Ojeda. Last of all: we looked into the directing philosophy of Rintaro, the visualist [ https://substack.com/redirect/96af0fef-340b-4694-87c9-5265be30f0bf?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Until next time! Unsubscribe https://substack.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.CpyiwvktfzVeKwNMaUM-CNx5ntMEc2WGZuZMpdO8EyE?

View this post on the web at https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/artist-resources-we-love It’s Sunday! Thanks for joining us. This is another issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s the slate: 1. Useful things for artists. 2. Animation newsbits. With that, let’s go! 1. Five gems Quite a few artists read this newsletter. Among them are animators — and painters, cartoonists and beyond. It’s something wonderful about running Animation Obsessive. We aim mainly at a general audience, but it makes our day when the work helps artists with their art. So, sometimes, we do issues for artists specifically. Case in point: our continuing series dedicated to free art guides, reference databases and so on. We come across these things in our line of work. The last time we published a collection of them was in May 2025 [ https://substack.com/redirect/bc3800b9-8f37-4899-a203-1dd5aad96b0c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] — and we’re due for a new one. Past editions have included treasures like the Don Bluth Studios Animation Archive [ https://substack.com/redirect/09df7f60-31fe-428e-9fe3-7b0ffa51368f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and Nick Cross’s painting tutorial [ https://substack.com/redirect/e70535cc-a60f-43dc-bb62-7d725b14a005?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for Over the Garden Wall. But you won’t find any repeats in today’s issue. Below, we’ve rounded up tips on walk animation, troves of material on painting and design — and inspiration from the public domain. We hope it’ll be interesting for artists of all persuasions. 1.1: James Baxter on walking It’s pretty rare for a key animator to get famous — for their name to make eyes widen in recognition not only in the business, but just about anywhere animation is discussed. James Baxter resides in that group. You’ve seen his work in Disney renaissance movies (Belle, Rafiki, Quasimodo) and in many other places. An episode of Adventure Time was named after him. People lost it over his recent animation for [ https://substack.com/redirect/7439c6ec-a16e-42bb-ba23-9fb123a29cf0?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]Gumball [ https://substack.com/redirect/7439c6ec-a16e-42bb-ba23-9fb123a29cf0?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Baxter’s work is clean and slick, and its technical virtuosity appeals to pros and to complete outsiders. So, it was a big deal, a couple of months ago, when Baxter posted a guide to animated walks on YouTube. A legend held a 44-minute master class for free — for viewers anywhere. Baxter’s video is called “Walks,” and those studying animation have likely already seen it. As one commenter wrote, “If you listen closely, you can hear the cheers of thousands of animation students from across the world as this video was posted.” Still, for animators who haven’t checked it out, it’s worth highlighting again. Baxter breaks down walks in three styles: realistic, quasi-realistic and cartoony. His tips are clear — at one point, he speaks about limbs that open outward “kind of like an umbrella.” And each walk is realized in the tight, smooth, three-dimensional animation for which he’s known. Even artists with looser, more abstract approaches can get something from watching Baxter explain what he’s doing and why. “Walks” is a must-see for animators, and one of the 2026 highlights in the animation world so far. 1.2: Cartoon Modern The book is two decades old, but unsurpassed in its lane. Amid Amidi’s Cartoon Modern maps the break away from the classic Disney method [ https://substack.com/redirect/e5358c13-6b9f-4e2a-8e38-b4664c6b9a4f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], and the rise of modernist animation in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. Years back, Amidi posted an open call for someone to scan Cartoon Modern and put it online for free. That’s what we did [ https://substack.com/redirect/39aca62f-10b1-4591-aa33-67aafc8131a4?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in 2021. Watching the book benefit so many people was great. That said, 2021 was a while ago. When we first shared Cartoon Modern, the newsletter’s audience was roughly 40 times smaller than today (a figure that startles us). For that reason, it feels valuable to re-post Amidi’s book, and to explain again why it’s so good. Read via the Internet Archive [ https://substack.com/redirect/07812b0c-fe1b-47af-8030-299c53abfb91?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] If you’ve ever wanted to learn about UPA, or the cartoon movement that later inspired The Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack, this is the starting point. It’s an art book that doubles as a history lesson. As Amidi wrote at the front: The new look of cartoons during the 1950s stemmed largely from the desire of animation artists to move beyond the slapstick routines and “hurt gags” that had been the stock-in-trade of American animated filmmakers up until that time, and instead use the language of animation to convey contemporary ideas and themes. … Animation artists conceived a bold visual style that was derived from the modern arts, assimilating and adapting the principles of cubism, surrealism and expressionism. In Cartoon Modern, you find the classic films (Rooty Toot Toot, Dalmatians) alongside the industrial and advertising work that dominated the mid-century. Amidi broke serious ground with this book — reintroducing to the canon artists like Sterling Sturtevant, and her contributions to Mr. Magoo [ https://substack.com/redirect/32f1af83-4ef4-4240-a36d-bc9b0f82f806?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and the ad world. We still use Cartoon Modern ourselves in our writing about mid-century animation, and we don’t plan to stop. Highly recommended. 1.3: Art with Jake Taplin There are reasons the academic painting of the 1800s fell off. The work of artists like Poynter and Bouguereau had a decadent, glossy, show-off-y quality that came to feel suffocating. Modernists opened the windows. In the playfulness of Paul Klee, or the pure shapes [ https://substack.com/redirect/5049c1b8-1adc-4454-8039-e8a381dae5e3?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] of Kazimir Malevich, there was a raw new vitality. At the same time, many of the techniques of the academic painters are still useful to know — for all kinds of artists, including animators. And those techniques are hard to learn today, and often misunderstood as grueling art-challenges for perfectionists. Which is a little off-base. Lately, we’ve been enjoying the articles and videos that Jake Taplin [ https://substack.com/redirect/e0da71f0-c9bc-469c-aaac-3c3cd91658af?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] does. He’s a young, self-taught artist who’s studying academic techniques, and his mission is to make them accessible. “Does learning to draw mean we have to suffer and even learn to dread drawing?” he asked [ https://substack.com/redirect/07d0af5d-931f-40e5-806e-f59d37b316b1?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in 2025. His answer: “no.” Taplin brings a sense of excitement and momentum when he talks about drawing and painting. A number of his short videos — like this one [ https://substack.com/redirect/42ab2201-5a13-4c2a-94ba-0ca0bc85b75e?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] — have views in the millions, even though the ideas in them were once seen as bone-dry. (He also keeps his own list of learning resources [ https://substack.com/redirect/0224a592-0a00-4ea2-875e-45e44d475497?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], most of them free.) Along the way, Taplin is pushing back [ https://substack.com/redirect/01212144-8191-46c2-8253-4edd1292b40c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] against elements of the academic-revival scene, and the current fixation on copying. A recent video [ https://substack.com/redirect/43c82dec-88bf-4d14-af7b-981e4d1f36a2?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] gets into Charles Bargue’s exercises (here [ https://substack.com/redirect/9a00a138-56ae-47b3-8926-68c2825f574a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]), related to the ones studied by Van Gogh. Although Taplin is a fan, he offers a word of caution: Copying the Bargue plates is a core part of many traditional art schools’ curriculum today, but there’s one major difference. Students nowadays line up the drawing in scale, side by side with the plate, and spend dozens and sometimes even a hundred-plus hours copying it. … [The original drawings in the Bargue plates] were done by several of the teachers and students at the École des Beaux-Arts ... [and] they had rigorous time limits for their drawings. They did the entire 18x24 figure drawings in only 12 hours. ... Some teachers believed that, if you spent too long drawing these plates, your work would become stiff and overly flat. It would be focused on the aesthetics of copying and making it look right instead of understanding. In the Taplin videos we’ve seen, there’s a lot of humility — and real enthusiasm. It’s hard not to root for him and his project. 1.4: Turner at the Tate One more about 19th-century painting. A great from that era was J. M. W. Turner — who learned the academic techniques himself, and then exploded them in his mature work. Paintings like Sun Setting Over a Lake [ https://substack.com/redirect/d018f675-9f82-4064-a42f-77dd24e7d143?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1840) are right on the border of abstract expressionism. Besides the canvases, Turner was a prolific sketcher. And many of those sketches survive. In Britain, the Tate hosts thousands of them — in its brilliant online archive J. M. W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolors [ https://substack.com/redirect/b1170c59-23f2-40fe-adb3-ae21a5a57a06?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. This is one for the hardcore. Nevertheless, anyone curious about Turner’s development will find things here, and even animators can learn from it. As director Frédéric Back once wrote: All too often, young people limit themselves to technical training without first (or at the same time) acquiring the kind of artistic education that opens their eyes and minds, freeing them to be creative with their animation — or to choose another line of work if they find it doesn’t suit them! The Tate archive of Turner’s work is organized clearly by date, and painstakingly documented. You get the art and the context. There’s plenty to gain by going through these sketches and rough watercolors — and seeing how casual and non-literal Turner’s lines were, and how much more attention he paid to light than to firm shapes. It’s one of the richest databases we’ve seen for a master painter. 1.5: The public domain Our last pick today is a broad one — and, at first, it might sound too obvious. Who doesn’t know about the public domain? It’s here for a reason, though. In a sense, the public domain is the ultimate resource for artists, including filmmakers, and yet it’s still underused. See the Public Domain Image Archive [ https://substack.com/redirect/4af2b16b-cdb2-48b6-a9ac-15834fe7263f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] or Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis [ https://substack.com/redirect/638900bc-d870-4915-98b9-84bf8ed912e1?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], or the public domain collections of the Smithsonian [ https://substack.com/redirect/e391ae0d-f2bf-4967-8669-0fb423661711?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], the Met [ https://substack.com/redirect/fe1ba67a-6cce-47ba-ae64-18bfc89115c4?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], the New York Public Library [ https://substack.com/redirect/43304eab-d8cc-42cb-97e6-90c579c98668?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] or the Library of Congress [ https://substack.com/redirect/ce30348b-d32d-44d8-a7a6-cc2522602bdd?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (including Citizen DJ [ https://substack.com/redirect/f5a4625d-c27a-4d49-b079-8ff0a551926c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]). They’re full of things that beg to be reinterpreted as background art or collage, or even as sound effects and music. There are no limits here. With a little lateral thinking, all kinds of new work could be conjured out of this stuff. (It’s far more than Max Ernst could access when he made his surrealist collage masterpiece A Week of Kindness [ https://substack.com/redirect/345d8e29-e8c0-4d2b-a243-f46e10d26a22?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in the ‘30s.) But the public domain has a second value to artists — especially in animation. A recognizable story or character can improve a film and help it succeed. That was true when fairy tales gave us Snow White and The Adventures of Prince Achmed [ https://substack.com/redirect/94245525-7c8a-4f95-8aa4-9ec91e845ece?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and it’s still true. Nancy Drew is in the public domain now. So are Winnie-the-Pooh, and Sam Spade, and As I Lay Dying — and, by accident, a bunch of Philip K. Dick stories [ https://substack.com/redirect/634b1111-9070-4c67-9bd5-ad18fa540c2a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. We found out about that last one because an animated film, The Gun [ https://substack.com/redirect/4c560603-23fa-474b-8f50-46ab09f4ac27?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (2025), recently adapted Dick’s work. What’s in the public domain varies by country, and requires care in some cases. Early versions of Tintin, Mickey Mouse and Miss Marple are free in America, for example, but there are restrictions to keep in mind. Still, these are things worth exploring. Some of the best animated films of all time — like The Tell-Tale Heart [ https://substack.com/redirect/17118b6d-80a3-4f87-9981-631f3b44e70f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1953) and the Soviet Winnie-the-Pooh [ https://substack.com/redirect/a7bb37b2-55ce-4c90-8e86-5153dcd215e0?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1969) — were adaptations of stories that are currently open to all. It’s freeing to consider. At a time when so much of culture is controlled by a handful of copyright-hoarding corporations, taking a piece of the public domain for yourself is almost rebellious. 2. Newsbits At the Oscars tonight, the animated feature and short awards went [ https://substack.com/redirect/adcaebc4-8d37-45e3-a813-639f3dce51d1?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] to KPop Demon Hunters and The Girl Who Cried Pearls. Another win for the National Film Board — and another loss for Disney, which hasn’t taken either category since Encanto. In America, the indie animator Jonni Peppers is working on a series called Field Notes from the Orphanage, due on YouTube in August. It’s backed by Cartuna, and there’s a very fun teaser [ https://substack.com/redirect/de1d1a29-67ab-45a5-9eb5-8b2bddc0ea39?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] out already. Drawing attention this week was a French music video for the song it stings a little though [ https://substack.com/redirect/ed546058-dbdf-4135-b916-4324a7c0637f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Émilie Tronche (Samuel) directed. In Cuba, where the humanitarian crisis continues to worsen due to America’s blockade, an exhibition opened [ https://substack.com/redirect/7847adc1-815e-43c6-b02e-9d0758a2ca7d?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] this past week. Created over a few years, it’s dedicated to Elpidio Valdés and the work of the animation legend Juan Padrón. New photos of Hayao Miyazaki emerged [ https://substack.com/redirect/abd5d956-ae61-427e-9460-293ffdb3176d?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] from Japan, after Hideaki Anno went to visit him. The second season of Yao: Chinese Folktales ended in China last month. It did really well — but not as well as the original. Anim-Babblers investigates [ https://substack.com/redirect/7fc33001-78d4-4662-a8c3-8a6a4ada8d03?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. American animator Bill Premo is creating a program [ https://substack.com/redirect/6376d358-353d-4684-b250-f48dfde37b90?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] he calls “Flash if Flash was built in 2026.” Among other things, it aims to revive the long-dead .SWF format. Sans Voix is a Swiss short about a burnt-out raver who changes his life, and it’s now on YouTube [ https://substack.com/redirect/c5414e8d-19f3-442d-a06a-7c5f690ed1dc?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Director Samuel Patthey called [ https://substack.com/redirect/af759889-270d-48bb-9cd2-a38122448741?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] it a “sort of autobiographical fiction … inspired by my life before and after being a father.” In France, Patrick Imbert (The Summit of the Gods) is working on another feature. It’s called Hakim’s Odyssey — he spoke to [ https://substack.com/redirect/866ddad8-8f33-459f-9ff1-0192e2cba92e?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]Animation Magazine [ https://substack.com/redirect/866ddad8-8f33-459f-9ff1-0192e2cba92e?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] about it. In Japan, classic episodes of Traditional Japanese Folktales are coming back. Animenomics reports [ https://substack.com/redirect/f4b7375b-8423-4470-9ad6-1714140b7dc4?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] that the “film footage and original drawings were retrieved from warehouses, where they laid dormant for decades, and all of the nearly 1,500 episodes in the series are being digitized.” In Britain, the artist and musician Klein is creating an unusual series called Mandela Effect [ https://substack.com/redirect/96418cf3-a173-4512-bed2-9b5d91cbc6e6?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], animated with doodles that move almost at the speed of thought. Hoppers has spent two weeks [ https://substack.com/redirect/74777170-d65f-43ad-a966-08a0b6a4b337?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] at the top of the American box office. It’s a return for Pixar after the commercial failure of Elio. Last of all: we covered an underrated anthology film [ https://substack.com/redirect/454a2382-201a-4a6d-af44-dffd73cfcdc8?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] from China — a key moment in the present rise of Chinese animation. Until next time! Unsubscribe https://substack.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.XnQoWDHTPidpNKfH4F-Rc-k8LJeGrR_XSrMyjzYd09Q?

View this post on the web at https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-film-that-should-be-nominated Welcome! This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s our plan today: 1. Nobody, and what’s happening without the Oscars. 2. Animation newsbits. With that, let’s go! 1. The underdogs Next Sunday, the Oscars happen. The nominees have been public for a while. And, in the list of animated features, there are conspicuous holes. Major and highly regarded projects got nominated, no doubt. Among them: the biggest box-office smash in Hollywood animation history (Zootopia 2), and the most-watched original film from Netflix (KPop Demon Hunters). The two contenders from Europe, Arco and Little Amélie, have won awards worldwide. If you follow animation closely, though, you might wonder: “what about China?” Although Zootopia 2 broke records, Nezha 2 broke more of them. It out-earned every movie everywhere during 2025 — and it’s widely loved. Yet it isn’t present here. Reports suggest it wasn’t even submitted to the Oscars. There’s a second Chinese absentee, too. It’s a wonderful film watched by too few outside China. In its home country, it was a “dark horse” phenomenon last year — almost $250 million in revenue, on a budget below $10 million. People fell in love with it. It’s called Nobody, and its stateside distribution has been pretty thin. You can find subtitled copies floating around unofficially on YouTube — if you know where to look [ https://substack.com/redirect/6e008a08-b24f-4dbe-a733-5bfe31e69b91?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. It’s our favorite mainstream movie we’ve seen from 2025, and it belongs on any list of last year’s best animation. But it won’t be competing next Sunday. Like with Nezha 2, there are reasons for Nobody’s omission. It didn’t make the longlist, possibly because its brief release in American theaters wasn’t tuned to get it qualified. This isn’t simply an oversight by the Academy. Yet it still makes this year’s Oscars feel a bit provincial. The largest animated feature of 2025 won’t be there, nor will (arguably) the finest. And it’s a shame — because Nobody, especially, feels like a sign of animation’s future. Before Nobody, Yu Shui wasn’t exactly a nobody himself. Years ago, his student film About Life [ https://substack.com/redirect/5af28477-8d1d-47f5-ab0e-52971c113e80?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (2004) won prizes, and his Flash series FOF and His Story [ https://substack.com/redirect/0995f316-d34c-44ff-85d4-fe25445c78dd?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (2013) had its fans. But, because the industry was weak in China, animation stayed an indie side project for him. As he said, “At the beginning, I had nothing and worked alone.” His day job was teaching at a university in Beijing. Yu was no star as a director. Slowly and gradually, though, he gathered allies — and opportunities arrived. “After more than 20 years in the industry,” noted an outlet in 2025, “Yu Shui finally got his chance.” For those who haven’t seen Nobody, it’s about frauds. A ragtag band in ancient China sets out to become immortal. All involved are animal-monster outcasts: former bandits, henchmen, con artists. On their quest, they impersonate a few heroes they’ve heard about — namely, the Monkey King’s group. Since they don’t know what Sun Wukong or his friends look like, they hire a concept artist to spitball, and they choose the lineup that feels right. It’s very funny. There are smart, layered jokes throughout the script. In fact, even the drawings and movement are funny — often subtly, in ways not usually seen. Then, over time, the emotions sneak up. In China, Nobody was known to get theaters crying. The frauds — a boar, toad, weasel and gorilla — grow as they try to live up to their pretend roles. What begins as farce turns into halting, absurd, small-scale but real heroism. No knowledge of Journey to the West is required to grasp the arc. It’s universal. Yu and his team aimed at a broad audience — even an international one. As they said, this is a film about the “nobodies” whose tales aren’t told. “Most of the world consists of ‘nobodies.’ That’s why their stories resonate so powerfully,” Yu argued. Pointedly, his film’s stars don’t appear in the text of Journey to the West. Yu places himself in this invisible group. Like he put it: Most people, myself included, are just ordinary individuals. But how do ordinary people establish themselves and navigate life? So many things are beyond our control — whether it’s the demands of our career, family or society. Essentially, numerous external forces collectively shape our lives. The core message of our film is that: can you truly understand yourself and find your own path? When Yu’s break came, he was already in his 40s. Shanghai Animation Film Studio [ https://substack.com/redirect/f1bca002-cba4-4d5a-849d-30d6cf31b166?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], the most senior company in Chinese animation, released an anthology of shorts back in 2023. First up was a creation of Yu’s — a piece called Nobody (watch [ https://substack.com/redirect/2d51db36-e5c5-420c-8609-faad95be30dc?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]). It was an indie film in spirit, but made at industry scale. Surprisingly, it blew up. Yu’s work was suddenly mainstream. The short is likewise about a boar-creature who wants to become more than a lackey. And, visually, the whole thing is tied to Chinese tradition: ink-wash painting and local styles of cartooning come together on screen. The result was excellent, and people higher up thought it was ripe for a feature-length treatment. That was the plan even before the anthology was done. When the producers saw Yu’s script in 2021, they asked him to develop it into a feature, side by side with the creation of the short. The art director of the long version, Chen Liaoyu, called it “neither a prequel nor a sequel to the short ... we’ve developed a completely new, parallel story.” They’re different takes on the same subject matter and characters. The Nobody feature built on the aesthetics of the short, too. Once again, it’s steeped in Chinese tradition. Like Yu said: For this film, I did a lot of field research in Shanxi Province, my hometown, and discovered so many treasures. For example, places like the Guanyin Hall in Changzhi, the Chongqing Temple and Faxing Temple in Zhangzi County … I found the craftsmanship of these Buddhist statues [in Shanxi] to be deeply moving. The reason I incorporated these elements into the film is that they’re grounded — they come from real life, from the world around us. ... With this foundation in reality, I felt much more confident in my creative process. China’s local visual arts played a large part, too. For the backgrounds, the team studied ink-wash painting and mimicked the techniques of the masters. For the cartoony characters, they looked to the ink drawings in 20th-century lianhuanhua [ https://substack.com/redirect/fdd43d43-6f08-45bc-9dd2-edac0cafaee1?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] comics — from artists like Dai Dunbang. Yu’s guiding concept for Nobody was “mythological realism,” or a down-to-earth take on Chinese myths. It affected everything — from the asymmetrical character designs to the way those designs move. “We’re portraying the most ordinary people from everyday life,” explained Chen Liaoyu. “If the little pig monster came out like Mickey Mouse, with elastic, smoothly flowing deformation and stretching, it would just be an American pig monster. But we want precisely the opposite: first, it needs a feeling of lived-in texture, a little bent and clumsy.” That said, Yu and the team aren’t isolationists. China was opening up to foreign animation when Yu was young — he saw stuff like Toy Story and Japan’s Lunlun, The Flower Angel, and it stayed with him. Nobody pulls ideas from beyond the local as well. For one, the team wanted a sense of “believable” and “cinematic” space, as if the characters exist in a solid and three-dimensional world. That isn’t typical for ink-wash painting, where Western ideas of “light and shadow and perspective” are minimized. But Yu’s group combined the two approaches. The art couldn’t be too flat or too photographic; it was a balance. As Chen Liaoyu explained: … we had to figure out how to integrate the effects of light and shadow within ink-wash painting. … Traditionally, Chinese painting doesn’t emphasize the portrayal of light and shadow as much. However, as a film, it’s inherently an art of light and shadow. ... Beyond just the ink brushwork, we needed to add lighting, space and even texture. This approach allows the audience to appreciate the beauty of Chinese aesthetics while experiencing the intuitive realism of cinema. The thought and theory behind Nobody feel like classic Shanghai Animation stuff. In the studio’s heyday, films like Three Monks [ https://substack.com/redirect/e06b65c2-b748-4b8d-bdcb-f34b00ba8f2c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1980) came about like this — research, refinement, analytical hairsplitting. Every facet was intentional. It’s why those projects turned out so well, and so rich. You feel a similar richness in Nobody. In fact, some of the surviving Shanghai Animation veterans were consultants, and they hadn’t lost their “keen eyes,” Chen said. Their feedback helped. And the success of Nobody proves the old ideas still work. Today, China produces much of the world’s most lavish, over-the-top animation — just look at Deep Sea (2023). Many of those movies are worthwhile. Yet almost none of them were as popular as Nobody, a low-budget 2D film with little in the way of flash. As Chen said, the mentality was: “it’s not that you can’t be cool, but don’t be cool for the sake of being cool, or show off for the sake of showing off; above all, you need to tell a good story.” The camera doesn’t fly around much, and even the animation in the fight scenes stays clear and direct. But Nobody gets the quieter, more difficult parts really right, and that was enough to grab people. It shows what’s possible in China’s rising animation industry. It also shows that tiny movies, wherever they’re made, continue to have a shot against giant ones. Nobody is only one instance. After all, Flow made €50 million and won the Oscar last year with even fewer resources. Nobody won’t have the chance to repeat that performance next Sunday. With or without the Oscars, though, the rise of small, thoughtful and risky animation is happening. There’s an audience for it. The untold stories are coming to light. 2. Newsbits Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon released the teaser [ https://substack.com/redirect/5180a4d3-97b5-47f2-8fd2-8efa3e015e22?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for Kindred Spirits, the latest from director Tomm Moore. Hype for the project was significant [ https://substack.com/redirect/6d16c5a5-148b-4104-a68c-60f91c41c6a6?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] at the recent Cartoon Movie event. On that note, check out the teaser [ https://substack.com/redirect/49d9d23a-579b-4016-a1bc-4ff951649d41?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for Kigali Night that screened at Cartoon Movie in France. We saw the film pitched at Annecy last year — keep an eye on this one. One more teaser trailer: Only Rats [ https://substack.com/redirect/b209b422-d53f-4016-bfdd-0cc827237175?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], a stop-motion short from Spain. As the American blockade against Cuba worsens, the animation workshops of Animaluz Academy are continuing — even during power outages. See posts on the group’s Facebook page (here [ https://substack.com/redirect/9aa309f8-2609-4cf1-a4e3-44eb6aacf035?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and here [ https://substack.com/redirect/89558cc5-97cc-4788-b693-f419b4bc4074?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]). In America, animator Coleen Baik became a MacDowell fellow [ https://substack.com/redirect/986be5fd-205a-4205-a438-e675f094b9ac?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. She continues to offer one-of-a-kind insights into the animation process over at The Line Between [ https://substack.com/redirect/b4589eef-9c72-4f3f-a3ee-ba7a877c53d8?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. That recent Gorillaz video came from The Line in Britain. Writing for Cartoon Brew, Kambole Campbell uncovered the technical processes [ https://substack.com/redirect/9937bf03-28f8-4c27-b6f0-a94df9e98400?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] that gave the animation its retro look. Kyra Kupetsky, creator of the American series Chikn Nuggit, reportedly left her project [ https://substack.com/redirect/babdffd7-f3a0-4990-ac54-30e6c81da0cf?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in protest of enforced GenAI use. In China, a new season of Yao: Chinese Folktales (the origin of Nobody) debuted earlier this year. Anim-Babblers explored [ https://substack.com/redirect/62c14e4b-341d-4215-8d46-ca0eb64b7635?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] one of the entries, animated with wool. A few months ago, the Russian film Father’s Letters popped up online [ https://substack.com/redirect/33a30acf-9fd3-4353-915c-b44a51fcaa5a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for free. It’s a tribute to the victims of Stalinism. Today, in America, Los Angeles Filmforum held a screening called Femme Grotesquerie [ https://substack.com/redirect/d9d4c9e1-3bad-4208-817a-d802ebd0ee06?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], featuring work by Sofia Carrillo, Victoria Vincent and more. The government of Russia declared it illegal [ https://substack.com/redirect/f96668dd-5e7e-43ec-8b0f-c53c70febeb0?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] to advertise on Telegram, as part of its growing campaign [ https://substack.com/redirect/3b6c3f46-f8ec-488c-9ad9-0af6f6af2d9a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] against the platform. Last of all: a gorgeous resource [ https://substack.com/redirect/b428450e-cb64-4d96-9a6d-59f43a36ace3?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] on the art and animation of an Italian great. Until next time! 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View this post on the web at https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/takamoto-and-disney-and-the-war-fa4 It’s Sunday! Thanks for joining us. Here’s the plan for the latest issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter: 1. A story about Iwao Takamoto, Disney legend. 2. Animation newsbits. With that, here we go! 1. A big turn Today, his name’s tied to Hanna-Barbera. He designed Scooby-Doo’s cast, refined The Jetsons’ look. You know his work — and not only from those places. The hand of Iwao Takamoto (1925–2007) is visible in animation’s history. In fact, he started out as a key player on Walt Disney’s team. Takamoto spent 15 years at the Disney studio, working under different titles: assistant animator, cleanup artist. Generally, his job was to make animation perfect before it went to the inking crew. An animator’s broad sketches of movement became tight, exact, technical drawings under his watch. That was his gift to the films. He worked closely with Milt Kahl — one of the Nine Old Men, and a perfectionist. They had an understanding. Disney artist Floyd Norman remembered that “Iwao was an awesome draftsman in his own right, and had the chops to follow up Kahl.” To quote one of Takamoto’s apprentices at the studio: Every little line, everything, had to be perfect. So, I would stand in front of him as he would correct my drawings. And, sometimes, I would just think, “You know ... maybe I should have taken [my dad] up on … getting a license so I could become a barber. Because I don’t know if I’m going to be able to cut the mustard with him.” Takamoto entered Disney’s studio in 1945. You find his touch in films like Sleeping Beauty and Lady and the Tramp — he led “quality control” on Princess Aurora and Lady. Among other things, he guided and polished the spaghetti kiss. “Iwao was the only one who could’ve been entrusted in doing that scene as perfectly as it was done,” said [ https://substack.com/redirect/f21559c2-33bb-4110-aba8-1abbf1fe44d8?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] Willie Ito, an artist assigned to the same shot. A Disney career was a big turn in Takamoto’s life. Shortly before he joined, he’d been in the camps. As a kid in California, Takamoto was a strong student, although not a rich one. He grew up during the Great Depression — in “what might be considered a tough section of downtown Los Angeles, without many prospects,” he later wrote. His parents, Japanese immigrants, got by as they could. Takamoto became interested in drawing at a young age. He studied picture books and copied their illustrations from memory, while bringing his “personal interpretation” to them. It was an aptitude — he wasn’t an art student. His closest thing to training, he noted, was calligraphy practice: It taught me the value of the strength and character that exists in a single line ... and it also instilled in me an awareness of the concept of “negative space,” the spatial quality that exists around the visual things that you see. Takamoto’s world was small back then — he rarely left downtown Los Angeles, near South Central. His reaction was muted when the Pearl Harbor attack came in late 1941. Many other teenagers he knew felt the same. “It took quite a bit of time for the seriousness of it to settle into our consciousness,” he wrote. A few months later, he went with friends to visit Terminal Island. They’d heard that Japanese people were being evicted there. What he saw shocked him: families forced to leave behind their homes and most of their belongings, like they were “run[ning] out of a burning building, grabbing whatever they could on the way.” The government soon came for him and his family, too. Posters filled his neighborhood, informing residents of the eviction and internment ahead. Takamoto recalled that “the FBI was using almost anything they found in the houses of the Japanese families against them,” especially when those things were noticeably Japanese. People started to dump possessions for safety. Like he put it: ... we lost an awful lot of things I would love to still have. And I think that’s consistent with the experience of an awful lot of people like us. ... You know, the displays for Girls’ Day and Boys’ Day, and all these wonderful little dolls, and the court of the Lord, and so on, that they used to display on these steps ... [My mother] had to get rid of those things. And, of course, all the other, more technical things that you had to get rid of, like flashlights [and radios]. In retrospect, Takamoto saw his family as lucky. They avoided the worst of the mistreatment, and they weren’t sent to the notorious Tule Lake camp. But he rejected the government’s euphemisms for these places — words like “internment” or “relocation.” As he wrote in his autobiography, “They were concentration camps.” Takamoto and his family ended up in Manzanar, with the Sierra Nevada towering above. Meals, served three times per day, started out “pitiful.” They lived in barracks, four families to each, and they were enclosed by barbed wire and armed guards. People from all walks of life were stuck there. Takamoto met two Hollywood men: “art directors at a couple of the major film studios,” MGM and Paramount. The prisoners worked to improve their conditions on their own — planting gardens, building makeshift ball courts. Only so much could be done about the grit and dirt, though. Here’s Takamoto: Today it is not difficult to find photographic records of life at Manzanar. But there are several aspects of the camp that these pictures fail to convey. One was the wind, which was constant. ... [The effect was] to raise a perpetual cloud of dust throughout the camp. When the wind really kicked up you could not even see the barracks next to yours, and most of our days were spent sweeping out and dusting our living quarters. Even with all that effort, we were lying around in sand all the time. Takamoto took to sketching life in the camp. Those two Hollywood artists “were quite encouraging” about it, he said. They gave him an idea: why not apply to Walt Disney’s company after he got out? Their impression was that “it was a liberal place when it came to hiring.” A Japanese person might not be turned away. Around early 1945, when Takamoto was almost 20, he was finally freed. He moved into a Los Angeles hostel and called about that job at Disney. He needed a portfolio, so he bought two notepads from a dime store and began to draw. “I filled the pads from page one and just went ahead and drew anything that came to mind from knights to cowboys,” he said later. He surprised himself: the work was good enough to get him an apprenticeship at the studio. Takamoto kept surprising himself from there. “The expectations were that if I really so-called made it in about eight months, I’d be shifted to a unit with some animator,” he said. “I was selected in about two or three months.” Quickly, the government took notice of Takamoto’s Disney career. As he explained: As 1945 progressed, and so many of the internees were demonstrating reluctance to leave the camps [because there was not a lot to go back to], the [War Relocation Authority] started to get desperate. ... Someone at the Authority found out about this young kid — that is to say, me — who just went out and got a job at the famous Walt Disney Studios ... [which] perfectly served their purpose. They thought it would be a very encouraging piece of news for people who were nervous about leaving. So they set up a photo session in an office somewhere with a makeshift drawing board and I sat there and posed for the camera and pretended to know everything about animation. ... [M]y entire wartime experience was bookended by signs: one signed by FDR demanding the evacuation of my family from our home to take up residence in an internment camp, and the other one featuring me welcoming all internees back to normal life. Takamoto became a valuable member of the Disney crew. He caught Milt Kahl’s attention in the 1940s, after doing breakdowns for his key animation in the Pecos Bill section of Melody Time (1948). That got Takamoto invited to Kahl’s unit. Kahl was a firebrand at Disney — known for his extreme standards and stuttering, spluttering bouts of rage. His ego was wrapped up in his work, and his own mistakes made him at least as mad as the mistakes of others. He was a “rock-ribbed conservative,” too, according to Ward Kimball (one of the few progressives among the Nine Old Men). But Takamoto got along with him. He was a perfectionist as well — and that sensibility seemed to put him on Kahl’s good side. In his words: He was a true Scandinavian. Very strong. No nonsense. ... [H]e seemed to appreciate anyone who was willing to extend themselves in terms of hard work. Consequently he never raised his voice at me. He was very kind. He was not a man who taught. He wasn’t a natural pedagogue. You learned from him by studying what he did. Takamoto worked with Kahl a lot during the ‘50s — on Cinderella, on Peter Pan. His big job at the studio came through this partnership, during Lady and the Tramp. Walt Disney felt that Kahl’s design for Lady didn’t have the right “feminine” quality, which left Kahl fretting. “Dammit, he always likes what I do! ... I really don’t know what the hell’s going to make her look more feminine!” he said. Then Takamoto suggested drawing the fur on her ears like a movie star’s hair. Kahl tried it and liked it, and Takamoto was put in charge of quality control for Lady — checking and finalizing the drawings of all the animators. “I was still a young guy in my 20s,” Takamoto wrote, “and here I was instructing and correcting some artists who were old enough to be my father!” Yet his presence was needed: he brought his meticulousness to her design. Not every Disney animator was great at drawing, but he was. Animator Andreas Deja once wrote, “He paid insane attention to eyes, eyelids, eyelashes and the raised volume around eyebrows. Iwao’s contribution to Lady’s appealing look is immeasurable.” Something similar happened with Aurora in Sleeping Beauty. Takamoto was with Marc Davis there — another of the Nine. The film’s style was complex, and brutally hard for the team to keep consistent. Takamoto had to personally retouch many of the animators’ drawings of Aurora.And, while she wasn’t his own design, he reportedly refined her look. He had a big hand in the quality control of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, too. The film replaced Disney’s inkers with Xerox [ https://substack.com/redirect/e676c44a-28b9-43bc-b790-87096979c912?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], which put the key animators’ work directly on screen. “Yet when you do this, then you have animators whose mastery of the craft isn’t nearly as strong in the area of drawing, and it was quite a bit of work in making sure their work was consistent,” Takamoto said. Takamoto ultimately left Disney’s studio in the early ‘60s. The animation team was downsizing — Walt Disney’s focus was elsewhere. Many Disney artists were already going to Hanna-Barbera, where the pay was good and the work was freer. Takamoto made the switch himself. By that point, the Disney people knew what they were losing. Marc Davis told Takamoto of his “exceptional talent.” Milt Kahl said, “No matter what you decide to do or where you go, you’re going to do fine.” Takamoto was a perfectionist in a studio obsessed with technical perfection, and it would be a long time before a Disney film looked as clean as Sleeping Beauty again. The loss went beyond his ability: he’d become part of the team. Takamoto wrote at length about their parties and endless practical jokes in his book My Life with a Thousand Characters. He’d found a kind of home at Disney’s studio — and the environment had allowed him to grow into a top professional. As a kid, Takamoto hadn’t adopted an Americanized first name. Hearing adults stumble over what he pronounced with ease — “Iwao” — gave him a sense of identity and strength. People kept struggling to pronounce it well into his adult years, even at the Disney studio. But the lightly mangled version of his name that stuck didn’t bother him. He found it a little endearing. As Disney artist Willie Ito said: We used to call him “Ee-woe” at the studio. Because [for] all the hakujins, the Caucasians, “I-wa-o” was a little hard to say. So they said, “Ee-woe.” ... So, he became known affectionately in the industry as “Ee-woe” Takamoto. This is a revised reprint of an article we first ran behind the paywall on April 10, 2025. 2. Newsbits In China, the latest Boonie Bears film (The Hidden Protector) is another box-office hit. It’s pulled in [ https://substack.com/redirect/4d5fd7f2-b14f-4daa-8007-79ce115609dd?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] more than 941 million yuan, or $137.2 million, after a couple of weeks. A new documentary from Archipel covers Mahiro Maeda [ https://substack.com/redirect/8505c637-b34f-48a7-855a-32ff989daa38?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], a legend in Japan’s anime industry. Paramount is buying Warner — foreboding news for American animation. In re:frame, Kambole Campbell writes [ https://substack.com/redirect/3a333c5a-52fa-47dc-92ba-f3c5031d6b2e?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] that “it feels as though the industry is shrinking … in terms of what can be made, who can make it, how they make it and where it’s shown.” If you have a Japanese IP address, check out the collection of restored Kihachiro Kawamoto films on YouTube [ https://substack.com/redirect/b849b8cc-7517-4dee-86e9-84ac087bd5a7?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], currently free. You may have seen Baby Globe [ https://substack.com/redirect/28c1cb4b-761b-4054-b286-162fe0dd5e2f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], the mascot that pops up on certain Wikipedia articles (like the one for headphones [ https://substack.com/redirect/82e8bca5-2952-4583-979d-f8e7bb1fe508?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]). A whole team is behind it — including animator Alex Kinnear [ https://substack.com/redirect/87e34d4e-a919-4e46-aa8e-ff106ebfe1d3?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], based in Canada, who made the character move. Italy unveiled a 35% tax credit [ https://substack.com/redirect/b1e4d052-716e-429d-bb0b-fb7a59e1b20a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for animated projects. It’s higher than the one offered to live-action films. The project Walk with Me [ https://substack.com/redirect/bedccd87-4046-4098-988f-7ad0f6e9bdf3?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] is gathering many different walk cycles animated by many different artists. It’s American, but open worldwide. In Cuba, restored films from the Elpidio Valdés series screened [ https://substack.com/redirect/06c8b70c-8b5a-49fd-9e6e-20379798d45b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] at a children’s center in Havana, as the country faces an existential energy crisis [ https://substack.com/redirect/7547845a-673e-4251-90dd-e4fb44d8d529?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] due to American sanctions. Russia’s Gulag Museum is switching to a more regime-friendly theme [ https://substack.com/redirect/6927c328-9e9e-4382-9eb2-050b25294788?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. On that note, scholar Pavel Shvedov wrote about [ https://substack.com/redirect/52da3eec-9149-4dd4-8910-e96dc253fb0b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] the animated docs in which the museum was previously involved — among them The Epplee Brothers [ https://substack.com/redirect/a1fb4856-262e-405e-82b8-65c0dd1ad504?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (2020). In Japan, MAPPA absorbed Contrail [ https://substack.com/redirect/f67db0aa-97e7-4955-bd0c-6fdb9c6ae8c2?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], the studio where Sunao Katabuchi is presently making The Mourning Children. A Goya went [ https://substack.com/redirect/ead0986b-545d-4909-af27-da79a28c4292?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] to the short Gilbert, from Spain. It has a charming look — see the trailer [ https://substack.com/redirect/5ec49a31-a1f1-4065-872a-c2ac5084dd6a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Last of all: we looked into the storyboards [ https://substack.com/redirect/0e680bfc-41bb-4e80-a6d9-4907b1236e48?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for three Oscar-winning films from the ‘60s, ‘80s and ‘00s. Until next time! 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View this post on the web at https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-music-of-samurai-champloo Welcome! This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s the plan: 1. Creating the sound of Samurai Champloo. 2. Animation news. With that, let’s go! 1. Tension Hip hop and old Japan have a link. It goes back decades and decades. There’s a reason Wu-Tang Clan members rapped about “swinging swords like shinobi” in the ‘90s, and Liquid Swords opened with the words, “When I was little, my father was famous. He was the greatest samurai in the empire.” Or look at Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, or even the Samurai Jack title sequence. Mixing these worlds feels cool — but also right, somehow, as if they belong together. It’s possible they do. “In feudal times, it didn’t matter what others said, and samurai would determine their own fate with their own sword,” a Japanese director once argued. Many back then were “aggressive about expressing themselves,” he believed, in a way “very similar to rappers.” The Japanese director in question was Shinichiro Watanabe. These thoughts were occupying his mind a few years after he finished Cowboy Bebop (1998–1999). It was during the early ‘80s, during high school, that Watanabe first got into hip hop. He liked The Message [ https://substack.com/redirect/6e80b5cb-3a3b-4a9e-82e5-7118e1b6a06a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1982). “And then a little later … I got very interested in the new-school style of hip hop,” he recalled, “the music of De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers.” He favored “underground” stuff — grimier and less “major-label-sounding,” he said. Watanabe used that type of music in a Cowboy Bebop episode never aired abroad: Mish-Mash Blues [ https://substack.com/redirect/3c840c19-ed9e-4815-a10e-85c403e4007a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Beats by Tsutchie, a Japanese hip hop producer, play [ https://substack.com/redirect/af6806f9-3a9c-4d8a-a64b-65478058504f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in the background. Even a track with rapping [ https://substack.com/redirect/f59ddb43-52ea-4e17-8550-9ab7c5387972?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] appears. Watanabe was hunting for a different sound. “I was convinced that hip hop music could be used in soundtracks,” he said. “Some of my other staff said that it was too much of a risk to use just hip hop [laughs]. I shot back, ‘If you think like that we might as well just have normal movie music’ [laughs].” By the early ‘00s, an idea had taken hold of Watanabe. He wanted to make a new series with hip hop at its core — one about feudal samurai. There was a link between the two worlds, he said. These thoughts led to Samurai Champloo (2004–2005). Cowboy Bebop was odd, edgy and risky. In fact, it got cut to pieces in its first Japanese airing — around half the series went unshown. But Watanabe’s project turned into a big deal and even, eventually, crossed over onto American television. Its success removed hurdles for Samurai Champloo. “I was told I could do whatever I wanted,” Watanabe said. That was what he did. The plan to blend hip hop and samurai hit him all at once. “When I came up with the character of Mugen I heard hip hop at the same time,” Watanabe remembered. The whole thing had a personal appeal to him: When I make a new anime, it’s no fun for me if I make something that I’m not interested in. So, in the case of Samurai Champloo, I took two things that I’m very interested in: hip hop and old samurai shows … I thought that, if I took two things that I’m very interested in, it would make something even more fascinating for the audience. The show’s foundation was its music. Before Watanabe had an animation team, he already had someone on the soundtrack. It was Tsutchie — they’d kept in touch since the ‘90s, and he got grabbed by the first vague outline. “I thought it was interesting from the beginning. It didn’t seem strange to me at all,” Tsutchie said. Watanabe wanted a certain sound in Samurai Champloo. Again, he liked the underground: he was following the rise of what he called “jazzy hip hop.” Beyond Tsutchie, there was another beatmaker high on his list — a borderline unknown with his own tiny label in Tokyo. His stage name was Nujabes. He was a record-store owner whose personal sound hadn’t inspired a million imitators yet. His shop in Shibuya was a major spot for underground hip hop releases — and his early singles made a convert out of Watanabe, who frequented record stores in the area. There was a “melodious,” lyric quality to Nujabes’s lo-fi beats, before lo-fi beats were a thing. Watanabe was intrigued. Nujabes stocked his store partly according to what he liked to hear. For him, making music came from the same place: “I wanted to hear music which sampled all the old soul and jazz that I liked,” he once said. His taste and Watanabe’s aligned — and he got hired to Samurai Champloo. Backing up Tsutchie and Nujabes, Watanabe pulled in a few more of his favorites: Force of Nature and Fat Jon, the latter a producer from Ohio, then living in Germany. Watanabe was “worried” that it wouldn’t be possible to get him, but Fat Jon turned out to be a massive fan of Cowboy Bebop. When Watanabe’s offer came, he said, “I was so, so, so happy that I nearly cried.” This group, and the extended circle of musicians around it, would define the feel of Samurai Champloo. By this point, Watanabe had a special approach to music. It was all over Cowboy Bebop — and he continued it here. As he explained: Generally, a movie soundtrack just plays a supporting role to complement the visuals, to give them a hand. However, since Cowboy Bebop, I never wanted to do something like that. I wanted to make the music more prominent, to have the music and visuals compete 50:50. Sometimes, I thought it would be more interesting if the music stood out too much. To do this, the music needed to possess that kind of power, and it needed to be high quality enough to rival the pictures. Watanabe had an outsize role in the show’s music. Beyond picking the artists, he learned Pro Tools and got involved in editing the episode soundtracks. Still, he gave each collaborator a pretty free hand. As a rule, he preferred that method. “People who are afraid of the director are no good [laughs]. It’s always better to do what you’re going to do, even if it is a little off topic,” he said around the time of Champloo. “That’s the spirit of working together on the project. You have to be willing to take risks.” The result, as Watanabe hoped, was music that drew attention to itself. You find it all across the show. Take the famous sword fight in the first episode, with Jin and Mugen in the teahouse. Right beside the action, we hear the track Sneak Chamber [ https://substack.com/redirect/66ab8f67-64a1-47a0-b80b-c051f6aaa7fd?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] by Force of Nature, a duo. It’s almost all percussion — a skittering breakbeat. The speed keeps up with the quick, sharp animation, as the two fighters slash at each other and Mugen kicks and spins like a breakdancer. That said, not much lands directly on beat. There’s a loose swing to the music’s sync with the images — the two parts stand out individually. It creates a weaving effect that’s hard not to feel. After all, Force of Nature’s track is mixed almost as loud as the sword swipes. Going into Samurai Champloo, Force of Nature had the Ghost Dog soundtrack partly in mind. But Watanabe gave the two very little direction — he trusted them. So, they did a range of things. Sneak Chamber is light and upbeat, and its frenzied drumming made KZA (one half of the duo) realize, “Percussion instruments really suit sword fighting!” Or take another fight scene — the one from episode 10, with Mugen in the stream. Here, a Nujabes piece called 1st Samurai [ https://substack.com/redirect/0e387c10-fd7a-45f9-ac8e-e0ca76bd0319?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] refuses to stay in the background. It sits on top of the images, almost clashes with them. A lot of Nujabes’s best-known work appears in Samurai Champloo. Even if you’ve never watched the series, you’ve probably heard Battlecry [ https://substack.com/redirect/71f93af9-21b4-45b6-9dda-dedf157016c2?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] or Aruarian Dance [ https://substack.com/redirect/ced4de60-1368-4f1f-91fa-fd3f7112024b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. They have the sound of old, dusty vinyl records, and that lyrical quality Watanabe felt. The rapper Shing02, who performed on Battlecry, once said: Nujabes’s music contains a Japanese-style melancholy. It can be applied to the word “saudade” in Brazilian music, and in English it can be connected to the word “nostalgia.” There’s another driving breakbeat in this scene. But the melodic parts of Nujabes’s instrumental — the slowed-down saxophone [ https://substack.com/redirect/147c05da-55c4-4564-af6e-56d746b1756c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] sample, the flute [ https://substack.com/redirect/de7d4a7d-ad6c-4e28-838f-fa1d0bfdbf7f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] from the ‘60s — have some of that melancholy. And they’re loud in the mix. Nujabes gives us something more than just a cool fight. A droning high note swallows up the scene, playing unbroken for more than 20 seconds, as Mugen’s opponent rushes him and falls to a surprise hit. Even when we cut away to another location, the drone continues. It feels a little haunting, a little tragic. The music doesn’t fit snugly into the action or the edits — but that’s why it works. Techniques like these were used throughout Samurai Champloo. Toward the end of episode five, for example, Tsutchie’s Sincerely [ https://substack.com/redirect/5e2e9a6f-dfcd-435b-a385-527e11eaed41?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] plays as a criminal gang is rounded up. A bittersweet, nostalgic loop is front and center. Hearing it over feudal imagery is interesting by itself — but it also avoidsjust “illustrating” the scene, repeating the emotions or timing of the images. That swing is present again. You see this stuff, too, in one of the show’s great musical highlights, courtesy of Fat Jon. It happens in episode seven. A young, misunderstood thief jumps from a window and runs across rooftops, fleeing a gang and the police. And Fat Jon’s low-key 624 Part 2 [ https://substack.com/redirect/274981d8-faa6-454c-aa08-70666fa9b3d3?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] takes total control. A faster, more exciting piece of “normal movie music” would match the thief’s desperate escape here. But it wouldn’t work as well — the melancholy piano line and quiet percussion add another emotional layer to these shots. When the thief gets cornered and threatens his pursuers, yelling, the music stays relaxed. And it grows quieter still when a blade moves toward him. It’s one of those moments where, as Watanabe said, the music stands out “too much.” Fat Jon’s part isn’t 50:50 — it’s more like 60:40. He worked on the show almost entirely without feedback from Watanabe and, once again, the result was music that doesn’t sit comfortably with the images. Yet that’s where this scene’s strength lies. Watanabe didn’t aim Samurai Champloo at America. As he said, it’s full of references that foreigners miss. Its huge success abroad was a lucky break — because, as he admitted years later, the show failed in Japan. He found that hip hop and animation appealed to different groups in his country back then. To the outside world, though, this pairing of old Japan and modern music didn’t just work — it was a bit addictive. And the jazzy, melodic, lo-fi, underground sound that Watanabe wanted in his show (and that artists like Nujabes delivered so well) would later be copied to infinity. There’s something that links these worlds — Watanabe wasn’t the first to realize it. But, for the feeling of Samurai Champloo’s sound, just as important as the links are the contrasts. In this show, a lot doesn’t fit together on screen in an obvious way. Because it’s not obvious, because elements “compete,” you get tension. In the 2000s, breakbeats over sword fights — and the quiet emotion of Nujabes’s music over a struggle in a stream — had just enough similarity and just enough clash to make the world look, and listen. 2. Newsbits We lost Jane Baer [ https://substack.com/redirect/37007d0e-b701-455f-a9e1-8f7e9c0afd41?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (91), a Disney veteran from the Sleeping Beauty days. Animation artists are speaking out [ https://substack.com/redirect/0b9e6b97-f04d-4419-ab27-428883d984bc?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] against America’s blockade of Cuba, which is sending the country into a crisis. Netflix picked up the Mexican film I Am Frankelda for an international streaming release [ https://substack.com/redirect/68771a9a-a3cd-4fb4-beef-04ce8067d24b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Its directors attended [ https://substack.com/redirect/73ab4136-d777-4176-9286-8ebca7b5481d?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] the Annies this week, where Frankelda was nominated. Speaking of the Annies, the Chilean series Wow Lisa took the award for preschool animation. See the complete list of winners here [ https://substack.com/redirect/1e8e367c-8230-4eed-8dd3-0be02c332339?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. There’s a great-looking trailer [ https://substack.com/redirect/77a931f2-437b-4a54-9607-b0ca7dff47a3?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] out for A Foreign Heart, produced by Trollfilm in Norway. It’s a new film from Anton Dyakov (BoxBallet). In India, Studio Eeksaurus did a commissioned piece [ https://substack.com/redirect/b8d25588-e1c2-40ed-aff5-509767932fd1?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for the Pune Design Festival — in a very cool, sort of ‘90s-throwback style. One of the world’s best living animators, Akihiko Yamashita (The Boy and the Heron), did a great little spot [ https://substack.com/redirect/22897c5b-04ba-48a6-9efe-98973733f164?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for the Japanese company VAP. See it here [ https://substack.com/redirect/6694b6b1-c619-4493-b03d-b6a445e3db10?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Also in Japan, the legendary studio Telecom is being dissolved into TMS [ https://substack.com/redirect/42819376-00bb-465e-a799-c214aa17c426?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Last of all: we looked into the first film by Yuri Norstein [ https://substack.com/redirect/c7295d48-7b60-40f0-8a18-3a91744aaaf0?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], made years before Hedgehog in the Fog. Until next time! Unsubscribe https://substack.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.n2Tmr5za9vuzcUAFtvO4I99CEZLvRKtxM3tKWjpfJNg?

View this post on the web at https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/sand-and-a-source-of-light Welcome! Glad you could join us. This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — and here’s the plan: 1. Why animation is for anyone. 2. Newsbits. With that, let’s go! 1. Problem solvers It’s no secret that animation is tough work. Anyone who’s tried it can tell you as much. And certain styles and studios are especially taxing: more than once, Walt Disney ordered a dozen-plus retakes of individual shots, for example. Even Disney’s best artists didn’t reach his standards easily. This type of perfectionism created Snow White (1937) — his people got pushed beyond all they’d done before. Years and immense resources went into training a team to work in the Snow White style on the Snow White level. That was an anomaly in the ‘30s. Even today, most don’t get the opportunity to learn all that the Disney people learned back then. Like an artist from the Snow White era recalled, the studio: … was like a marvelous big Renaissance Craft Hall in that it had a terrific teaching program and a lot of training that went with it. Young people coming in got a terrific break, I believe, because they were given a chance to study drawing, composition, animation, action. We studied old movies, layout, art direction. All of us were encouraged to study these free courses. Out of that came advancements, too. They were very anxious to find the exceptional people and move them up fast. It’s impressive — and, viewed one way, maybe demoralizing. Who’s got the time or access to learn to draw like Grim Natwick [ https://substack.com/redirect/ba751d9b-3e23-4b43-bf5e-2242c9fbf7a4?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], one of Snow White’s leads? And isn’t that what real animation demands? The competitive, kind-of-elitist attitude of the old Disney school often seemed to suggest it. Maybe you’ve been left out. These are real feelings. And, in recent years, they’ve gotten used in a core GenAI sales pitch to artists. Allegedly, art is inaccessible and only for a lucky few; slop services level the playing field. The idea is that generated animation gives everyone a shot. Despite the many problems [ https://substack.com/redirect/075d5914-44f8-404a-a9fd-4286565c7366?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] with GenAI videos and images, that sense of left-outness can be powerful. Drawing like a Disney great really is off the table for some people. But perspective matters here, because the hyper-technical Disney style was only ever one option — one of many. A wonderful thing about animation, especially now, is its openness. Everyone already has a shot. Last summer, we shared a clip from The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa (1977) on social media. It’s a Kafka story animated with an unusual material — sand. One person pointed this out in a comment that went viral [ https://substack.com/redirect/51dee95c-40e1-4a93-846f-ee43a8dcf12c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]: “I’ll use AI cus drawing is inaccessible” Meanwhile people doing animation WITH SAND AND A SOURCE OF LIGHT Animator Caroline Leaf created most of The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa in her spare time, in her home. She would come back from her job and work into the night. Each frame was her own. Leaf wasn’t a mechanical person and she kept her setup basic — “I am shy of machines,” she said during production. Fixed above her workspace was a 16 mm camera. The rest was done with sand on a sheet of milk glass, lit from below. She didn’t consider herself much of a visual artist. “I can’t really draw; never could,” she said in 1976. “But it is interesting, not being able to draw and trying to find solutions around it. If, for example, I knew how to draw a hand with all the correct shadings and perspective, there would be no problem. But that hand would come out looking like a conventional hand.” At first, Leaf’s limited drawing skill almost scared her away from animation. Plus, she was no fan of the Disney films she’d seen (“I didn’t like them at all”). As a college student in the ‘60s, though, she stumbled into an animation course whose professor didn’t pay much mind to drawing or to Hollywood cartoons. “His idea was that you could animate anything,” Leaf remembered. Once, Leaf came to class with a container of sand and poured it onto a light box. Something clicked. “There was no tradition of drawing in sand, so I felt free to develop my own style,” she noted. Six months of daily work went into her student film Sand, or Peter and the Wolf (1969), and a major new artist was born. The lack of tradition attracted Leaf to sand — but her left-field, iconoclastic thinking was a sort of tradition in itself. It was a strain in animation. Leaf chose to animate in the first place because she’d encountered that strain in her animation class, through film screenings. Among other things, she saw animated collage. One of her favorite discoveries was Jan Lenica, a Polish director of cutout collage films. “He works with paper cutouts, and that impressed me,” Leaf said. “I like to draw a parallel between the fluid movement of the material I work with (sand) and the one he uses (paper).” Lenica’s films are about as far from Disney as it gets. They follow no classical rules of drawing and were made from the simplest parts. But the best of them, like New Janko the Musician [ https://substack.com/redirect/3a101369-f6b7-4892-af53-75c5141a9e7b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1960), have a haunting power of their own. Collage animation is like that. If Leaf built Mr. Samsa out of “sand and a source of light,” these artists use just as little, if not less, to do a lot. The collage animator Dave Merson Hess (Tight Pants Ultra Bold [ https://substack.com/redirect/60b26f50-b237-4d03-b7a9-fa99f01a68ca?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]) told us a few years ago: There is no canon of required reading for cutout. Truly, the rules have not fully been codified. Yes, there are zines, there are book chapters, there are PDFs of assignments scattered across the internet, but there’s no 500-page tome, no pack of devoted readers hellbent on enforcing the so-called rules. When compared to hand-drawn, this is a point of freedom. The so-called principles of animation exist as a set of potential suggestions. A famous example is Frank Film [ https://substack.com/redirect/c0fac42a-038d-4b9b-b2c5-cc9ab4f9fce1?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1973) from America. It’s a mind-altering barrage of stuff, set to dueling narration tracks. At the time, director Frank Mouris called it “the true story of my life from the beginning up to the present and on into the future shown by the images I have cut out and saved for the past six years.” Mouris was an independent who admitted that he “didn’t draw well.” But it didn’t matter — he realized that he could do something else with cutouts. A lot of people loved Frank Film, even if they struggled to describe it. Mouris’s piece won the Oscar in ‘74. According to LA Weekly, Mouris “dashed up to receive the Oscar for his animated short, Frank Film, wearing a borrowed jacket, borrowed pants, borrowed scarf and a borrowed sequined belt. The shirt was his own.” This collage-aligned school has drawn many, many artists since the mid-century. One of the best worked in communist Hungary — Sándor Reisenbüchler. His films, like The Year of 1812 [ https://substack.com/redirect/9180380d-f81f-4287-90ba-b43549cb7d0a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], were utterly homebrew. Movement was often improvised under the camera. Reisenbüchler’s masterpiece was The Kidnapping of the Sun and Moon [ https://substack.com/redirect/f2d7695d-1c35-44e9-bd5a-73034fabacf1?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1968). It’s a wordless fairy tale about a dragon that devours the sun, moon and stars and leaves the world in absolute darkness, until a spark of light appears, and a hero takes it up. The technique is a mix of things: cutout, experimental effects, semi-traditional animation. And the whole thing has a primordial energy. We’ve loved The Kidnapping of the Sun and Moon for years. Seeing it on the big screen last year, at the Annecy Festival, we were overwhelmed by its emotional force. There were flashier, higher-tech and bigger-budget films at the festival, but almost none hit us like this one. Reisenbüchler managed it with none of the tools of a Disney artist. As he once said: I made this film on a stool. I lived in the countryside, 30 km from Pest, in Felsőgöd, in dire poverty. […] My son was born just then, and my wife joined in between breastfeeding to fill in the dragon with a grease pencil. It’s actually a family short film. [The author Ferenc] Juhász also told me: you will see, Sándor, your child will bring luck. It’s a folk saying. A newborn always brings good luck that year. I had never been abroad before. With this film, I became popular all over the world. This shows that one can make a film on a kitchen table and a credenza. In the ‘70s, when movies were still shot on physical reels of film, Caroline Leaf created animation with sand and a source of light — and it wows people today. Artists like Mouris and Lenica and Reisenbüchler used even humbler means. And there was a wide group of animators who fell somewhere in between. By the mid-century, there were films made by animating people in stop motion (A Chairy Tale [ https://substack.com/redirect/03097481-1e0a-4512-b93d-17b9bf379324?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]), and films made by directly scratching and painting on film stock (Begone Dull Care [ https://substack.com/redirect/3bacbbee-38b2-4058-a0c9-00a60acccd1e?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]). One of Caroline Leaf’s early fans, Norman McLaren, spent his whole career resisting the complex Disney approach. As he wrote in the ‘40s: … my militant philosophy is this: to make with a brush on canvas is a simple and direct delight — to make with a movie should be the same. And, in 2026, the technical hurdles that even rebels like Leaf and McLaren navigated are gone. Anyone with a phone camera can shoot an animated film. Anyone with Blender or OpenToonz [ https://substack.com/redirect/db4821e0-052f-41a1-a05a-78457ef3896b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], the free software that Ghibli uses, can move images around. There are guides to building a multiplane shooting stand [ https://substack.com/redirect/e8aba831-415f-4a9e-835a-d2d22a43ae4f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for under $100. The results might not look exactly like classic Disney animation, or like Ghibli’s films. But that’s when creativity starts —at the point where you can’t just copy. Leaf’s work grew from the problem of “not being able to draw and trying to find solutions around it.” Her solutions, her creative problem-solving, made her an original. What AI-generated animation promises is a shortcut around that problem-solving. Which is a risk, because it aims at the heart of an artist’s creative growth. After all, we can thank problem-solving even for the best work of the Disney giants. That’s how their discoveries were made. Most of us will never have the privilege of the “marvelous big Renaissance Craft Hall” that was Disney’s studio in the ‘30s. But many of us have a camera, sand and a light, or a kitchen table and a pair of scissors, and those humbler tools can do a lot. We love Snow White. Yet it was The Kidnapping of the Sun and Moon that made us cry in a theater. 2. Newsbits The Italian classic Allegro non troppo is coming stateside via GKIDS. See the trailer [ https://substack.com/redirect/fddd120d-c1f9-4b85-a8e0-14aa3f5a603a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. In Mexico, Cinema Fantasma is reportedly [ https://substack.com/redirect/e9f4d871-ebc9-4854-8dc3-9dde32bf814b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] prepping another feature film: The Ballad of the Phoenix. BoxBallet, from Russia, is an Oscar nominee and one of the best animated shorts of the 2020s. It’s finally out on YouTube [ https://substack.com/redirect/fb5b9128-ee23-4f1e-ba32-171654c653fc?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in an official capacity. Meanwhile, beginning in March, Russia’s government will review [ https://substack.com/redirect/5ffb88ac-b3cf-4ac7-96bd-cdb1e8420407?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] audiovisual works shared online for “compliance with traditional spiritual and moral values.” It can order deleted any material found in violation. In America, the Hollywood director and showrunner Matt Braly is going independent [ https://substack.com/redirect/98b94e33-0c89-4c35-88f3-d743fcdbd9f5?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] with a new studio called Fantasy Project. “Why am I doing this?” he asked [ https://substack.com/redirect/1a4cd1d3-f375-4fa1-891d-9d91a9f28044?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] on Twitter. “Because the only ones who can protect art are the ones who value it. Disney using AI? Yuck.” India’s 88 Pictures is set to animate [ https://substack.com/redirect/ff3ccba8-744a-41b7-8d24-bcfb05b1855a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] Baahubali: The Eternal War, whose hype keeps growing. The Japanese film Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade is coming to UHD Blu-ray with its original colors restored [ https://substack.com/redirect/f74fd9f4-6859-47f9-b331-8737f8f637ba?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. A few years ago, Netflix killed Jorge Gutierrez’s Hollywood project I, Chihuahua. He’s now taken it overseas [ https://substack.com/redirect/5ce70dad-4330-4f08-b640-0edb158ea9e2?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] to Snafu, a British company. Amanita Design (Samorost) is a game studio rooted in the animated films of Czechia, its home country. Its latest project, Phonopolis, animates avant-garde aesthetics from the early 20th century — and now has a demo [ https://substack.com/redirect/23741896-18cf-4f40-baae-bd954e8ca72f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Last of all: director Josh Fagin (spktra) explained the mysterious light effects in ‘80s and ‘90s anime like Akira, and how he’s revived them for the digital age [ https://substack.com/redirect/8b335e54-1bb9-4289-859a-d8726260a4ca?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. His piece has generated a lot of buzz on social media. Until next time! Unsubscribe https://substack.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.Hr-2KMPQUfTl45tQBpXPtwGHqDqBNLtQ2Tc9G2vaTDM?

Hello! Hope you’re holding up okay. This is Jules and John, co-runners. It’s a special day for us. On February 14, five years ago, the first issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter shipped out. Today marks our fifth anniversary. In early 2021, we were running a Twitter account about animation. The idea was to attach a publication on the side — the publication you’re reading now. But it wasn’t clear that folks would be interested. If we were beyond lucky, we thought, we’d max out at 2,000 readers. Five years later, this newsletter reaches upward of 67,000 people. We’re immensely grateful, and humbled. At the half-decade mark, it’s tempting to reminisce about the long, tough, wonderful years behind us. But that doesn’t feel quite right — not right now. As this anniversary arrives, there’s a heavy darkness in the world. That’s true in many places, including the States, where we live. To be clear: we strongly agree with Cartoon Brew [ https://substack.com/redirect/798df749-73a8-4db0-acfe-ab24eb850820?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]’s statement [ https://substack.com/redirect/798df749-73a8-4db0-acfe-ab24eb850820?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] from last month. As a result, this isn’t a moment for looking back. We want to talk instead about the present — about the point of this newsletter in 2026. A couple of months ago, a subscriber named Daniel left us a comment. It floored us then and has stayed with us as an encouragement since. To quote the first two lines: For me, Animation Obsessive is more like a place than a newsletter. It’s a haven, like a school where I get to learn about art, artists, animation and history. Daniel’s words were incredible to read, in part because the newsletter is our haven. Disappearing into our research is a joy. Before this project began, we already loved to learn about these things — “art, artists, animation and history.” Now, it’s our job. Twice a week, we think and write about topics that fascinate us. As manic as the schedule is, this is our quiet place. Here, we get to put meaningful things first, no matter how much inhumanity or GenAI slop we encounter outside the boundaries of the newsletter. Here, we get to spend days on things we love, and on stories that excite us and give us hope and answers. This newsletter occupies a very small corner of the world, but it helps us. Our dream is that the work will help other folks, too. It would be presumptuous to say that we want people to find a haven here — that’s a big thing to be. Even so, we still do want this publication to be a kind of haven for readers, however it can be, however presumptuous that may be. It’s been the goal for a long time. In the words Daniel wrote, it felt like we’d succeeded, somehow. Personally, our need for meaningful, human art and stories is only growing in 2026. They’re a counterbalance, and they’re what we want to share. They can’t fix everything — but, for us, they edge back the darkness with a little light. We’re committing again to art as we enter our sixth year. Some of you joined shortly before this email. A few of you have been with us since February 2021 (we’re honored). To longtime subscribers and newcomers alike: thank you. We hope the Animation Obsessive newsletter will be useful to you in the year ahead. Finally, a brief note. We’re running a fifth-anniversary sale through the 23rd. We don’t spend much time on sales pitches here. The internet is commercialized enough, and times are tight for everyone. That said, if you’d like to join the group of readers who give us the freedom to publish what we want, without ads or sponsorships, now is a chance to do so. Paid subscriptions are half off: $50 per year or $5 per month. Paid subscribers get full access to our Thursday issues, like the recent one about the lost art of backlit animation [ https://substack.com/redirect/fbe585aa-e909-4c23-84e0-f8293149b1fc?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (unlocked for the curious). If that sounds appealing, and it’s within your budget, we’d love for you to join us. That’s all for now. Thank you again — and let’s keep pushing through 2026! Best, Jules & John Animation Obsessive

View this post on the web at https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/how-the-little-guy-moved Welcome! Thanks for checking in. It’s another Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the slate: 1. Animating in the early days of the personal computer. 2. Newsbits. With that, let’s go! 1. Computer animation There was a question in the days when video games were young. People figured out how to move graphics on a screen — see Pong from the early ‘70s, for example. This alone was a feat. Fast forward a decade, and the growth was visible. You had Donkey Kong beating his chest in the arcades; personal computers like the Apple II were running games where helicopters flew around [ https://substack.com/redirect/db3c66b2-9165-4559-928d-70d4c706937f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] with energy and bounce. Games and animation went together — that much was clear. Like animated films, these things often (if not always [ https://substack.com/redirect/b001bc54-4533-4c63-bab5-d4a8ceb3dca2?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]) brought artwork to life. How deep was the link, though? How many techniques from the animation world could really, effectively cross over? A twenty-something coder from New York explored that question during the ‘80s. His name: Jordan Mechner. He self-described, among other things, as an “amateur animator.” Mechner got his first Apple II as a teenager and fell in love. “I wanted to produce animations,” he said. “I knew from making those animations that the computer was powerful, and that it was capable as a games machine.” After years of writing games, Mechner released the one that made him a star: Prince of Persia (1989). It drew from the “great old Hollywood swashbuckling movies,” he said — like those starring Douglas Fairbanks. And animation was at the center. “Prince of Persia is the culmination of a lifelong fascination with animation,” noted the game’s manual. Famously, Mechner’s project rested on an experiment in digital rotoscoping. Prince of Persia comes from an era when high-end PCs did way, way less than today’s low-end smartphones. And the game wasn’t made for the best computers of its time. Mechner’s target system, the Apple II, was already a fossil by 1989. “[T]he Apple II’s memory was 48K,” Mechner said a few years back. “That’s less than a normal text email.” The original Prince of Persia displays big, blocky shapes in a handful of colors. Early in development, Mechner noted that the action was planned to run at just 15 frames per second, much slower than a movie. But he knew visuals were about more than tech. How they moved came down to animation technique — and it meant everything. He wrote in his journal: The figure will be tiny and messy and look like crap… but I have faith that, when the frames are run in sequence at 15 fps, it’ll create an illusion of life that’s more amazing than anything that’s ever been seen on an Apple II screen. The little guy will be … this shimmering little beacon of life in the static Apple-graphics Persian world I’ll build for him. Mechner felt it would work because he’d done it before. He knew how to get believable movement into the Apple II’s tiny memory. It was what he’d achieved in his game Karateka [ https://substack.com/redirect/0e3b7c80-9905-41bb-88f3-818d25602247?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1984), whose lead character punched, kicked, walked and ran in a compelling way via rotoscoping. “What made the big difference was using a Super 8 camera to film my karate teacher going through the moves, and tracing them frame by frame on a Moviola,” Mechner said about that project. The trick originated in animated films — an aid for the movement of the humans in projects like Snow White (1937). Disney’s animators traced footage of live actors and deviated: they tweaked shapes, removed frames, kept the best poses. Mechner didn’t know that yet, but he did know that his own hand-drawn animation was “stiff,” and not the “realistic simulation of karate fighting” he wanted. His father was the one who suggested video footage (he even wore a gi and helped Mechner shoot a few movements). The only problem was digitization. These were the days, Mechner said, when the “challenge was getting [the footage] into the computer, which, of course, is something we can do now by pressing a button on a cellphone.” Mechner’s setup for Karateka was wild. Over his Moviola screen, he taped thin paper, upon which he traced key frames from the Super 8 footage beneath. Then he took his pencil sketches to a VersaWriter — an early drawing tablet — and traced them on that. Frames of movement became pixels on his computer monitor. From there, he cleaned them up with an art program he’d coded. His animation changed when he started taking from life in this way. The little details he’d missed became obvious. Mechner said: I remember the frame of the high kick, the fighter leans back and also the arm goes back. … [I]n the beginning, when I tried to do a frame of a high kick, you know, it was more idealized. I didn’t realize that the body would have to move quite that far back. Mechner recorded his impression of the initial tests in his journal. As he wrote, “When I saw that sketchy little figure walk across the screen, looking just like [my karate teacher] Dennis, all I could say was, ‘ALL RIGHT!’ ” Karateka was unusual for the time, and it sold well — over 400,000 copies, in fact. The whole thing was a product of Mechner’s ambitious thinking about games. “I was taking film studies classes (always dangerous) and starting to get delusions of grandeur that computer games were in the infancy of a new art form,” he said, “like cartoon animation in the ‘20s or film in the 1900s.” Those ideas influenced him again when he undertook Prince of Persia, not long after Karateka. He felt that games “had a lot of the same limitations that silent film had,” and he wanted to borrow the solutions of the silent era. Mechner aimed for a game in which “personality is expressed through action.” To do it, he returned to digital rotoscoping. His younger brother David — a rising talent at Go, the board game — helped this time. “He was 16 years old [and] in high school ... He wasn’t the greatest athlete, but he was willing to do it for free,” said the elder Mechner. In ‘85, they went to the parking lot of Reader’s Digest, near his brother’s school, to get footage with a VHS camera. It was an expensive toy then — “I couldn’t afford to own it,” Mechner admitted. (Guiltily, he refunded it after the shoot.) As he said later: I made him do all of the moves that I thought would be needed in the game: running, jumping, climbing up on the generator that was sitting in the middle of the parking lot. Once again, the problem was converting the movement into animation. Mechner’s method was even wilder this time. For his Apple II, he bought a “digitizer.” It was a special card that connected to a CCTV camera. “[It] let you basically point a little black-and-white video camera at an art stand, and it would digitize it and put it back on the computer [as pixels],” Mechner said. Early tests were not promising. The images weren’t resizable, and the VHS footage wasn’t in the stark black and white that the card registered well. What he’d shot was “useless” as-was. Mechner needed a workaround: a way to make the movements readable by the card. So, he hooked up a screen to a VCR, and set a Nikon camera (35 mm) on a tripod in front of it. “[Y]ou basically drew all the curtains in the room and then popped the videotape in the VCR, hit play, hit pause, did a frame advance,” he said. Mechner photographed “every third frame,” reducing his brother’s movement from 24 frames per second down to eight. The photos were developed and then processed further. “I highlighted these shots with a black marker to produce a series of silhouettes,” Mechner explained. Specifically, he used a Magic Marker and Wite-Out to define the lines of each frame of his brother’s movement as clearly as possible. The next step was to put them through “a Xerox machine to get a really clean silhouette.” The result: more than a dozen sheets of paper, all covered with black-and-white animation frames in sequence. Those went in front of the CCTV camera to be digitized, one at a time. This whole agonizing process had taken “months,” he said. “I love the quality of the just-digitized roughs,” Mechner wrote in his journal toward the end of ‘86, after seeing the tests. The final step was to “clean it up and stylize the figures” — and to “enhance” certain motions, like the long jump, to be larger than life. Mechner built the rest of Prince of Persia around the lead character’s movement. As he put it, “My basic concept was to create the most lifelike, fluidly animated human game character ever ... trying to survive like Buster Keaton in a world that was dangerous.” Throughout production, he kept including more rotoscoped motions, which brought extra difficulties. For one thing, there was the hardware — new frames ate up space in the Apple II’s memory. Another thing was his brother’s growth spurt between the first video shoot and the second (“with the magic of my cartoonization process, I was able to correct for this,” Mechner said). But combat was the big one. Sword fights got added to Prince of Persia in late 1988 — and they needed a bunch of new animation. As Mechner studied the fights in early swashbucklers like Captain Blood for reference, he started to feel just how exciting his project was. “This is going to be the greatest game of all time,” he wrote to himself in December of ‘88. Ultimately, The Adventures of Robin Hood solved the combat. Going over the film’s climactic fight, Mechner found “six seconds” that matched his needs. As he said: … the camera angle has them [fighting] in exact profile. This was a godsend. I did my VHS/one-hour-photo rotoscope procedure, spread two-dozen snapshots out on the floor of the office and spent days poring over them trying to figure out what exactly was going on in that duel, how to conceptualize it into a repeatable pattern. What he got was simple, thrilling back-and-forth action. It captured the thing he wanted: the old Hollywood style in which “the blades clash high and low in a kind of balletic rhythm.” Again, Prince of Persia was released for an ancient piece of hardware. By the time the game came out, in September 1989, the Apple II was dying off. Mechner’s project didn’t really sell — maybe 500 units per month at first. Those who encountered his animation were wowed, though. “You really have to see it to believe it,” noted one newsletter. The game’s packaging hyped up the animated characters in terms that, according to another publication, would “be the height of marketing arrogance if [they] weren’t, quite simply, true.” Prince of Persia became one of those long-tail games. It ended up on a ton of platforms, ported by a ton of different teams. Versions reached Japan, Europe. Years later, Mechner met people who’d played it in the USSR: “I was amazed and moved to realize that my game had such a cultural impact, even behind the Iron Curtain, which was an unknown world to me as an American at that time.” Over time, it sold millions of copies. The versions people played weren’t quite Mechner’s original — the game’s visuals were redone many times for newer, stronger hardware. The Apple II’s harsh, limited colors went away. Yet Mechner’s animation, the basis of the project, stayed in place. And it stayed strong. Which was the thing: making the animation believable and exciting wasn’t really about tech. Despite all the tricks Mechner used for it, this was an artistic problem. The arrival of newer hardware, more colors, faster frame rates and higher resolutions didn’t outmode the simple, lively motion in Prince of Persia — how could they? The great animation of the 1920s, a century ago, still looks great now. Movement doesn’t age so easily. Back in 2020, Mechner published his journals from the Prince of Persia era as a book. On the cover is his game’s hero — rendered in two colors and in razor-sharp, Apple II-style pixels. We find the character mid-leap, in a pose that Mechner got and refined from his brother 40 years ago. It’s still full of energy. 2. Newsbits In America, Adobe announced plans this week to kill off Animate — and then backtracked [ https://substack.com/redirect/64452c9a-89f5-45e3-8305-5b1265f19f5c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] after an outcry, thankfully. The Palestinian animator Rama Heib is among the first artists [ https://substack.com/redirect/0e4498e1-6515-4ddf-a224-9b177f371080?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] to win a grant from the Palestine Film Fund (for the short Issa and the Forest). An American music video, Spirit Jumper [ https://substack.com/redirect/155ee4c7-f8da-470f-a281-a593925cc8d1?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], aims to digitally recreate [ https://substack.com/redirect/341d85a9-9a6e-430b-9fd7-4b261f4b287e?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] the look of classic ‘80s and ‘90s cel animation. It does an impressive job — especially in the use of light. Director Josh Fagin writes that he went for “that ‘dangerous’ light, the kind that actually feels like it’s burning the screen,” as seen in Akira. In Hungary, the Kecskemét animation studio has a new leader for the first time since 1971 [ https://substack.com/redirect/e4ff638f-f4ca-4962-8a2d-927a642b547b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. László Toth (an animator on The Secret of Kells and The Red Turtle) took over from Ferenc Mikulás. On that note, in America, Bob Iger will step down [ https://substack.com/redirect/94fd0535-021d-4de3-a96f-be2df91785e0?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] as the head of Disney in March. His replacement is Josh D’Amaro from the company’s parks division. A little late, but worth noting: David was produced in South Africa, and its box office of $83 million represents a “breakthrough [ https://substack.com/redirect/20bb1a7b-ea8f-4a60-a112-df32e6007535?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]” for animation from the continent. In Germany, new rules require [ https://substack.com/redirect/51ae5d0e-0cc3-47e5-a3df-823c488e737e?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] “streaming platforms and TV broadcasters … to invest 8% of their [German] revenue” into projects produced in the country. There’s an effort in America to build a National Animation Museum, and CalArts signed on [ https://substack.com/redirect/9c11a2d1-dbc7-411b-8b8c-93dede567418?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] last month. The Japanese animator Kazuya Kanehisa was featured [ https://substack.com/redirect/1685b8b0-2268-412b-9470-7b96b5fc7158?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] by Cartoon Brew in a piece with lots of fascinating insights about his work, based on “Showa-era” cartoons and aesthetics. In Britain, the Cardiff Animation Festival revealed [ https://substack.com/redirect/f224e86d-0688-4b8b-8bcd-97a581faf078?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] its program for 2026. It opens in April. Last of all: we looked at three projects from China’s Flash scene [ https://substack.com/redirect/2495175f-1171-4cb8-b9ba-00057167c5f5?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] — and at how that scene built the current Chinese animation boom. Until next time! Unsubscribe https://substack.com/redirect/2/eyJlIjoiaHR0cHM6Ly9hbmltYXRpb25vYnNlc3NpdmUuc3Vic3RhY2suY29tL2FjdGlvbi9kaXNhYmxlX2VtYWlsP3Rva2VuPWV5SjFjMlZ5WDJsa0lqbzBNalkxTVRVd05EQXNJbkJ2YzNSZmFXUWlPakU0TnpFMk1qY3pPQ3dpYVdGMElqb3hOemN3TmpFek1qQXpMQ0psZUhBaU9qRTRNREl4TkRreU1ETXNJbWx6Y3lJNkluQjFZaTB5TnpRd05UVWlMQ0p6ZFdJaU9pSmthWE5oWW14bFgyVnRZV2xzSW4wLmJQVGVBOWRheW1RRXNrZ2VrdlhDTkY1aHREQnZValo1RXdUd2NibXlUTlUiLCJwIjoxODcxNjI3MzgsInMiOjI3NDA1NSwiZiI6dHJ1ZSwidSI6NDI2NTE1MDQwLCJpYXQiOjE3NzA2MTMyMDMsImV4cCI6MjA4NjE4OTIwMywiaXNzIjoicHViLTAiLCJzdWIiOiJsaW5rLXJlZGlyZWN0In0.QXrF5WYM81n4zWyBj7NA6o1nCq5-UNlNvCB3wn-7h9U?

View this post on the web at https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/a-film-for-all-times Welcome! Glad you could join us. This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s the plan: 1. Why The Mitten is so special. 2. Animation newsbits. With that, let’s go! 1. “Planned inconveniences” You can do a lot with a few puppets and a camera — even a phone camera. By itself, that stuff is enough to shoot a stop-motion film. Adding lights and a set gives you plenty for a full production. The rest is about thinking and execution and soul. Nail those, even on a low-key project, and you might have a gem. The Mitten (1967) is that kind of piece. It’s a quiet story about a girl who wants a dog — and it doesn’t feel like it aims to be a classic. Even when her red mitten comes to life as a knit puppy, maybe by magic, the film keeps its ambitions small. It’s gentle, and a little funny and a little sad, and then it’s over. The effect of it sneaks up on you, though. There’s a human warmth here, in everything, that can’t be faked. It became a classic without flash, without pretense. Yuri Norstein (Hedgehog in the Fog [ https://substack.com/redirect/10b8bc60-939d-47e1-9112-86521f872fc7?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]) isn’t a huge fan of stop-motion puppets, but he called The Mitten a “deafening discovery” and “a film for all times.” Norstein himself animated on The Mitten. It was made behind the Iron Curtain — in the USSR, at the venerable Soyuzmultfilm. A few years later, key members of its team would bring the Cheburashka [ https://substack.com/redirect/77fc1e43-c8a9-4b32-a574-97e92f0b7fea?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] series to life. But this one stood out in their filmographies even then. The Mitten’s designer, Leonid Shvartsman, remembered an encounter with a colleague once the short was finished: After the screening of our Mitten, when we were leaving the cinema hall, my childhood friend Lyova Milchin rushed to me and simply kissed me. We both were moved to tears. The things that make The Mitten special operate on a subtle level. They’re tiny, but, together, they have power. Director Roman Kachanov [ https://substack.com/redirect/506efadc-c1e9-48ee-89f0-e4b1b1573ce9?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] had been working with puppets at Soyuzmultfilm since the late ‘50s. He’d come to realize something in that time. To make an animated character feel alive on the screen, you need unnecessary things. Moving straight from A to B isn’t enough. This is the philosophy he brought to The Mitten — the film for which he saw all his past work as “preparation.” As Kachanov wrote: A live actor, a live person, makes a lot of “excess” movements, entirely without thinking about it. You sit down on a chair and instinctively straighten your clothes. You rise from a chair and — without thinking, involuntarily — shake off the crumbs clung to your clothes. You put a dot on a blackboard with chalk and automatically turn the chalk so that the dot gets thicker. But when an animator animates a drawing or a puppet, they forget about this. … And the character becomes like a moving robot that has no incidental or excess movements, nor life-like details, and the viewer subconsciously feels that there is no life in the scene. If a live actor makes these movements involuntarily, then the viewer perceives them just as involuntarily, as unconsciously. … I call such lively details and touches “planned inconveniences.” They should be in every scene. In The Mitten, you sense them in every scene. There’s no naturalistic animation here (nothing moves in an everyday way), but the characters feel fully real thanks to these extra touches. As the girl climbs the stairs to her neighbor’s apartment, one arm is out for balance. When she reaches the top, she’s already starting to tie her hood under her chin. She stretches for the doorbell — and a knee bends up with the effort. No movement just happens. Every time, it happens in an interesting way. Late in the story, the girl pets the mitten. Norstein called it the film’s “best scene” and spoke of its “perfection.” It went to Maya Buzinova, the primary animator, who worked a lot on the girl and her red puppy. The subtleties that make this scene so tender are very small: a tilt of the head, for example, or the way her hand pulls back and her fingers bend after each stroke. But the emotion of it is undeniable. Decades later, Buzinova argued that animators hadn’t gotten enough credit for films like this one — for turning “trifling scripts” into believable stories. This was difficult work, especially without computers. As she put it a few years ago: Compared with my current colleagues, it was very difficult for us ... we did not have a screen to check the previous frame, to monitor. Everything had to be in the head. You had to begin to live the character. You had to begin to be the character. ... In The Mitten, there is just a girl and just a mitten. The key is their connection. The key is to feel that you are performing. To convey love, to convey tenderness. To convey the power of desire: the little girl wants to have a puppy. If there is no love in me for the character, I won’t perform it. Animation isn’t all, though, that makes The Mitten work. While its script might not have impressed Buzinova, it was an important part of the process. Everything else sprang from it. The film’s screenwriter was Jeanna Vitenzon. As the story goes, from her apartment window, she’d watched a little girl drag a mitten along the ground by a thread. She put together a draft based on that idea. Her script landed in the hands of Anatoly Karanovich (The Bath [ https://substack.com/redirect/fd0b4ec8-a18f-4dfd-af77-dd7cab10aca4?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]), and he brought it to Kachanov, his protégé. “The idea of The Mitten was liked by Roman Kachanov, an amazing director and person,” said Vitenzon. With him, she revised it. They pulled out every line of dialogue: the story would be told in images. Kachanov was a bulky, muscular man and a boxer. He was also a cinematic poet — Vitenzon recalled that he “could sense such subtle movements of the soul.” Many noticed this about him. “He was strong, tall, athletic. Physically unshakeable,” Norstein said in 2009. “At the same time he had a tender, almost childish soul. It was a charming contrast.” Like Norstein explained elsewhere, Kachanov was: … called “the Great Coffer” for his stature and heavy build. The Coffer, still, was endowed with subtlest psychoanalytical wits, great ingeniousness and sound and precise intuition about everything in this life. Working under Kachanov on The Mitten, Norstein was struck by the director’s “ability to daydream.” Thought after thought came to him about the film, and he would interrupt his animators mid-scene to ask for their feedback. One of Kachanov’s thoughts was to have Maya Buzinova redo the petting scene, which had already come out well. People were stunned, noted historian Georgy Borodin — and yet the next take was even better. Another thought was not to pre-record The Mitten’s jazzy score. Kachanov didn’t want to handcuff himself or his team to a soundtrack. In his view, timing in advance to music [ https://substack.com/redirect/c18c4f60-9854-4961-a4f2-8384595e4610?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] stifled both movement and filmmaking. He didn’t mind that the music didn’t line up perfectly. “At one time, vast importance was attached to synchronicity. It was a time when the modesty and naivety of the story, the absence of characters or psychology in films, were offset by musicality,” Kachanov argued. The Mitten comes from a different place. It’s a story about longing, friendship and loneliness. The feelings happen in a childlike register, but adults can recognize them, too. To design The Mitten, Kachanov brought in Leonid Shvartsman, who passed away a few years ago at age 101. He was already a legend at Soyuzmultfilm by the ‘60s, having helped to define The Snow Queen [ https://substack.com/redirect/b65b269a-ffb6-4d26-8b09-1ee6f5acafd1?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1957) and more. The characters he created for The Mitten were some of his best, and some of his favorites. Shvartsman liked to base characters on real people. In The Mitten, the girl’s absent-minded mother was designed after an artist at the studio. He pulled the stern bulldog, who judges the dog show, from Kachanov. “The mighty figure, a serious pensive head without any neck, thick eyebrows, sad clever eyes,” Shvartsman said. An interviewer once asked Shvartsman if the director had noticed the caricature. “Well, in the first place, everyone else recognized him,” he recalled, “and afterwards, naturally, he did too.” Whenever he designed, Shvartsman worked with the animators in mind. His drawings had to function as puppets. According to Maya Buzinova, he took pains to create “convenient” characters, ones that stood up well and had proper joints. Paired with his creative spirit, he was a master of his craft. “Each time I saw Liolly [Shvartsman] bending over a scene — the world seemed to me safe and stable,” Norstein said of his time on The Mitten. With Shvartsman and Kachanov in charge, this was a project in good hands. Add in people like Norstein and Buzinova (“one of the best puppeteers of the Soyuzmultfilm studio,” noted one critic), and a quality film was almost guaranteed. But an unusual energy went into the production, too, as Norstein remembered: … all of us, who took part in its creation, seemed to go a bit crazy. … A masterpiece is never planned, it is always being born by circumstances, even talent is not the main thing here. What is really important — is the point of intersection of deep emotional experiences, vivacity, creative excitement, the birth of a son into the family of Roman Kachanov and his wife’s life on the verge of dying, the feeling of fellowship and the amiable composure of Liolly Shvartsman, tilling the pictorial soil of the film as if it were his cherished vegetable garden — in his steady, unhurried, resourceful manner rich in implicit humor. Such are the bricks a film is made of. It is being filled with the heart feelings of its makers. Again, the team knew it had done something — as shown by the kissing and crying after the film screened. The Mitten became defining for Soyuzmultfilm. “[D]espite its apparent simplicity, [it] turned out to be a new breakthrough in children’s animation,” wrote historian Sergey Kapkov. It won awards internationally. A couple of years later, Kachanov, Shvartsman and Buzinova would go on to bigger things in Crocodile Gena [ https://substack.com/redirect/b2101097-90f5-4ecc-9734-913352f6b5dc?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1969), the first entry in the Cheburashka series. But The Mitten was the foundation, and some called it Kachanov’s career high even after the success of Cheburashka. Here was puppet animation clearly different from the style of Czechs like Jiří Trnka [ https://substack.com/redirect/8b02447a-e95c-42dc-8cb7-61b9cb90d920?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], but not overshadowed by it. The way Norstein came to move his paper-cutout characters later, in his own films, owes a lot to Kachanov’s approach — and those “planned inconveniences.” Within the tenderness of the movements in Tale of Tales [ https://substack.com/redirect/e29eb513-4244-4fa0-8ec5-1baecb58b97e?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1979), or Norstein’s Good Night, Little Ones! [ https://substack.com/redirect/d01e906e-96b8-4be6-90f3-7e96f29b2b3f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] animation [ https://substack.com/redirect/d01e906e-96b8-4be6-90f3-7e96f29b2b3f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], you can see films like The Mitten. He didn’t deny it. “I can safely call him my teacher. … It is not a stretch to say that Roman Kachanov created his own school of movement in puppet animation,” Norstein admitted. “I think that without him I would hardly have become a director.” This is a revised reprint of an article we first ran behind the paywall on August 22, 2024. 2. Newsbits We lost Catherine O’Hara [ https://substack.com/redirect/f45366f3-6164-4e45-a9e4-54c90909859c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (71). Her voice appeared in many animated projects, including The Wild Robot. Claire Keane, a key concept artist for Tangled and Frozen, is now on Substack [ https://substack.com/redirect/a8dd48a8-a33a-4d15-bc2b-d0b80f3625d7?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. She’s based in France. Weilin Zhang is a young star in Japan’s anime industry. Last month, he wrote about his despair [ https://substack.com/redirect/7c09b77d-7dda-482e-9ecb-8ca7aac0ab7a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] with the current business and the value of what it produces. “I sincerely feel that the projects that I am a part of genuinely make the world a worse place,” he admitted. Readers with Japanese IP addresses can watch the restored films of Tadanari Okamoto, an indie legend, for free on YouTube [ https://substack.com/redirect/7124d8c4-68c6-4683-a252-750ce4f468ad?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. There’s interesting discourse about Russia’s faltering animation field [ https://substack.com/redirect/7ae0d9cf-c962-4c98-8458-93f04affe40b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Writer Dina Goder argued at length [ https://substack.com/redirect/35a19e1a-ca29-41c8-9bc4-61f2b4d7518a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] that things are grim: artists have left, quality is down, films are “outdated” and heavily censored. The scholar Pavel Shvedov agreed [ https://substack.com/redirect/e68d9b4c-8d6c-4f42-b1ee-7838fd8a4b5b?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] on many counts — but he still has hope, and he pleaded with the youth not to give up. In Japan, Sunao Katabuchi (In This Corner of the World) has a short film [ https://substack.com/redirect/a86589d4-ccb9-44ed-bdeb-c16f3a6a588e?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] on the way. It’s due online next month. In other Russian news, a startling proposal [ https://substack.com/redirect/b02ccca5-72fd-4be8-ab6d-18bb0b9c4ae7?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] would defund film festivals that lack an award category for films about the “SVO,” the euphemism for the war against Ukraine. (Also, director Alexander Sokurov and the influential Yuliana Slashcheva were removed [ https://substack.com/redirect/b2271334-d232-4ded-95e2-d55ed554dd76?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] from a major film council.) In Britain, Little Amélie, Zootopia 2 and Arco are among the animated nominees at the BAFTAs. See the full list [ https://substack.com/redirect/5d5af8c3-39e9-41cb-bb8b-bdb5c6080449?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. This coming week, the Animation First [ https://substack.com/redirect/f8985b94-f00f-4f87-9031-67fbcb47e5d3?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] festival opens in America. Its retrospective on the films of Raoul Servais is a highlight this time. A few years back, Anton Dyakov got an Oscar nomination for BoxBallet (2020). Now based in France, he’s working with a Norwegian studio to produce the film Black Box, revealed this week. See details here [ https://substack.com/redirect/251be85d-3062-415d-b8e0-5469de8779f0?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and the trailer here [ https://substack.com/redirect/d7f006b1-d22d-49ad-88d5-105650b81da8?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. On that note: we wrote about BoxBallet and Dyakov’s interrupted career [ https://substack.com/redirect/9bc8fc9c-efc7-41f0-8593-c3bcde2ac62d?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Until next time! Unsubscribe https://substack.com/redirect/2/eyJlIjoiaHR0cHM6Ly9hbmltYXRpb25vYnNlc3NpdmUuc3Vic3RhY2suY29tL2FjdGlvbi9kaXNhYmxlX2VtYWlsP3Rva2VuPWV5SjFjMlZ5WDJsa0lqbzBNalkxTVRVd05EQXNJbkJ2YzNSZmFXUWlPakU0TmpRM09URXlOQ3dpYVdGMElqb3hOemN3TURBM05EZzBMQ0psZUhBaU9qRTRNREUxTkRNME9EUXNJbWx6Y3lJNkluQjFZaTB5TnpRd05UVWlMQ0p6ZFdJaU9pSmthWE5oWW14bFgyVnRZV2xzSW4wLm1yQTI3T0Voc19jV1Nfdnc0TGF1OXVzZWJSQm9RU25MR21DM25rcHJ0T0kiLCJwIjoxODY0NzkxMjQsInMiOjI3NDA1NSwiZiI6dHJ1ZSwidSI6NDI2NTE1MDQwLCJpYXQiOjE3NzAwMDc0ODQsImV4cCI6MjA4NTU4MzQ4NCwiaXNzIjoicHViLTAiLCJzdWIiOiJsaW5rLXJlZGlyZWN0In0.zSpGvGlJbTxVIdcsTHfmBUZvm5hHfufKAIBA7vezRKU?

View this post on the web at https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/designing-the-powerpuff-girls-512 Welcome! Glad you could join us. This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s our slate: 1. The creation of Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup. 2. Animation newsbits. With that, let’s go! 1. Iconic Startling as it may be, the original Powerpuff Girls series is 27 years old. It predates the iPod and George Lucas’s three prequels. When it started in late 1998, who figured that it would still be as relevant as it is? Not Craig McCracken, creator of the thing. “I thought I would get a college hit where 20-year-olds would watch it in their dorms when they’re stoned,” he once said. “That was it.” Even after Powerpuff’s surprise success, McCracken felt it couldn’t last. “The fact that Powerpuff is hot right now means it’s going to be a joke someday. People will hate it because it was popular,” he told the magazine Bust in 2002. And yet here we are. The show might be more beloved than it ever was. The original Powerpuff owes its enduring fame to a lot of things. Take its scripts and stylish backgrounds — or its voice cast and inventive, memorable stories. That said, one specific thing brought the show into existence. And that thing gave Powerpuff the instant recognizability that let it soar: The iconic designs of Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup. Back in 1991, Craig McCracken was a promising student at CalArts. Like his school friends Genndy Tartakovsky [ https://substack.com/redirect/d25268fc-060f-4b8b-9ad2-2db98ffd5a74?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and Paul Rudish, he was in love with the flat, graphic cartoons of UPA [ https://substack.com/redirect/7a262bab-cc93-4b8c-9a00-87afbf722723?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. The new generation looked to the past to find the future. McCracken recalled: I always knew there was this graphic style that I liked — I had seen it somewhere. ... But growing up in Southern California, you know, there was no access to UPA cartoons... you might’ve seen it somewhere, in some ether world, and your subconscious remembers seeing it, but it wasn’t till I got to CalArts that I really found it and realized that’s the stuff — that fifties graphic style that I knew I always liked; I just didn’t have any reference to it. It was the start of the “UPA revival [ https://substack.com/redirect/93406ae0-318d-4255-9225-ed8d8b7ab4b6?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]” era. Young artists like McCracken combined UPA’s influence with the likes of Hanna-Barbera, Underdog, Jay Ward and anime — and created something new. In this context, the Powerpuff Girls were born. Their origin story is kind of famous. McCracken was working on his sophomore film — something about a superhero, drawn in his mid-century modern style. But he needed a lead character. “And it was around June [1991] and my mom said, ‘Hey, your brother’s birthday’s coming up. Why don’t you do a card for him?’ ” McCracken remembered. “So, I just started doodling these little things.” As he sketched ideas for the card, he made a drawing of three girls holding hands. They had giant eyes, inspired by the paintings of Margaret Keane. “There wasn’t any conscious thing, I was just, ‘Oh, those Keane paintings are funny,’ and I was just sitting around just drawing girls with big eyes,” he said in 1995. For the look of each girl, his main focus was contrast. They were drawn “as a unit” — so, giving them blond, red and black hair separated them out. He based Buttercup’s haircut on one used by Jennifer Fried, a CalArts friend. In terms of style, McCracken was heavily influenced by Paul Rudish at the time. “He always had this ability to draw really cute things without them being too sappy. So I went through this phase where I was trying to emulate what he did,” McCracken told Bust. The girls didn’t look like Rudish’s art — but McCracken was “really thinking of him” as he drew. Add in a dash of Hello Kitty influence, and something clicked. “I just liked them as a design. I liked how simple they were; I liked how graphic they were,” McCracken said. And it occurred to him that they could be the leads in his superhero film for CalArts. Such cute designs acting tough was an immediate hook. Which was the beginning of the Whoopass Girls. That initial sketch was remarkably close to the final designs in the Powerpuff Girls series. Still, between those two iterations was a slow process of refinement — starting with McCracken’s student film about the Whoopass Girls (their original name, before the complaints). There were false starts along the way. One of the earliest was McCracken’s attempt to give them fingers. As the book Makin’ Toons recounts: The girls first sprang to life as a small thumbnail drawing — so small that McCracken couldn’t give them too many distinctly articulated features — and when he tried to enlarge the image to refine it, he realized that some things shouldn’t be tampered with. “That’s why they don’t have fingers or anything,” he explains. “Because I drew them so tiny... and when I tried to add fingers, I was like, okay, I’m not gonna screw with it. I stumbled accidentally onto something that works; I’m just gonna leave it.” The versions of Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup he used in his second-year film, Whoopass Stew – A Sticky Situation [ https://substack.com/redirect/2290e582-9cfc-44ba-ab27-398f1ca6e5e9?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], got closer to the ones we recognize — from the colors to the eye shapes. But there’s something awkward about them. In certain key ways, they almost drifted from the charm and balance of that first rough sketch. Compared to the Powerpuffs, McCracken later called the Whoopass Girls “a little more freakish and stretched out and not as cute.” It was something he ironed out as he became a better artist. “I did fine then,” he said, “but when I look back at them, they look sickly to me.” McCracken told us [ https://substack.com/redirect/58319a89-3bf6-4a81-b555-c944e5d8678a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] that getting the girls right, over all that time, partly came down to drawing them a lot. It was an organic thing. “What naturally starts to happen is, you eliminate what’s unnecessary,” he noted. “Or things like proportions naturally start evolving and changing, the way it’s comfortable for your hand.” By the time of the 1995 pilot [ https://substack.com/redirect/b82c756e-04c9-4c8a-960e-eecec2a21f1c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for The Powerpuff Girls, McCracken had smoothed out the girls’ designs significantly. They’re still elongated, but they’re more like themselves. The problem was that this pilot (on which Rudish and Tartakovsky also worked) tested poorly among kids. “They literally said this is the worst cartoon ever made and whoever made it should be fired,” McCracken recalled a few years ago. “Craig panicked that afternoon and he came back that evening... redesigned the whole show in a night,” Rudish said. McCracken threw out the girls’ designs entirely — he even added fingers. Thankfully, it went nowhere. Cartoon Network decided to give his original vision for the series another shot. From there, things progressed, little by little. There was a second pilot. McCracken spent years on Tartakovsky’s series Dexter’s Laboratory, polishing his skills. “And then [executives] Mike Lazzo and Linda Simensky came to me and said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna pick up Powerpuff Girls,’ ” McCracken explained. “ ‘We want to greenlight the show. We love this Dexter’s crew; we want to keep this unit together … and we want to put you in the driver’s seat.’ ” That led to McCracken’s all-time favorite iteration of the girls — the “1998 designs.” As the new Powerpuff Girls series went into the works, the girls reached their ultimate form. McCracken partnered with designer Craig Kellman on the model sheets for the primary cast, but recalled handling the designs of the Powerpuffs himself. The sheer amount of thought in the 1998 models and style guides is breathtaking. We learn that a Powerpuff Girl’s hand is curved and pointed “like a butterknife.” That her head isn’t a ball or an egg or a pill, but another shape — the shape “my hand was naturally drawing,” McCracken told us. He worked backward to describe it to his team. (Its exact name, he learned later, is a “55-degree ellipse.”) Also broken down on these pages is that odd mix of flatness and volume that characterizes the Powerpuffs. McCracken again: … even though they look flat, they actually have volume. You see on those model sheets where their head is this sort of “not an egg, not a ball,” the facial features wrap around that volume. When they’re looking up, the angle of the hairline or the angle to the eyes might shrink, depending on what the perspective on that drawing might be. Or the way you angle the line of the belt around the body to define their waist. Or the angle of, like, their shoes. Everything good about the original sketch is here, only better, clearer and more fleshed out. McCracken had spent years fleshing it out, through that process of drawing and redrawing. The girls had evolved gradually — just as Dexter had evolved across his series. It came down to the “natural shorthand,” McCracken said. He equated “the essence of the design” with “what [his] hand want[ed] to do.” This effort made for really tight and eye-catching design work. In those final sheets for the team, each aspect of the Powerpuffs was weighed and measured. It adds up to characters that feel solid and present — almost like they’re real. And yet there’s nothing realistic about them. It’s a mystery. The beginning was “just the essence of a character,” according to McCracken. He said that he “tried to define all the characters as iconic images.” Across years, he honed that accidental sketch of Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup down into an unforgettable achievement in design. If there’s one word that fully describes it all, it’s the one he used. This stuff is iconic. This is a revised and expanded reprint of an article that first ran in our newsletter on July 24, 2022. 2. Newsbits If you missed it, artist James Baxter recorded a 44-minute masterclass on animated walks and uploaded it to YouTube [ https://substack.com/redirect/5d4f8645-fc94-4672-a205-794d440c2508?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. In Malaysia, a homegrown project called Papa Zola: The Movie has become [ https://substack.com/redirect/7d547a70-fec5-4aa3-810a-713da315eefb?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] the country’s top-earning animated feature, foreign or domestic. Its first 10 minutes are free on YouTube [ https://substack.com/redirect/eb22c4b1-e304-4b6e-9ec3-486d591974ce?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. The Oscar nominees were announced in America — including Arco, Little Amelie and (among shorts) Retirement Plan. A cool surprise is Konstantin Bronzit’s Three Sisters, a strong underdog film, and his third nomination. See the full list [ https://substack.com/redirect/a8b43fa6-ee2e-409b-b776-ca4ad40d4af4?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. The Glassworker, from Pakistan, hit Blu-ray [ https://substack.com/redirect/2208f428-5b05-4bf5-b0ad-f0594e0ef444?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] earlier this month. In France, the latest installment of Cartoon Movie is nearing. Animated film projects go there to find partners, money and more. As a note, the intriguing Kigali Night and Saima are up for the event’s Eurimages funding award [ https://substack.com/redirect/1602a150-cc63-4f24-96e2-fad8144db256?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] this year. For one week, Le Cinéma Club is streaming the American classic Abel’s Island (1988) on its website [ https://substack.com/redirect/c84d9192-7d1c-4c7c-8f8e-b529bd5c9e5a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. It’s available internationally. Arco, from France, took the prize [ https://substack.com/redirect/7a6f83e0-597f-44c3-b621-c161a85f7fd0?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for animated features at the European Film Awards — a big deal. Raking in 4.409 billion yuan [ https://substack.com/redirect/4c0bbde2-53ef-44fa-bc5b-1f46475c9bef?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], Zootopia 2 just became the biggest foreign film ever released in China (above the last Avengers). Its success in the country makes it Hollywood’s top-earning animated movie [ https://substack.com/redirect/a359196c-03fc-404b-84bc-6a4dffcfe70a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] to date. An obscure Hungarian feature, Song of the Miraculous Hind (2002), is coming stateside [ https://substack.com/redirect/b289be92-119c-438d-b38e-ed293a900363?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] via Deaf Crocodile. It was directed by the legendary Marcell Jankovics, behind Son of the White Mare. Catch the trailer on YouTube [ https://substack.com/redirect/7a983e0e-1c89-484b-a0fe-ca4353196eda?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Russia’s government passed a new bill [ https://substack.com/redirect/0db8f251-9de6-4a64-8ac4-869be8b32100?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] that allows animation to be fully funded by the state. The scholar Pavel Shvedov wrote about the proceedings in a series of revealing and often brutally funny posts, here [ https://substack.com/redirect/437911fd-62cc-4387-8d9f-00c6a1fbfc40?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], here [ https://substack.com/redirect/032519db-2a27-4fcf-8960-083a9ffe8856?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and here [ https://substack.com/redirect/a8b04bea-f118-43ed-9ca2-b54bb7c9deed?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Last of all: we looked at two approaches to music in animation [ https://substack.com/redirect/7f96634d-9a20-4129-929e-e27251af7be6?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], ranging from early Disney to the mid-century avant-garde. Until next time! Unsubscribe https://substack.com/redirect/2/eyJlIjoiaHR0cHM6Ly9hbmltYXRpb25vYnNlc3NpdmUuc3Vic3RhY2suY29tL2FjdGlvbi9kaXNhYmxlX2VtYWlsP3Rva2VuPWV5SjFjMlZ5WDJsa0lqbzBNalkxTVRVd05EQXNJbkJ2YzNSZmFXUWlPakU0TlRjek5EZzBOQ3dpYVdGMElqb3hOelk1TkRBeU1EZzRMQ0psZUhBaU9qRTRNREE1TXpnd09EZ3NJbWx6Y3lJNkluQjFZaTB5TnpRd05UVWlMQ0p6ZFdJaU9pSmthWE5oWW14bFgyVnRZV2xzSW4wLkJWQmZpdGR4OHB4UDlNTkpNSUVaRVdmdWZsOG5PbDRRb1RuWkJrM3hUVFUiLCJwIjoxODU3MzQ4NDQsInMiOjI3NDA1NSwiZiI6dHJ1ZSwidSI6NDI2NTE1MDQwLCJpYXQiOjE3Njk0MDIwODgsImV4cCI6MjA4NDk3ODA4OCwiaXNzIjoicHViLTAiLCJzdWIiOiJsaW5rLXJlZGlyZWN0In0.GZZpsIqK4Ixbk9D4LzcUJKTK8hi798WsjV8CsbLMG4E?

View this post on the web at https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/designing-one-hundred-and-one-dalmatians Welcome! Glad you could join us. We’re here with another issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is our plan: 1. On the visual design of Disney’s Dalmatians. 2. Animation newsbits. With that, let’s go! 1. Modernizing Disney At the time, it felt unique. There wasn’t another Disney film that looked like it. And, really, that uniqueness survives today: Disney hasn’t quite copied it since. One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) was a huge deal. Reportedly, it was “the first animated feature to earn more than $10 million on its initial release.” Which was exciting, because the project was an experiment. For one, the story was set in the mid-century when the mid-century was new. And there’s that design. Everyone knows the Dalmatians style. This is a world of angular shapes, color blotches and scraggly, spidery lines. It’s a world of drawings — the team made no effort to hide them. That was unusual in Disney features. The thing was, Walt Disney wasn’t crazy about drawings. As early as 1930, he’d chided his animators for bringing characters to complete stops. “[H]e said that is the worst thing about the kind of animation you guys are doing,” recalled one artist. “Your character goes dead and it looks like a drawing.” At Disney’s studio, hard pauses were replaced with constant motion. The illusion of life, in which viewers forget that they’re watching artwork, was the key. His team minimized black outlines for the same reason. “Every line was a soft line and [Walt] was doing his level best to make it like live action,” said artist Ken Anderson, one of the studio’s major people. As Anderson explained: [Walt] hated to see a drawing on a screen. He wanted to see them disguised ... he was the one who really pushed us into cel-paint ink lines, where the ink line is the same color as the area it is encompassing. By the mid-century, though, Disney’s visual ideas were old-fashioned. Graphic artists like the UPA [ https://substack.com/redirect/3b4acf49-56de-4f5c-b5a3-1598d8bd7500?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] crew updated animation in the ‘40s and ‘50s. The new wave “embraced the fact that cartoons were, in fact, a visual composition of lines and shapes drawn upon and seen in two dimensions,” according to the book Cartoon Modern [ https://substack.com/redirect/1c0dc900-84ec-42f1-a335-9ea41e17fba0?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Fresh approaches to color, shape and line filled UPA gems like Rooty Toot Toot [ https://substack.com/redirect/557d14e1-898b-4f84-b215-05643e0c992c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (1951). A few Disney artists tried to modernize, too, as far as they could. And Ken Anderson was one of them. His art direction for One Hundred and One Dalmatians was his biggest coup — achieved, kind of, under his boss’s nose. The basis of Dalmatians was a children’s novel from the ‘50s, popular in its day. Disney’s studio bought the rights in 1957 — he liked the book. Its author, Dodie Smith, was thrilled. “To be quite honest, I always hoped you might [make a film of my book],” she wrote to Disney after the deal was signed. Walt Disney had some involvement in the adaptation. But he was “preoccupied with live-action projects, television programs and theme parks,” wrote historian John Canemaker. That was true during much of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Ward Kimball of the Nine Old Men got away with mid-century films like Mars and Beyond [ https://substack.com/redirect/960c1410-5552-4ab3-ad19-88f04994c110?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for this reason. (“After [Walt] saw them … he sat there with his mouth open,” Kimball noted.) So it was with Dalmatians. By mid-1958, Ken Anderson was testing all kinds of new stylistic ideas for the project. He was a Snow White veteran, but he wasn’t stuck in a ‘30s sensibility. When he pitched his early plans to Disney, the replies were often vague approval, with a few vague concerns. “Ah, yeah, yeah, you can fool around all you want to,” Anderson recalled hearing at one point. At the core of Anderson’s vision was a film “all [in] one style.” Here, unlike in Cinderella and other Disney features, the characters and the backgrounds would visibly belong together — both of them using lines and color. And the style chosen by the team was a modern one. Anderson admitted to “very definitely” borrowing from the work of Ronald Searle, a major cartoonist of the mid-century, known for his scratchy lines and graphic shapes (Searle even offered him advice). The influence of modern painting, including abstract expressionism, touched the work as well. Underpinning the creative changes was a technical one: Anderson wanted to use Xerox on Dalmatians. In Disney classics like Pinocchio, the audience doesn’t tend to see the animators’ drawings. The studio’s inkers first traced the animation onto transparent plastic cels, which were then photographed. They were masters at this job. “[A]n animator wouldn’t even need to clean up his drawings, because the good inker knew what lines to pick up,” said Disney artist Phyllis Craig. Xerox was a cost-saving measure that, on Dalmatians, doubled as an artistic tool. It automated the inking process: the rough, unpolished lines of the animators were converted straight to cel. That was a complex job back then. Craig, an early member of the Xerox department, noted that you “really had to know what you were doing in order to blow the images up and down and get them in the right position.” (Plus, toxic chemicals were involved.) Although Dalmatians wasn’t the studio’s first use of Xerox, no Disney feature had taken it this far. As Anderson said: There was no attempt to disguise the lines; I knew they were going to be a half foot across on a big screen, but they were good-looking lines, and [because] they were the animators’ lines, they always had more life than tracings. The animators were high on it; everybody was high on the thing. It changed the Disney system. Fewer hands touched the animators’ art before it reached the screen, so they “had to draw really clean,” said Craig. It demanded a lot from people like Iwao Takamoto [ https://substack.com/redirect/c2adbb4c-7223-45be-abe7-cf162bf435c5?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], a top quality-control artist, who noted that some of Disney’s animators were great at movement but not “nearly as strong in the area of drawing.” All of the pencil animation had to be standardized. Meanwhile, Xerox had a second use: the backgrounds. Each came in two layers. First was a simple painting. Laid over it was a line-drawn layout, copied to cel via Xerox. Using lines in backgrounds was daring, and Walt Disney didn’t like the initial tests. His team went ahead anyway. Dalmatians ended up with backgrounds somewhere between realism and the abstraction of UPA. According to layout artist Ray Aragon: It was demanding. We had to be very realistic and we … had to use one- and two-point perspective. And really make it so perfect with a ruler, with a long straightedge: a t-square or whatever. ... Once we did that and the thing was scientifically perfect, it was too perfect. We had to put a clean sheet of paper over that and do the whole thing over by hand without the use of triangles and rulers. We had to now draw over the rulers and make a finished drawing by hand as carefully as we could, to make it not so perfect. That is where you got the charm of the drawings of One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Anderson had a large role in the look of Dalmatians — one crewmember noted that his concept art “set the pace” and “gave flavor to all the picture.” But he didn’t define everything. The film was really “a graphic collaboration between numerous artists,” to quote Cartoon Modern. Another main contributor was Walt Peregoy, picked by Anderson to handle the background colors. He was possibly the most avant-garde painter at Disney in that era, influenced by modern art and UPA. “[T]he reason I was chosen by Ken Anderson,” Peregoy said, “is that if he put me as color stylist, he knew I’d do it, I’d create something, not just another Disney background.” It was Peregoy who finalized the backgrounds’ style. Early tests of lines overlaid on paint “looked like a cheap comic book,” according to Ray Aragon. Nothing seemed to work. “Then finally,” Aragon said, “Walt Peregoy took the painting style of Raoul Dufy ... where you ... just ignore the lines and paint over and beyond. It looks like nothing. But when you put the line on the thing, there it is.” Loose color shapes became pillows, trees, banisters and buildings once the lines were added. And, because the two layers don’t fit together seamlessly, there’s an exciting tension: color and line say slightly different things. To populate this graphic world, several other artists developed the graphic cast. The most important character designer was probably Bill Peet, who wrote and storyboarded Dalmatians. His sketches provided the general outlines for Cruella, and Pongo, and more. Peet, a notorious firebrand, griped later that the animators took “credit for my Cruella de Vil and all of the personalities.” Like many comments by the original Disney veterans, Peet’s words were partly true and partly bitterness. He was essential, but other artists mattered, too — and plenty acknowledged his role in the film. Also valuable to the character designs was Tom Oreb (Sleeping Beauty), alongside Milt Kahl and Marc Davis of the Nine. Final say didn’t simply fall to one person. While Kahl’s role was often to polish up Peet’s basic designs, the two of them fought on Dalmatians, specifically over the lead dogs. Peet ultimately won that battle, as animator Andreas Deja has pointed out [ https://substack.com/redirect/cf3567dc-37f2-4100-b4c1-6fb974443e45?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. As Dalmatians went through its years of production, Walt Disney grew a little more aware of what his team was making. His feedback on the style often wasn’t good. Until it was too late, Ken Anderson didn’t understand just how vague Disney’s initial approvals had been. “I realized what a terrific hole I had dug for myself but there was no turning back,” he said. In the end, Dalmatians looked fantastic to everyone but Disney himself. As Anderson’s put it, this film ended up being: ... the antithesis of what Walt wanted. He wanted people to believe that these things were not drawings, that these things were actual people. His whole drive had been in that direction. … He didn’t like it at all and he made several remarks that hurt me, because I thought he liked it. For the success of Dalmatians, Anderson was rewarded with a year-long silent treatment from Disney, and several demotions. “We’re never gonna do another one of those goddamned things like Ken did,” he said at one meeting, with Anderson in attendance. Only toward the end of Disney’s life did they really reconcile over it. The era had changed, but Disney’s taste hadn’t. Modernist animation was never a great love of his, even when it netted his studio Oscars and millions. Sometimes, he seemed to tolerate it. Then there were incidents like Dalmatians. Design-wise, decades passed before the studio made another feature comparable to the level of this one. The conservative swing on The Sword in the Stone (1963) affected even Walt Peregoy’s artwork, which had pushed so many boundaries before. Until Disney’s experiments of the ‘90s, Dalmatians looked a bit like a one-off. Still, even if they weren’t allowed to try again, the artists had pulled it off this time. Dalmatians was “the culmination of the Disney studio’s drive toward modernism,” argued Cartoon Modern, and was “one of the most brazen shifts in aesthetic sensibility during the studio’s history.” It’s up there with stuff like Sleeping Beauty — among the team’s richest-looking films. 2. Newsbits We lost Roger Allers [ https://substack.com/redirect/64199b0c-7990-405a-b3e6-91606019c051?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (76), a Disney legend best known for co-directing The Lion King. In Germany, animator Sasha Svirsky is bringing out [ https://substack.com/redirect/6bbabde9-f83d-4f4d-84b6-3b922ff0ccdc?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] a new film called Unidentified Nonflying Objects. (Longtime readers may know our piece [ https://substack.com/redirect/c58a4e50-1d3b-4392-a7b5-535d98c695ac?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] about his one-of-a-kind work.) Artists Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani won an Oscar last year for In the Shadow of the Cypress. Now, they’re speaking out [ https://substack.com/redirect/6da5ca3a-23b3-41ad-9ada-1f2834437b4a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] against the horrors in their home country of Iran. In America, the documentary Animation Mavericks [ https://substack.com/redirect/6a889694-18de-420a-badc-88fa61decbbe?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] will tell the tale of UPA, which feels increasingly relevant in 2026. More and more old episodes of an American classic, Sesame Street, are turning up officially on YouTube [ https://substack.com/redirect/fe67f2f7-e77c-4266-a08f-3a0373c75d20?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. (Thanks to the [ https://substack.com/redirect/9e3eeb8c-8365-492b-b74c-4e3d79cdb33f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]re:frame [ https://substack.com/redirect/9e3eeb8c-8365-492b-b74c-4e3d79cdb33f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]guys [ https://substack.com/redirect/9e3eeb8c-8365-492b-b74c-4e3d79cdb33f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for pointing this out.) Studio Heartbreak, an indie team co-founded by folks in America and Canada, had a hit Kickstarter with The Lovers [ https://substack.com/redirect/e6fa0824-a52b-4c25-a369-d912481f5307?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] a few years back. That film is now reportedly complete and set for release [ https://substack.com/redirect/917e2f09-8377-4dd5-bd23-504c734a4e60?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] on YouTube this summer. In America, Jorge Gutierrez (Maya and the Three) is directing a Speedy Gonzales movie [ https://substack.com/redirect/bcacdb53-2259-4d79-8d34-0d9b14b58553?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for Warner. Japan’s government continues to investigate the anime industry. A new report finds [ https://substack.com/redirect/88b3ae9b-08b9-46ef-9042-6409cda1a569?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] that an “overwhelming 89.4% of film directors and staff, along with 52.1% of animators, said they were not satisfied with their current pay.” It sounds like new rules may be coming. Cartoon Movie, a central event in Europe’s co-production ecosystem each year, has expanded [ https://substack.com/redirect/943dd134-6335-4926-9642-12d3e28c3b57?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] to include Canadian projects in 2026. Last of all: we looked into the art of animating the world around you [ https://substack.com/redirect/8f3df47c-4f44-4c53-bb05-67cb5a4455c3?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Until next time! Unsubscribe https://substack.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.50ba6nbC5KDteU-LGZQIARQM0GM6VJwvzJZrbEaO3a8?

View this post on the web at https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/miyazakis-sherlock We’re back! Thanks for checking in. This is the first 2026 edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — we’re fresh off our break, and ready to explore more stories from across the globe. Here’s the plan for today: 1. How Sherlock Hound (1984–1985) came to be. 2. Animation newsbits. Now, as always, let’s go! 1. Scrambling At one point in his animation career, Hayao Miyazaki was looking for work. Ghibli wasn’t there. He took jobs as they turned up. Directing wasn’t his dream, initially. “Even today I don’t like being pegged just as a ‘director,’ ” he said in the late ‘70s. By then, though, he’d already accepted and overseen Future Boy Conan, his first time in the spotlight. He followed it with The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), his debut feature, despite his reservations about that project. To Miyazaki, The Castle of Cagliostro was a rehash — leftovers of the old Lupin the 3rd [ https://substack.com/redirect/652feef2-275a-4cd7-8410-c33ce36f40aa?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] era. He and his team threw the film together in under five months, and it bombed in theaters. “You can’t use a sullied middle-aged guy to create fresh work that will wow viewers. I realized I should never do this again,” he said. Yet Miyazaki kept taking the work in front of him. Soon, he accepted two more [ https://substack.com/redirect/0612cf51-4f15-474b-a5e8-4410bb8a0b98?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]Lupin [ https://substack.com/redirect/0612cf51-4f15-474b-a5e8-4410bb8a0b98?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] projects [ https://substack.com/redirect/0612cf51-4f15-474b-a5e8-4410bb8a0b98?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] — suffering as he went. He viewed himself as a bit washed up by 1980, more than 15 years after the start of his career. His “year of being mired in gloom,” he called it. Miyazaki was pushing 40 and having a mid-life crisis. “With every piece I made,” he said, “it was obvious that I was just trotting out everything I had done before.” But the world saw things differently. Future Boy Conan and especially Cagliostro began to bring him a name. In meetings abroad, Miyazaki’s work became a calling card for Tokyo’s Telecom, the studio behind Cagliostro. “You know, whenever I go to the US, I take The Castle of Cagliostro with me,” said company head Yutaka Fujioka in the early ‘80s. “Recently I invited 200 Disney staffers to see it — and, wow, there was applause, great applause.” Although he doubted his creations, Miyazaki put in a supreme amount of effort and care, always. It showed, and word of his ability spread. The Cagliostro screenings seem to have caught the attention of producers even in Italy. That was when the Sherlock Hound series came into Telecom, and into Miyazaki’s hands. As it happened, Japanese animation was already big business in Italy. During the ‘70s, shows like Grendizer took over the country’s airwaves. The Italian theme song [ https://substack.com/redirect/e53cc2e1-2b2d-403c-b8d1-e1fe738669c0?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] for Heidi: Girl of the Alps became a hit single. By 1980, animation from Japan was popular enough in Italy to be controversial — writers fretted about the effect of its allegedly “reactionary and very sinister” content on kids. Tied to this boom was an exec named Luciano Scaffa. And, when business grew, he thought to take it beyond licensing: he wanted to co-create shows with Japan. As early as 1980, Scaffa was developing a series planned by Marco Pagot and his sister Gi, two important people in Italian animation. In Marco’s words: … Rai 1 director Luciano Scaffa decided that, in order to bring new ideas into the Italian market, the only way was to make co-productions with the most powerful market of the period, the Japanese one. He chose a series of Italian projects and brought them into Japan. Among them is one of my projects, which generates a certain degree of interest: Il Fiuto di Sherlock Holmes. That title is a pun: fiuto refers to the sense of smell, but also to intuition. Basically, the Pagots imagined a cartoon-dog version of Sherlock Holmes, to be animated by Japanese talent. The idea wasn’t crazy. Europe was doing more and more co-productions with Japan back then — one, Dogtanian, had a similar angle. Yutaka Fujioka was involved in this co-production wave. In fact, he’d built Telecom to make animation with foreign studios. It was a training hub — and a site for Japan’s best animators to reach world-class quality. “[W]ith this ‘co-pro’ system, you can use more than twice as much money and time. There can be no greater advantage than this,” he argued. Extra resources, Fujioka believed, meant higher quality and higher profits. Telecom took the dog-Sherlock show, known today as Sherlock Hound, and put Miyazaki in charge. He began sketching ideas for it in April 1981. Right away, though, the outline worried him. Miyazaki approached art on a deep level — he thought about the worldview and meaning inside a story and its characters. “When the offer came, what struck me was the difficulty of the concept of a detective. These days, it’s hard for a knight in shining armor (seigi no mikata) to exist,” he argued. In the ‘80s, criminals and their messy motivations seemed to be more full of life than a good guy like Sherlock. And why, Miyazaki kept wondering, did he need to be a dog? Miyazaki had been an idea guy since the ‘60s. Concept sketches flowed out of him — wild contraptions, zany stories. But he didn’t come up with Sherlock Hound all alone. He left a good deal of the prep to his crew, seemingly in an effort to train the new generation. Doing concept art with him was Yoshifumi Kondo, who’d later direct Whisper of the Heart at Ghibli. Another was Kazuhide Tomonaga, animator of that iconic car chase [ https://substack.com/redirect/60a25355-a75e-42e9-8245-77a44730ad08?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] from Cagliostro. They adopted Miyazaki’s pencil-and-watercolor style to illustrate the world of Sherlock Hound. That world is a mashup of the late 19th century with 20th-century technology, Miyazaki said. Guided by research material from the British Council, the artists imagined the everyday lives of these dog-creatures. Still, they deviated. Miyazaki bent Sherlock Hound toward his own interests: flying machines, love, characters with complexes. He needed to be invested, even in a work-for-hire project. “Even if it’s a co-pro, we have no choice but to create what we find interesting,” he said. “As long as Japanese children are happy [with it], we believe that Italian children will be pleased, too.” In the process, the team scrapped the Italian plan for the look. Sherlock Hound was meant to be “flat” and “graphic” in the Pink Panther vein, Tomonaga said. Miyazaki wasn’t interested: “the other side was creating a two-dimensional world, but Miyazaki-san wanted to make a three-dimensional world.” Miyazaki’s goal was “space.” It had to feel like the characters were navigating real places of concrete sizes and shapes — every street, every room. In Tomonaga’s words: If the perception of space is realistic, then, even if the characters do cartoony and comical things, it doesn’t look like a lie, right? The characters definitely feel like they’re moving with their feet firmly grounded. It was an approach Miyazaki had picked up during his years as the right hand of Isao Takahata, on projects like Heidi [ https://substack.com/redirect/871e68e7-4a3e-4e4c-9d50-d7a32607b9ca?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Takahata saw film as “a continuity of time and space,” Miyazaki said. The theory was that, when animation has a sense of realistic continuity, viewers treat even the absurd as believable. After going solo, Miyazaki stayed indebted to Takahata’s style. “I wonder what Paku-san would do in a situation like this?” he said often during Sherlock Hound, using Takahata’s nickname. In the summer of ‘81, after a few months of prep, an Italian delegation arrived to review Sherlock Hound. With it were Luciano Scaffa and co-creator Marco Pagot, then in his early 20s. “I was introduced to Hayao Miyazaki, who for me was still an unknown character, because he wasn’t yet so well known outside Japan,” Pagot said. Disputes broke out. From the beginning, Miyazaki was reportedly suspicious of Pagot, this “typical rich kid.” And the Italians weren’t happy about the new visual style, among other things. Miyazaki had even cooked up a plan to turn Sherlock’s landlady, Mrs. Hudson, into a human. Sherlock had feelings for her but was ultimately “just a puppy,” watching from the sidelines. (Mrs. Hudson reverted to a dog-person in the final show, which Miyazaki came to agree with.) Still, after a few months, the two sides reached an understanding. Things like Sherlock’s drug addiction, shown in the concept art, were cut. But many of the team’s ideas, including that three-dimensional world, remained. And Miyazaki’s team got near-total control from there. Production started at the end of ‘81. It was feature-level animation: the first episode used almost 10,000 cels by itself. Telecom’s artists appreciated that. These were people trained to animate and animate — it was their love. Late nights were the norm there. But the workload was trouble for Miyazaki. Two of his deadlines ran into each other: as Sherlock Hound began, he was doing his new manga series Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Like he remembered: It was standard operating procedure at Telecom to work till after midnight, but I used to sneak out around 11 p.m., worried that people would notice me leaving early, and drive home, switching my brain over to Nausicaä. Then I would sit at my desk in the middle of the night, desperately drawing manga pages and cursing. Then in the morning I would put my brain back on Sherlock Hound as I drove to the studio. I did this every day. While I was working at the studio I behaved as if I’d never heard of Nausicaä. If I saw a copy of Animage [where the manga ran] lying around I would flee the room. But he had a strong team to rely on. Yoshifumi Kondo’s character designs were undeniable, and his corrections to the animators’ work were top-notch. Nizo Yamamoto [ https://substack.com/redirect/9c3190b7-215a-4ad9-83a7-6ccf20d441a2?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] supervised the backgrounds with amazing care, down to the unique colors of individual bricks in the walls. Animators like Atsuko Tanaka drew relentlessly, even adding details that weren’t in the storyboards. There was also a young student Miyazaki had brought in. His name was SunaoKatabuchi — and he had no screenplay experience until he pitched a script for Sherlock Hound. He submitted Blue Ruby (watch [ https://substack.com/redirect/413be49e-31e0-4ef2-bc27-e2a6f4d79bff?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]), which went into production. Then he did several more, and Miyazaki made him an assistant director. Sherlock Hound became a second school for Katabuchi, who learned everything from storyboarding to color design from the team. All of those people, and others on the Sherlock crew, later worked with Ghibli. Today, Katabuchi is one of Japan’s great directors, behind Princess Arete [ https://substack.com/redirect/543da400-367b-45ff-92c1-2e0be6c52cc3?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (2001) and In This Corner of the World (2016). Through this series, people got room to grow. On the third and fourth floors of the Telecom building, in Tokyo’s Koenji district, the team created the first two episodes — Blue Ruby and A Small Client (watch [ https://substack.com/redirect/f33d7822-c878-46e9-985f-2a964c3eb369?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]). They were pilots. Both were examples of that world-class animation Yutaka Fujioka wanted to produce. These were true follow-ups to Cagliostro. Miyazaki and the team weren’t working like most studios in Japan. He aimed to create old-fashioned slapstick adventures, and he used the dated term manga eiga [ https://substack.com/redirect/4fa8f66d-7921-479d-924c-f2a17d66c521?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] (“cartoon movies”) to describe them. That term was popular in his childhood, when stuff like the Fleischer cartoons came over. It’s optimistic, zany, funny, exciting entertainment that owes a lot to Chaplin films like City Lights and Modern Times. Katabuchi described the theory this way: Animated films for children aren’t all “cartoon movies.” It’s more like… if I were to give you one similar example, it would be playing tag on the jungle gym as a child. Field athletics might also be close. I think there’s a kind of “mechanical environment” involved. A maze full of contrivances? A childlike sense of excitement for such a place. … Ah, yes, it feels like a “secret base.” It feels like the thrill and excitement of “kick the can.” Moreover, no matter what happens, no one dies or gets hurt. Those first two Sherlock Hound episodes are among the ultimate versions of this style of animation. When the Italians showed up again to review progress on the series, they were met with TV masterpieces. But, again, there were concerns. Miyazaki’s series was becoming very, very expensive. And his auteurism didn’t mesh with the commercial approach planned for Sherlock Hound. The colors were too dark, the Italian side complained. And why was Smiley, Moriarty’s henchman, so weird-looking? And why was the series so wild? Miyazaki left one talk fuming. “They were doodling during the meeting, drawing things like a propeller on top of Holmes’ deerstalker cap,” he said, according to Katabuchi. “That kind of American TV cartoon nonsense was their intention all along.” Notes from Italy led to edits in later episodes. The team had to redo part of Treasure Under the Sea, and the colors got brighter in all but Blue Ruby and A Small Client. But the trouble soon came to an end. In May 1982, production was interrupted due to a delay of funds from the Italian side. A few months later, Sherlock Hound shut down, with four episodes produced, two animated but unfinished and at least one partly storyboarded. It was a frustrating period. After the failure of Cagliostro, Miyazaki had been burned again. He and the team took this project and over-delivered — without much to show for it. Despite all its hype in the press, Sherlock Hound went into storage. Animage called it a “phantom masterpiece” in 1983. But the few who’d seen it knew what’d been achieved. Blue Ruby had a special showing in late ‘82, with no soundtrack, as none had been recorded yet. People were stunned anyway. This was something “fantastic,” one viewer recalled. In time, Miyazaki got another big chance: investors wanted him to adapt the Nausicaä manga into a movie. When that project reached theaters in 1984, Sherlock Hound screened with it in Japan. Two episodes — Blue Ruby and Treasure Under the Sea — were cut into a mid-length film. Even in a theater setting, the team’s work was strong enough to impress. Isao Takahata, too, got surprised by Miyazaki’s ability. It happened during the dubbing for the Blue Ruby section. There’s a pause in the dialogue when Sherlock speaks to Polly, the child thief, as she’s about to fall asleep. You feel it; the scene deepens. Takahata assumed it was an error on the team’s part. “Miya-san wouldn’t use a pause like that,” he insisted. But he and Katabuchi tracked down the instruction in the original storyboard. Miyazaki, clearly, had grown. Miyazaki kept growing, and he left Sherlock Hound behind. When the series resumed, after Italy started sending money again, it did so without his involvement. Another team came together — including some from the original group — and got the series on the air by the end of 1984. They followed many of the ideas laid down at the beginning, and his episodes sat beside theirs. This whole Sherlock project shouldn’t have been as interesting as it became. Miyazaki was scrambling from job to job in those years, taking what seemed doable, even if it didn’t sound promising. But he and the team put in so much care and effort that these projects — however unrealistic their deadlines, or questionable their outlines — were forced to be worthwhile. It’s how a five-month movie like Cagliostro became a classic, and one of Disney’s and Pixar’s major influences. And it’s how people fell in love with a failed series like Sherlock Hound — whose charms still hit, more than four decades later. 2. Newsbits Tonight at the Golden Globes, the animated film category went [ https://substack.com/redirect/f06fef48-76ee-4b96-b56f-c572dd0a9bbc?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] to KPop Demon Hunters. In America, voting for the Oscar nominations in the animated short category starts on Monday. Two wonderful contenders are The Night Boots and Retirement Plan — on YouTube here [ https://substack.com/redirect/0716c704-8db4-45f0-bc60-46f4b6678a4c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and here [ https://substack.com/redirect/3ec44d8c-581d-4249-9ba6-c4aac6b6f125?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], respectively. Another from America: animator Coleen Baik released [ https://substack.com/redirect/58fe3dbf-498a-47ee-9440-7d4f409f78b9?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] her film 엄마 나라 | Mother Land (2023) for free. It’s a haunting, personal piece that we recommend. In Japan, while we were away, animator Tsuneo Goda spoke about [ https://substack.com/redirect/53d2475f-ac30-4dd0-a14d-1a02bed8361d?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] his work with the Domo-kun character (his creation). Empress Chung, a feature co-produced in South Korea and North Korea, disappeared after its theatrical run in 2005. That recently changed with its preservation [ https://substack.com/redirect/db8b9386-56da-409b-a374-83f334aeaa81?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] on YouTube. (Thanks to Bryn for the tip!) Next month in America, the Animation First festival will take place [ https://substack.com/redirect/553cb338-11ad-4640-8e99-b592f0a87db4?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in New York, featuring Death Does Not Exist, restored shorts by Raoul Servais and more. Also in America, and also in New York, Metrograph has been showing [ https://substack.com/redirect/c6d9c7ee-a311-4606-aa0f-a13f2d413a85?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] the films of Ugo Bienvenu (Arco) alongside the films that inspired him. Some of the screenings are over, but there’s still a chance to catch Princess Mononoke. In Spain, animator José Martínez created a two-minute film in a five-day rush that he streamed continuously on Twitch. It’s now online [ https://substack.com/redirect/9004a346-0937-4d3a-8ef8-258c8536c346?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], alongside its complete stream archive. One last New York story from America: an animator, Rama Duwaji, is now the city’s first lady. See her work via her website [ https://substack.com/redirect/84f5542d-0084-46c6-90c1-7704b16791c8?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. Until next time! Unsubscribe https://substack.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.znIs0r3Nu6-QclV8Of5V59n9MZQlhGj_iBN-TSq2f10?

View this post on the web at https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/closing-out-2025 Hello! Hope you’re doing well. The Animation Obsessive newsletter is back with another issue — a recap. This publication’s existed for almost five years. We started it back in February 2021, a moment when the ground in our country seemed to be steadying again under us. Since that time, you’ve only heard a little from us (Jules and John, co-runners) in a personal capacity. We focus on other people’s stories here. It’s what we enjoy. As we look over the events of 2025, though, writing a bit about the thought behind this newsletter feels appropriate. That word, appropriate, is one we’ve used a lot since January, behind the scenes. It’s a question we’ve revisited week by week. What’s appropriate to publish right now? What do you say when Disney embraces GenAI [ https://substack.com/redirect/b0e048d4-2509-416f-9c71-f53ea95b9267?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], even as the technology spreads slop, the word of the year [ https://substack.com/redirect/9fe5f808-18b6-4211-ae66-5df1ef20cd73?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]? How do you address the (many) artists out of work? When countries edge toward war, and people get disappeared by government actors, what’s there to say about animation? A newsletter like ours occupies a very small corner. It can’t solve these big problems — GenAI plagiarism, or Poland’s flashbacks [ https://substack.com/redirect/bc1a129d-cf89-4b01-9dab-2e370767de83?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] to the Second World War this summer. Something as mundane as the end of the de minimis exemption for imports to the States, which has made our research harder lately, is beyond our power to fix. Even if an animation newsletter can’t change the world, though, it can shine a small light on valuable, human art. And it can cover stories that suggest answers, or at least alternatives. In place of slop, craft. In place of cruelty and cynicism, hope and meaning. This year, we focused on the animators who’ve worked in oil paint [ https://substack.com/redirect/c0c1cf55-5637-4520-be65-2429ea04b6be?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], or sand [ https://substack.com/redirect/a732928b-a504-460b-9a4f-1609f1d997e0?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], or paper [ https://substack.com/redirect/38b63e34-3466-4d55-897f-83a7f0d78284?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], or wool [ https://substack.com/redirect/127d6212-a103-4a09-846c-2294d61e5e05?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], or 500,000 metal pins [ https://substack.com/redirect/2353b009-6eab-4b9f-ba13-610ec688171f?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. As cliches grew more entrenched with the help of GenAI, we studied the unique thinking of directors like Kihachiro Kawamoto [ https://substack.com/redirect/324301a4-8a7d-4e5d-9038-26f3ba0e2afe?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and Mamoru Oshii [ https://substack.com/redirect/601d845c-8678-4a64-a3a7-c6da6446f558?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. As support systems for artists failed, we looked at projects like Sesame Street [ https://substack.com/redirect/cba2561c-ce3c-45f7-8379-b908e3cc4433?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ], and how they once allowed creativity to thrive. We focused, too, on artists who’ve struggled through in the past. Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki, and their time in a hostile industry [ https://substack.com/redirect/a42216ad-2bbe-4267-9f30-af76b7ff7d18?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. The UPA people who faced [ https://substack.com/redirect/0a79080d-554d-40a7-9d2b-2074b1398e73?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and resisted [ https://substack.com/redirect/56cef43e-cf74-4c53-b3da-c51e963e9b45?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] persecution during the Red Scare. Animators who rebuilt [ https://substack.com/redirect/b835daa7-a3bf-4e27-950c-778ad7dd8220?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in Poland after the ‘30s and ‘40s. And the director who, in reaction to the Nazi occupation of his country, used a Christmas film [ https://substack.com/redirect/50f311c8-abeb-4c38-a093-f41d2733b857?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] to reaffirm the warmth and love he recalled from the holidays of his childhood. How these stories relate to the present is sometimes obvious and sometimes not — but we took lessons from all of them. Getting to dwell in this art, and the ideas of these artists, was often a balm and motivation for us in 2025. We hope it was helpful to you as well. In a year of bad news, the wins have stood out to us. It was thrilling to see Jonni Peppers [ https://substack.com/redirect/a960d9fd-f2a7-438f-9dfb-e7885cade1a5?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and Victoria Vincent [ https://substack.com/redirect/c8c029d0-5638-4469-98f1-f62ff5453d9a?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] push animation into new places, and to see Crocodile Dance get funded, having featured [ https://substack.com/redirect/cd1e1016-4345-49cf-ada4-6dc8936b955c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] the film before. The same goes for I Am Frankelda [ https://substack.com/redirect/437bf3ef-240d-46cf-b66f-53fe92afcb17?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]’s box-office success in Mexico — and, this week, the inclusion of the wonderful Retirement Plan [ https://substack.com/redirect/53c79f2c-5d33-47bb-8d94-d68747be3689?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] and Night Boots [ https://substack.com/redirect/20d7dbc6-2a5a-4cdb-a380-bf2d54db28e6?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] on the Oscar shortlist. We’ve been fortunate ourselves. It was Animation Obsessive’s toughest year, but its largest. Passing 60,000 subscribers was surreal. Watching one of our articles [ https://substack.com/redirect/19fb6be0-c959-4137-85f7-7b2aadc37ade?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] hit 100,000 views was an honor. When the legendary Helen McCarthy recommended us [ https://substack.com/redirect/477a7e4e-1b58-4b2d-82ce-52aff0a26b29?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ] in her gift guide last month, it meant everything (thank you, Helen!). The positivity reminds us that this is worth doing. There’s some kind of meaning in sharing the art we share here. We intend to continue in 2026. For now, though, we’re wrapping up 2025 with our usual holiday break. It’s a chance to refocus, relax and study without a deadline. We’ll be back on January 11 with another issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. In the meantime, the articles linked in today’s issue (in bold), including the paywalled ones, are free to read over the holidays. Times are hard, and we understand that many can’t justify a paid subscription right now. If you haven’t read these pieces before, we hope you’ll find them interesting. Additionally, for anyone with eight minutes to spare during the next few weeks, we want to shout out the underrated film Pink Mountain [ https://substack.com/redirect/0e8fd907-a52b-4d9f-b839-c6ae0bcf1a5c?j=eyJ1IjoiNzF4cDQwIn0.VLQsNiiAawz-DS2VtWTrcrG2IFeLIxnWNFcK9akSjpY ]. We loved it at a Greek festival three years ago, and its recent launch on YouTube is fighting to reach 1,000 views. It’s definitely worth a look. We’ll end it there. To everyone who’s stuck with us in 2025: thank you. Getting to explore art as a full-time job is a privilege we don’t take for granted. In early 2026, this newsletter will return with a new batch of ideas — including, with luck, some of our most ambitious yet. Thank you so much for reading. Merry Christmas & Happy New Year! Unsubscribe https://substack.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.IpRlSprMfUtS-H8M6woK7c-6ynCFHQfTM669fZ2s31M?

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We’re happy to have you aboard. Our newsletter goes out twice a week — Sundays and Thursdays. Now that you’re on our free list, you’ll start receiving Sunday issues right here in your inbox. Want to see everything the world of animation has to offer? Paying subscribers (members) get access to a whole lot more. Becoming a member nets you the full version of each Sunday and Thursday issue we publish, plus our entire archive. Every single member is key to keeping this newsletter running. In return, they receive exclusive access to some of our best and most exciting work. 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