Welcome! This is another Thursday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, all about a Soviet cartoon.

It was one of the biggest ever released in the USSR. The film went way past its team’s expectations. There was a torrent of fan mail, and even the songs from its soundtrack “quickly became hits,” selling in massive quantities.1

The Bremen Town Musicians (1969) is the piece in question. It’s an animated musical — reportedly the USSR’s first.2 The country’s other cartoons weren’t much like it back then. It put contemporary music and Western fashion and dances, and the hot-and-saturated psychedelic colors of the late ‘60s, all across Soviet screens.

Whether in theaters or on television, or on record, people couldn’t get enough. And the audience wasn’t limited to children. Soviet teenagers, who often outgrew animation, were “the majority of the viewers and fans of The Bremen Town Musicians,” explained the film’s director, Inessa Kovalevskaya. The Union’s more countercultural people were, likewise, unusually drawn to this thing.3

Still, there were detractors. Among them: many of Kovalevskaya’s own co-workers at Soyuzmultfilm in Moscow.

“After The Bremen Town Musicians, I was virtually kicked out of the studio,” she recalled. “And the management and my colleagues said that this was an awful film.”4

The controversy began pre-release. When the finished project went before Soyuzmultfilm’s Artistic Council for feedback and censorship, top directors like Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Fyodor Khitruk criticized it (the latter strongly opposed it). A member of the film’s team has claimed that one attendee, composer Rostislav Boyko, dismissed The Bremen Town Musicians as “marijuana for children.”5

Others on the council intervened to save the film, but Kovalevskaya’s problems weren’t over. Her piece tended to provoke strong reactions. In fact, it was designed to do so.

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Welcome! It’s another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the slate:

• 1. Helpful things for artists.

• 2. On Electro Andes from Argentina.

• 3. Animation newsbits.

• 4. The last word.

With that, let’s go!

1. Five more resources

We’ve said it before: quite a few artists read this newsletter. That includes animators, but also illustrators, comic-makers and many more. It’s always a joy when we hear from folks who’ve been creatively inspired by our stories here.

For that reason, every once in a while, we put together a collection of free resources for artists specifically. It’s stuff we come across while running the newsletter — guides, caches of rare artwork, behind-the-scenes footage — that seems particularly useful.

Today brings our sixth batch. We’d still recommend the materials in our past five volumes (see here), ranging from the Temple of the Seven Golden Camels to the Samurai Jack painting tutorials. But the ones this time are all new.

Below, you’ll find precious information on drawing, design, animating with sand and paper cutouts and beyond. There should be something for beginners, experienced artists and everyone in between. We hope you’ll enjoy!

1.1: Jazno Francoeur’s Disney archive

Not enough people know what’s happening on Jazno Francoeur’s LinkedIn account. He’s a former Disney artist from the ‘90s and ‘00s — and, for a while now, he’s shared rare art from the studio.

A lot of what he posts is the really good stuff. Detailed animation notes from James Baxter, Glen Keane, Don Graham, Alex Kupershmidt. Tips from Lilo & Stitch on effects, walk cycles and cleanup, and from Mulan on character construction, and from The Little Mermaid on drawing the protagonist. Francoeur’s uploaded a whole folder of style guides.

Those sit alongside the model sheets, the concept art and all the rest. Francoeur’s account hosts great things, and he’s doing us all a service by putting them online.

1.2: The Sabotage paper process

A few months ago, the animator Corduroy Frames posted his stop-motion, paper-cutout recreation of the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage video (watch). It’s a lot of fun, and it did the rounds online for good reason.

Less publicized is that Corduroy Frames documented the making of this video, step by step, in a 79-episode series on YouTube. As he explains in the first entry:

… I wanted to start doing stop motion, but I’d only done a few little things and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I figured by recreating something, that would teach me a lot about how things moved, how to have things interact, how to learn different effects. And so I decided to do Sabotage by Beastie Boys. Because A, Beastie Boys are my favorite band ever, and B, Sabotage is kind of like a cartoon anyway. So, I decided to start at shot 1 and go all the way through to shot 129. The goal is to see improvement of the stop motion from the first shot to the last shot.

You watch it happen. During shot 60, he talks about his realization that human hips sway while walking, which he began incorporating from there. For shot 76, he needed a character’s hand to disappear inside a jacket, and so he discovered a way to create that illusion by using “smaller and smaller pieces” of paper.

Corduroy Frames was learning during this process, but watching it play out is inspiring and educational in itself. Taking the project one step at a time, with a few mundane and often homebrew tools (like a plexiglass sheet placed atop Lego-brick columns for shot 17), he built something compelling. With his Sabotage remake and the 79 videos that preceded it, he showed what’s possible.

1.3: Caroline Leaf’s workshops

You might know the films of Caroline Leaf — and you’re definitely familiar with films she inspired. Most festival-circuit animation today owes techniques and tics to Leaf’s work from the late 20th century, done in sand and paint and more. (See her Kafka sand film, for example).

Over the years, Leaf has passed down her knowledge. And, back in the ‘90s, some of her workshops were captured in a documentary called Hand-Crafted Cinema (1998), which is freely available online.

Leaf always had a knack for sand, and that’s the first method demonstrated. We watch her shape sand on a light box and explain how, in this kind of animation, you “always redraw an image before you erase it.” Both her descriptions and her hand movements casually reveal things that took her years to learn.

Then she shifts to paint-on-glass animation, and cutouts, and the scratching of drawings onto blank film stock. These, too, she’d used in her films. In 35 minutes, Hand-Crafted Cinema offers a master class from one of the most influential living animators, focused on all of her specialties. It’s extremely valuable.

1.4: Aaron Blaise’s animal drawing

The look of animated animals in the ‘90s and early ‘00s was defined, in no small part, by Aaron Blaise. He’s an ex-Disney artist whose contributions to films like Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast are recognizable at a glance. These days, his main focus is teaching.

Blaise’s YouTube channel has existed for close to 14 years and has a large following, but it’s worth mentioning again how helpful it is. He’s drawn animals since childhood — it’s his love. “When I went to art school, I wanted to be an illustrator. I wanted to work for National Geographic. My big dream was nature- and natural-history-type illustration,” he told us last year.

Everything he’s learned across the decades, he discusses on YouTube.

Take Blaise’s videos on working with shapes, creating animal characters or Disney-style design. Or look at his archived livestreams on animal gestures and anatomy, or animating animals (as seen here and here). It’s a goldmine for anyone who wants to understand this tradition of stylized animal drawing.

1.5: The Nick bumper breakdowns

It’s rare for animation to cross over like Vaibhav Studios’ bumpers for Nickelodeon India do. In fact, one of them appeared in our biggest tweet of all time. The reason is pretty obvious: these things are charming, funny and really, really ingenious.

Years ago, the studio’s Vaibhav Kumaresh told us that the pitch for these was “something entirely handmade, crude and non-digital.” Nickelodeon India went for it, and the bumpers that followed were undeniable. If you’ve seen the cutout wonders of Mom and Brat, or the rap battle between Indian street foods, or the rock band composed of actual rocks, you get the appeal.

And, crucially, Vaibhav Studios showed the making of these bumpers (and others) in a playlist of YouTube videos.

Each making-of video is short, and what’s happening isn’t explained in depth. Look carefully, though, and the details are present. You can see the exact stop-motion cutout tricks behind Mom and Brat, and how the studio’s food characters are often live puppets overlaid with animation. There’s the creation of Egg Opera, with its custom stage and its plaster-of-Paris-filled eggshells — and so on.

It’s more animation done with minimal means. A lot of people have access to the stuff used in these videos. That, in fact, is partly why the bumpers are magnetic. Couple their relatable homemade-ness with the endless imagination and humor of the Vaibhav team, and it’s magic. Through these videos, anyone can watch how the artists did it, and learn.

Those are our five resources today! Hope you’ll find them interesting. As mentioned, you can look through the previous volumes of this series, stretching back to 2022, right here.

2. Animation news

2.1: Electro Andes gains traction

We commissioned this news feature from writer-illustrator Malu Mirones. After catching the first episode of a rising Argentinian series, she interviewed one of its directors for us and put together the following report. Huge thanks to her for the great work.

In June, talents from across the animation world attended the Annecy Festival. Among them were Nacho Malter and Damian Fernandez from Argentinian studio Bellolandia, who brought along the first episode of their cyberpunk series Electro Andes.

It wasn’t the team’s Annecy debut. In 2023, they took their show’s concept teaser to the festival. Three years later, they were back to screen the full, half-hour pilot at MIFA and the Les Nemours Theater. The audience’s response was overwhelmingly positive, according to Nacho Malter, and there was a lot of traction on social media (YouTube, TikTok). Over a call, he describes the difference in experiences between 2023 and now:

Well, we noticed a different kind of attention from the industry. There’s a certain level of respect. It’s not the same to say you have a project you want to develop and to actually have it developed, to have the pilot done. There’s a phrase along those lines, about how you have to become inevitable, and in this case it felt like we had accomplished that, like we weren’t making promises anymore. We had something to show.

The Electro Andes pilot follows brothers Cal and Pietro, orphans in a futuristic Andean mining town, desperately searching for their grandfather. Their world is colored by an oppressive mining company, an underground revolutionary movement and creatures from Andean mythology.

Every scene in the pilot fleshes out the characters and the world, and, most importantly, makes viewers care. A football sequence, for example, establishes the brothers’ dynamic, the world’s sci-fi tech and the story’s Latin American DNA. Malter and Fernandez noted during their Annecy panel that people behind the scenes repeatedly told them to cut this moment, but that they insisted on its importance.

It’s tied to a major reference point for Electro Andes: the real-world mining town of La Rinconada in Peru. Malter describes it as a harsh and unforgiving place, with one exception: “in the middle of that environment, there’s a little football field, which is like this final space of intention this town has.”

Bellolandia aimed to balance the horror and tragedy of Electro Andes’ story with the characters’ humanity and resilience to make people root for Cal and Pietro. This message of resistance is relevant to both cyberpunk as a genre and the Latin American roots of the show. Malter sees a natural connection between the two:

Cyberpunk and the realities of Latin America have a lot of dystopian points in common, where a lot of times the abuse of power from corporate and governmental institutions is very present in day-to-day life, and these are key themes in the genre that connect with reality. So, from that point, it was a very organic fusion.

The result is refreshing and captivating. It occasionally feels like audiences “expect” a certain type of art from underrepresented communities, who are sometimes judged as cultural ambassadors under an unforgiving lens. Electro Andes’ creators took great care to tell a story that felt right and real to them, knowing that there is no such thing as “perfect” representation.

The show takes inspiration from both reality and mythology, while also remaining flexible for the sake of the project’s purpose: to tell Cal and Pietro’s story.

“When you’re developing a world, there’s an infinite number of directions you can take,” Malter notes, “and characters end up being the way to find your focus.”

Making an original series is often a luxury only mainstream studios can afford. Doing it independently hasn’t been easy, especially in the underfunded Latin American industry, but Bellolandia has written its own playbook. Electro Andes began with a remote crew spread across multiple Latin American countries; eventually, the team opened a physical studio in Buenos Aires.

They converted a residential home into a workspace, so production occurred quite literally “in-house.” Malter feels that in-person interaction in a set location was extremely valuable, despite mainstream industry trends leaning towards remote work. As he says:

I think it has huge benefits. I don’t think so, I lived it; I experienced them all over again building this space. ... For me, there’s a cost in [remote work], a loss in human synergy, in shared spaces, in the opinions on shots that are being worked on live, in the collaboration of, “Oh, you’re doing that shot? I have these assets from another one.” You lose a lot of richness working remotely.

Based on the season trailer for Electro Andes, much more of the story remains to be seen. Since Annecy, the team has been searching for VOD distributors to finance the remaining episodes and give the series a platform. In the meantime, the pilot is set to premiere on YouTube in September.

One thing made clear at Annecy this year was the importance of indie projects, and the public’s desire for them. Electro Andes is exactly the kind of show audiences want, and hopefully it will get the support it needs (either from major investors or through the upcoming Kickstarter campaign for the second episode) for Cal and Pietro’s story to fully unfold. MM

2.2: Newsbits

• Six early Mexican cartoons were restored in 4K and will screen at the Foro Internacional de Cine soon. All were created at AVA Studios in Mexico City during the 1930s. See a trailer here.

• In America, researcher Jacob Pruitt has preserved and shared a huge cache of archival material from the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, one of the birthplaces of computer animation. Check it out on the Internet Archive.

• In Russia, Leonid Shmelkov’s Restlessness had an opening of 12.5 million rubles at the box office — strong for an arthouse film with an adult rating. (Its budget was reportedly 116 million rubles.)

• Animator Alisa Shadrina, based in Georgia, released another of her strange, unique and hypnotic animations on YouTube.

• Meanwhile: another really clever and funny sponsored film by India’s Eeksaurus, this time for Adobe. Check it out on YouTube.

• In Japan, director Sunao Katabuchi argues that the massive growth of the anime industry has been bad for its health, and points to the collapsing infrastructure behind the scenes.

• One more from America. If you saw Cage Claypool’s bizarre new animated video for Primus, you might be intrigued by the one-of-a-kind Blender process behind it.

• This past week brought the day (August 4, 2026) when Ray Bradbury’s post-apocalyptic story There Will Come Soft Rains takes place. That’s a good excuse to watch the classic Uzbek animation based on it — available on YouTube.

• The pilot for Wolik, animated in Russia during the first half of the ‘90s, surfaced on YouTube in high quality. Artist Harald Siepermann contributed character designs and more to the project.

• With box-office revenues above $211 million, All Wishes Come True is now one of the 10-biggest animated films of all time in China, domestic or foreign.

• Finally: a rare look inside the stop-motion Wind in the Willows from the 1980s.

3. Last word

Thanks for reading today’s issue! As usual, we’re wrapping up with personal comments from the two of us:

John: Puppet animation is a love of mine. And, over the past few years, I’ve grown fascinated by the thoughtful philosophies that some puppet animators have about their work. So it was a special joy to get insights from Barry Purves, one of the living masters in the field, for a recent issue. He’s really eloquent about what he does (just look at this YouTube interview), and I feel like any puppet animator could benefit from studying his thinking and performances (like in Tchaikovsky, An Elegy). I’ve been learning a lot.

Jules: On the topic of Aaron Blaise’s videos, I’ve been watching them myself these last few weeks. I really enjoy exploring different logical frameworks for drawing in my own work, but one that I’ve never felt like I fully grasped was the Disney (or Looney Tunes) approach to drawing cartoon animals. Seeing the way Blaise tackled drawing Beast from Beauty and the Beast helped drive home that the purpose of this system isn’t just to design a character and then reverse-engineer it into basic shapes. It’s to create a repeatable formula of progressing through a drawing using a combination of guidelines, basic shapes and anchor points (like noses) — and to design characters whose features can be placed with such a formula — while keeping in mind the three-dimensional relationships of all these elements. It was a huge help!

Until next time!

Welcome! This is another Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — about The Wind in the Willows (1983), a stop-motion classic from Britain.

This story is a little unusual for us. It comes from an outside writer, Andrew Osmond, who pitched us the subject back in June. He’s done great pieces for the newsletter before (see his Dianne Jackson profile or his on-site interview with dwarf studios), and this idea intrigued us. We had to go for it.

Willows is well known, but studying it isn’t a straightforward thing. For today’s issue, Andrew pulled from ultra-obscure materials and conducted a new interview with animator Barry Purves, a Willows veteran who’s been called one of “the finest puppet animators on this planet.”1

As a result, what follows is a fresh view into the making and context of Willows. Going through Andrew’s work, we learned a lot ourselves. Hope you’ll enjoy!

Stop motion’s enjoying a bit of a surge. Wildwood opens in October, soon after the new Shaun the Sheep escapade in September. Japan’s dwarf studios is building excitement for Hidari, now starring Keanu Reeves, while Mexico’s I Am Frankelda recently dropped on Netflix to acclaim.

Back at the start of the 1980s, stop motion wasn’t quite so mainstream. But an important stepping stone to the present was Britain’s Wind in the Willows, created by Cosgrove Hall in Manchester. The film and the series that followed it relied on new puppet technology and a stop-motion animator who’d go far: Barry Purves (Next).

The rare book The Cosgrove Hall Story, a major source for this article, highlights the journey of trial and error to Willows.2 Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall were art-college graduates who found themselves in the graphics department of a regional TV company, Granada. The pair shared an interest in animation and, early in their experiments, Cosgrove noted an advantage of stop motion. Once a character was created in puppet form, they could use that puppet all through a series.

Hall threw himself into stop-motion tests: wired figures with bodies of clipped foam, then plastic armatured characters whose feet bore ski-like sliders. None were good enough. Cosgrove had collected articles on stop-motion masters George Pal and Jiří Trnka, and, partly inspired by the latter, they settled on metal rods, joints and drilled ball bearings to build a skeleton. They added metal feet and metal set boxes and fixed the characters to the sets by magnets.

“The first tests using this method brought smiles of relief,” Hall remembered. “If not up and running, we were at least up and moving jerkily, down the right path.”3

In 1971, Cosgrove and Hall established Stop Frame Productions.4 They made their first stop-motion series Sally and Jake for Thames Television — which would eventually produce The Wind in the Willows. While Sally and Jake was simple, with rough foam-rubber dolls, a tour of children through the studio showed animation’s power even in this rudimentary form. As Cosgrove recalled:

[A child] looked at us disbelievingly and no matter how hard we tried he just couldn’t accept these were the grown-up people whose adventures he watched every week.5

More lessons were learned on successive series. For Noddy (watch), character heads were carved from wood to better resemble the illustrations in the source books by Enid Blyton. On the bizarre Chorlton and the Wheelies (watch), expressions changed by way of removable face masks, attached with magnets. By then, in 1976, Cosgrove and Hall had formed the studio bearing their names.

One Chorlton viewer was a teenager interested in both animation and theater. That was Barry Purves. He penned a long letter to Mark Hall in “absolute arrogance” (as Purves put it) to argue that Chorlton’s characters weren’t performing, and that he could improve upon this. “What I didn’t say was that I had never touched a puppet in my life at that point!” Purves later confessed.6

His chutzpah paid off. Hall auditioned him, then accepted him. Soon Cosgrove Hall embarked on 1981’s Pied Piper of Hamelin (watch), for which Purves was one of two credited animators.

The Pied Piper wasn’t as grim (or Grimm) as Jiří Barta’s stop-motion version of the story, but Cosgrove Hall still eschewed cuteness in favor of a tide of violent rats and an enigmatic, beak-nosed Piper who might be an angel or a demon. And the film contained a breakthrough for the studio: its first attempt at puppet lip sync, as a rat turns to the camera to tell his tale.

“Although it was only a small, hinged jaw it looked terrific,” Hall said (watch the moment here). “With added observation by the animator of the way a rat moves, and the shaky feel he gave to the body movement, the lip sync worked. And as soon as we saw it on the big screen, Brian and I realized we were ready as a studio to take the next step forward.”7

That next step was The Wind in the Willows.

Cosgrove and Hall had loved Kenneth Grahame’s novel since childhood. “We had our own ideas of what each character was like,” Hall said. “We were both determined that when we did it, we would be as faithful to the book as possible.”8

But how to bring the characters to the screen? Here, Cosgrove acknowledged a debt to employee Peter Saunders, later of the Mackinnon & Saunders model-making company. “I was taken on [at Cosgrove Hall] for six weeks and paid by petty cash and ended up staying there for 14 years!” Saunders once remarked.9

Cosgrove described Saunders’s achievements:

The foam rubber that was available [at the time of Chorlton and the Wheelies] was hard and inflexible … From reading film literature, [Saunders] discovered there was a foam compound used in live-action filming to create prosthetics for actors … This material was as soft as real skin. It would be ideal for our needs. … He arranged to meet [a make-up expert from one of the American film studios] and got from him the source of the new foam. The sculptors could now model fur or hair on their clay originals, knowing that, when cast, the subtler form would retain the finest details.10

In Willows, characters’ heads were fitted with animatronic parts.11 Hall went further into Saunders’s work on that front:

Saunders showed me … a completed engineered head of Mole. It had a skull made of shaped fiberglass and inside the “head” were tiny metal devices that attached to both the top and bottom of the mouth. There were devices to make the eyes blink and others to make the cheeks swell out. It was wonderfully complex and it was patently obvious that with a thin, foam rubber skin … we would be able to deliver much subtler performances with our figures.12

Meanwhile, the attention given to Willows’s world was breathtaking. Costumes, furniture and even bow ties were true to the 1900s. The score was inspired by Edwardian composers and music hall. Some of the portraits in the animal dwellings measured a half-inch by a half-inch. It was a spendy production, with a budget of £400,000.13

As anyone who’s encountered Willows knows, the pivotal character Toad is an airheaded, boastful, indefatigable aristocrat who’s caught up in one crazed enthusiasm after another. In the Cosgrove Hall production, actor David Jason thought to play Toad as an overgrown child, often maddening but still kind, gregarious and vulnerable.14

For Cosgrove, that was the key. Jason’s Toad was a child, which explained why the other animals never abandoned him. However, when the animation for Toad was assigned to Barry Purves, he couldn’t find the character from Jason’s voice alone. Hall had the actor sit opposite Purves and read the script. In Hall’s words:

[Jason put] in the visual eye movements he had brought to Toad’s character in the recording studio … There was a pause in delivery whenever Toad “telegraphed” to camera. Toad would look at camera, then his eyes would screw to whatever business he was about to embark on, then return to camera — pause — then his head would turn swiftly and, “Whey-hey,” he was off. What he had done was telegraph to the audience exactly what he was about to do, and they were complicitly in on the act.15

Purves himself called Toad “a very dear friend of mine, totally extrovert, exhausting to animate because he was never still for a minute.”16 In a past interview, he clarified that he was working before video assist became the standard. “You moved it and that move was gone; you couldn’t get it back … It led to a slightly different mindset to animators today,” Purves said. “You were immersed in that character and you really had to concentrate. This became your ‘video recorder.’ ”17

For this article, I spoke to Purves via Zoom. He kindly went further into his animating Toad, in addition to Rat, for the film and subsequent series:

We cast the animators as the characters, and there were two animators per episode, and two episodes were being shot at the same time. So I was cast as Toad and Rat, and the other animator was Badger and Mole … Hopefully your personality came out with the puppet.

But, if there was a closeup of Toad, the other animator was sat down doing nothing. And, if there was a group shot of Toad and Rat and Mole and Badger, you had to really talk to each other to say, “What’s Badger doing?” … [W]e had to really choreograph it.18

Purves favored animating “on ones,” or one movement per frame. “[It] allows you to put detail in and bounce a bit in a movement,” he says. (He compares shooting “on twos” to writing with a 12-letter alphabet.)

On Willows, the animators worked at a fast clip and with some spontaneity. Purves singles out a shot in the tunnel beneath Toad Hall, when Toad raises his sword and his sleeve slips down. “[T]hat’s an unexpected piece of detail you couldn’t have planned for. … I think when you’re animating, it’s about 70% planned and 30% the puppet will tell you what to do,” he says.

Purves meshed well with the “click, click, click, click” pace of Willows’s animation. He contrasts it again with current stop motion, whose video assist, he believes, slows the process. “Sometimes I watch animators today,” he says, “and they move it, and they look at the monitor, move it back, look at the monitor, and move it back again, and you think, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, just do it’ [laughs]. You lose connection if you keep looking at the monitor too much.”19

With his work on Toad, Purves feels that a lot of the acting was in the eyes:

His eyes were huge marbles, and he had blinks that could be slow or quick, and so that immediately gave him a lot of expression.

Badger would often talk to Toad and say, “Oh, your father wouldn’t have done that,” and it was very easy to get Toad to switch off from Badger by having the eyes focused or non-focused. Sometimes when Toad was bored of Badger, his eyes would just go… [lifts his eyes]. Whereas, if he was excited, he would look directly at you. Sometimes puppet-makers today give you 20 shapes of an eye and you replace them, but with Toad you could do a really slow blink and then wake him up.20

Also crucial were Toad’s legs. “We worked to get the legs longer, and he could turn his one foot up like a ballet dancer,” Purves says. The character’s huge mouth (a “chasm,” Purves notes with a laugh) was operated by paddles on a length of metal, so that, for instance, one side could be turned up and the other down.21

He has distinct memories of handling Toad’s puppet, holding it by the block of wood in its chest while moving the head or extremities. Regarding the project’s latex-skin figures, Purves notes that the silicone puppets common now are much heavier, and “cold and clammy” to the touch. But silicone is washable, whereas the painted skins in Willows collected dirt and dried out until they became “a bit crispy,” and so they had to be replaced every few months.

After 18 months of production, The Wind in the Willows debuted as a TV feature around Christmas 1983. The television editor of The Evening Standard dubbed it “an absolute delight.”

The film led to a series of 65 episodes — after all, the costly puppets had to earn their keep.22 An episode like Piper at the Gates of Dawn stretches the remit of children’s television into fearsome and wonderful places, as the animals encounter Pan, a shining horned figure who might be the real wind in the willows.23 Purves also points up some of the team’s original stories, such as Mercury of the Motorbicycle, Badger’s Remedy and Toad, Astronomer.

In America, both film and series ended up on the Disney Channel. The New York Times expressed surprise that the Mouse would screen a “rival” version of a property that it had previously travestied — ahem, animated — itself.24

Wind in the Willows set technical precedents, especially in its lip sync. In Britain, it showed what could be done with stop motion, even if later animators found different ways to get there. “I think basically Cosgrove kick-started the fact that it can be done and it can be treated seriously,” Purves says about the intricate puppets of Willows. He believes that it all informed the likes of The Nightmare Before Christmas (which absorbed a top Willows animator, Paul Berry) and Laika.

Peter Saunders’s model-making remains integral to the medium through Mackinnon & Saunders, which has worked with dwarf studios, Wes Anderson and Guillermo del Toro, among many others. And Purves himself has become one of the living greats of puppet animation, an Oscar nominee whose films like Tchaikovsky, An Elegy (2011) have gone far beyond children’s fare.

Before its closure in 2009, Cosgrove Hall made many more stop-motion films in the years after Willows.25 Yet Willows’s legacy goes on. Among the myriad little details in its stop-motion world is a motto displayed on the proud flag over Toad Hall: “Semper Bufo.” Forever Toad. AO

Until next time!

Welcome! It’s another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the lineup today:

• 1. On the skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts (1963).

• 2. Animation newsbits.

• 3. The last word.

With that, let’s go!

1. Fantasy filmmaking

Ray Harryhausen knew stop motion. That said, his field wasn’t quite the same as puppet films — fairy-tale stories without humans, as he put it.1 What he loved best, and did best, was stop-motion movie magic. He did effects.

He’d seen King Kong as a kid in 1933.2 That was the moment he changed. Its fantastical animals amazed him, and he couldn’t figure them out. “I didn’t know anything about stop motion at the time,” he said. “I knew they weren’t real. They were not men in suits. So I got interested in finding out how the film was done.”

Harryhausen began to learn stop-motion effects on his own time. Eventually he got a job under Willis O’Brien, the King Kong animator, who became his mentor and passed down a philosophy. “[He] once told me that you should never attempt to create what you can photograph in real life — a piece of advice I have always applied to my creatures,” Harryhausen wrote later.3

The word that Harryhausen used for his films was fantasy: something “more theatrical than realistic.”4 Although he aimed for lifelike motion and real textures, there was always a disconnect between his creatures and the human actors around them.

“If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane. In Kong, you knew he wasn’t real, but he looked like a nightmare,” Harryhausen pointed out. That character’s “dream quality” was something he always channeled. “You have to be an illusionist,” he argued, “and not a photographer.”5

As Harryhausen summed it up in 1981:

To me, the ultimate aim in making our films has never been the smoothing out of stop-motion animation. To try to duplicate live action in every way seems to me like asking a painter to paint a landscape so it will appear like a photograph. Our pictures are more of a surrealistic experience rather than an excursion into technical perfection. I’m certain technical perfection has its place and its advantages, but could you really make a sequence such as the skeleton swordfight in Jason and the Argonauts … with a computer?6

The skeleton sequence was among Harryhausen’s favorite creations. And it might be his best known, noted his daughter.7 The thing was done more than 60 years ago, and its difficulty was incredible. But it remains an all-timer in movie effects.

Harryhausen projects had a specific approach. Their animation was nearly always his alone (partly to save money, partly because he preferred to work that way), and each film was designed around its effects. That was his style.

“I wasn’t what you’d call a special effect man. I wasn’t just given a script and told to put this on the screen,” he said. When Harryhausen touched a project, he got involved in the story and structure, and carefully planned sequences that he knew he could do on budget.8 He didn’t believe in mid-production rewrites. That’s how you go over-budget, he said, and his movies didn’t have that luxury.

At $3 million ($32.9 million today), Jason and the Argonauts was one of Harryhausen’s most expensive films. He used the money for great moments like the Hydra and the harpies and Talos’s coming to life. But it was the skeleton battle that “was always intended to form the centerpiece,” he wrote.9

It comes toward the end of the story, and it took four-and-a-half months to animate. Harryhausen recalled the work as “painful to the extreme.” On slow days, maybe 13 frames got finished. Like he wrote:

When one pauses to contemplate that there were seven skeletons fighting three men, with each skeleton having five appendages to move in each frame of film, this meant that an unprecedented 35 animated movements had to be synchronized with three live actors’ movements.10

To understand what Harryhausen was doing, you first need to grasp his most basic film trick: “rear projection.” It’s something you might recognize from car-ride scenes in old movies — the prerecorded footage that plays behind the actors. He used a version of the idea in most of his projects.11

Harryhausen’s skeletons sat on a table in front of a projection of live-action footage from Jason. The camera captured the illusion that his tiny 8-to-10-inch models were together with the actors. Harryhausen advanced the footage frame by frame, moved his skeletons to fit the action, then photographed.

To hide the animation table in shots where it might otherwise be visible, Harryhausen placed a glass sheet in front of the camera. He applied black paint to the glass to cover unwanted parts of the shot. As a result, when the scene was photographed, the black part was left unexposed on the film stock.

After the first pass, he rolled the film back, put an inverse matte in front of the camera and shot the background footage again. Lined up just right, the table disappeared, and the creatures looked like they were standing in the scene.12

This stuff was done throughout the skeleton fight. But it should be said: Harryhausen rarely relied on just one trick. “[Y]ou can’t keep doing the same technique time and time again,” he once argued, talking about another film. “So we mixed them up. … A combination of things so you don’t catch on too quickly to any one technique.”

Jason was like that, too. To let a skeleton stab the actor Andrew Faulds, its model sword was “whittled down between frames” to look like it was entering his body.13 When Jason leaps from a cliff into the water, life-size plaster skeletons were thrown after him during the shoot. On Harryhausen’s table, model walls and plinths were aligned with walls and plinths in the background footage, so that the skeletons seemed to touch the scene.

One of the wildest ideas appears when an actor impales a skeleton. Here’s Harryhausen:

During the live action Todd [Armstrong] plunges his sword down and then at a specific point in the movement lets go of it so that it drops to the ground. In the animation studio I animated the skeleton in front of the sword dropping on the ground, which appears in the back projection plate, and replaced the real sword, as it appeared to enter the skeleton, with a miniature one. Todd then pulls his arm away and the skeleton is seen clutching onto the miniature sword.

The skeleton fight began with Harryhausen’s drawings. He imagined a macabre sequence partly inspired by Gustave Doré, one of his biggest influences (he had “about 40 of his books” by the 1970s).14 Then he created storyboards to lay the groundwork for the shoot in Italy.

“The live-action choreography was intensely complex,” Harryhausen wrote. Under the supervision of Ferdinando Poggi, a crew of seven stunt performers trained with the actors to get the fight just right. With that down, they filmed an all-human version of the sequence as a reference for Harryhausen’s later animation. Then came the final shoot.

Andrew Faulds recalled the experience this way:

Over three Sundays, we did rehearsals. The first Sunday we were given the movements … We rehearsed this until we had got the run of the routine of the skeleton fight with some Italian fencers ... On the second Sunday, we did the fight again with the same men, but this time they all wore numbered jerseys [to be filmed as reference]. ... Then, on the third and final Sunday, we fought it for real, fighting thin air, following the movements exactly that we had practiced ... I thought this was never going to work. I was staggered when I saw the film for the first time.15

Back in England, at Shepperton Studios, Harryhausen prepared his creatures.16 The armatures were built by his father, and Harryhausen added “cotton wool soaked in latex, which I then shaped into bones.” One of the skeletons was a leftover from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) — Harryhausen was big on reuse.

Finally, it was time to animate. In his words:

… I had to count each frame of film on the rear projection plate to determine exactly where the actor’s sword, which appeared on the plate, and the skeleton’s sword would meet. The number of frames would determine how long it would take for the skeleton to go from point A to point B …

The speed of the live-action photography would be 24 frames per second, so I had to judge the speed of the movement for the animation accordingly. The broader the movement of the model, the faster it will appear to move when run at 24 frames. … This makes it necessary to sometimes move the model about half a millimeter per frame in order to keep in synchronization with the live actors. … Sometimes I would have to “kill” footage (killing time means that the model action is not completed) … but occasionally I would have to do the opposite by “fleshing out” time with subtle movements to allow synchronization with the live action and so lengthen the scene.

Remember that Harryhausen was working without Dragonframe or any other form of video playback. In fact, he’s written that he didn’t use many tools or notes at all to keep track of the skeletons’ movements. They were in his head. This was an idiosyncratic kind of film fantasy that came straight from him.

The skeleton work, again, was harrowing. And audience reactions to it weren’t clear when Jason first released. This fight is odd and creepy, but some people laughed. Over time, Harryhausen came to believe that “these were laughs of relief or nervousness” in response to the strangeness on screen.

Jason didn’t do well at the box office, but it became legendary among a certain group, and the skeleton battle was its high point. “Working alone, Harryhausen achieved the kind of complex special effects which now would only be attempted by a huge team of people,” argued Cinefantastique in the late ‘90s.17

By then, the age of stop-motion effects was just about over. Harryhausen had kind words for the CG effects that replaced him — in Jurassic Park, in Lord of the Rings.

But he wasn’t all-in on the new method. He found it often “so realistic that it loses the quality of fantasy,” and it involved too many artists for his taste.18 “I think it’s done by committee. You have to have a raft of 50 people to make two or three minutes of animation,” he said. The loss of showmanship bothered him, too: the willingness to tell viewers how images were made even before a film came out. He wasn’t impressed by a “magician whose tricks the entire world knows.”

The new ways were exciting, but they couldn’t simply invalidate the old ones — the surreal fantasy of Jason’s skeletons, and what Harryhausen called the “nightmare quality” of stop-motion creatures.19 His four-and-a-half-month struggle in the ‘60s had built something that wasn’t replaceable. As he wrote in the 21st century:

… I would never want to do it again. … Hours and hours of the same movements can wear a man down. But it was worth it. It is there on film for all to see, and no matter what technology is invented, it can never be reproduced. In stop motion the whole scene has a supernatural quality that could only be achieved by the use of dimensional animation.

2. Newsbits

• An important American story: “Pixar’s layoffs came days after receiving a $26 million tax credit.” Amid Amidi brought attention to the problem, and explained why he sent letters to California officials about it.

• In Russia, Leonid Shmelkov’s surrealist feature Restlessness got its wide release in theaters. The pre-sales were very good, and it’ll be interesting to see how it performs overall. Find a trailer here.

• In Cuba, students aged 10–13 took part in an animation workshop called “Jugando a animar,” hosted by the ICAIC. See posts here and here.

• Milin woolfelt (密林手作) is a popular animator from Chinese platforms like Bilibili and Douyin, and she’s getting hits on YouTube with her stop-motion series inspired by Brambly Hedge. See the latest episode here.

• In America, animator Glen Keane was rescued by helicopter from Mummy Mountain in Arizona.

• The Malaysian hit Papa Zola: The Movie is now set to reach theaters in many more countries. Cartoon Brew looks into the story.

• In America, Steve Stanchfield posted an interesting article and video about scanning an old Mighty Mouse cartoon.

• The Chinese film All Wishes Come True passed 1.1 billion yuan ($162.9 million) at the box office. Find a subtitled trailer here.

• Varvara Arenskaya, an animator based in Armenia, spoke to Watermelon Rind Boats about her film The Girl and the Axe (watch) — a funny and entertaining piece.

• Last of all: we looked into the tale of the Rankin-Bass Hobbit, made in Japan.

3. Last word

That’s a wrap for today! As usual, we’re closing out with personal comments from the two of us:

Jules: In the last few weeks I’ve been revisiting some of Disney’s work from the ‘10s. I was very impressed by Zootopia the first time I saw it, and it still held up for me. The intricacy of the character performances feels like some of the studio’s best work in 3D. There’s a careful blending of animal behavior with human body language that really works — Nick, for example, often emotes with his arms close to his body, moving them more at the elbows than at his shoulders. It feels like how foxes hold their front legs when they stand upright, and like a conman keeping his cards close to the vest. It’s very detailed, studied and real, but the acting has enough golden-age Hollywood spirit to maintain clarity and feel larger than life.

John: I realized the other day that I’ve edited videos, in one form or another, for a couple of decades. It’s something I handle for Animation Obsessive as well. In the past year or two, though, I’ve had a breakthrough in my thinking about music and moving images. Close sync and landing on beat used to be my fixations. Lately I’ve found that editing footage as a silent visual continuity first, and then adding a musical layer loosely on top, lets the two parts breathe, say different things and reinforce each other in more interesting ways. Everything opens up, and nothing is redundant. It’s really exciting.

Until next time!

Welcome! This is a new Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and our topic today is The Hobbit (1977).

The film has a shaky reputation. Long before Jackson’s series, Rankin-Bass put this thing together for NBC: a television movie, very much abridged from the book. According to Arthur Rankin, the aim was to “capture the essence” of Tolkien’s “very detailed and involved story.” Some believed that it failed.1

There was praise. The New York Times, to name one, basically liked the Hobbit movie. But there was also vitriol, especially from the hardcore. Dragon declared it “an inaccurate, poorly developed rehash of one of the finest fantasy novels”; another major sci-fi and fantasy magazine called it an “abomination.”2

Rankin-Bass’s people knew the pitfalls of adapting The Hobbit. Quite a few companies had already run away from it — including Disney, which feared angering the fans with a Disneyfied treatment. “You know, you can’t deviate from these books or somebody’ll wait on the street for you,” Rankin noted. Even so, his studio went through with The Hobbit: the very first large-scale Tolkien film.3

The bulk of the project was outsourced to Japan, to the Tokyo studio Topcraft. Later, in the ‘80s, the same outfit would make The Last Unicorn and Nausicaä. And The Hobbit was a step toward those films. Here was an “unforgettable moment” for the studio, in the words of animator Tsuguyuki Kubo.4

He and his peers put tremendous effort into this movie. In retrospect, it’s easier to see what they pulled off. The Hobbit isn’t perfect, but it’s a simple, unpretentious, earnest piece with a lot of gorgeous artwork. Today, too, the film’s “omissions and shortcomings ... seem mild when set beside Jackson’s forced inclusions and outright inventions,” argued Hogan’s Alley.5

All of which is to say that this unusual production warrants a closer look.

Read more

We’re back! With the mid-year break over, the Animation Obsessive newsletter returns with a new issue. We’ve done a ton of prep over the past few weeks to get ready for the rest of our 2026, which begins today.

Here’s the slate for this Sunday:

• 1. On Michiyo Yasuda, a master of color.

• 2. Animation newsbits.

• 3. The last word.

Now, let’s go!

1. Ghibli’s colors

The art of Studio Ghibli isn’t really duplicable. People have tried: the internet is full of attempts, the bulk of them machine-generated. Even when those images vaguely recall Ghibli, though, it’s not so simple to paint light like Kazuo Oga did in My Neighbor Totoro, or to animate a smile like Makiko Futaki did across the ‘80s.

Many tiny and hyper-specific choices, down to the individual frames, made Ghibli films what they are. These choices came from stars like Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, but also, critically, from the way less famous people on their teams.

Among the most central of the less-famous people, for most of Ghibli’s existence, was Michiyo Yasuda. She’s far from a household name. Yet the one-of-a-kind colors of Ghibli’s animation, which shape the whole look and feel of its films, were selected mainly by her.

Miyazaki once called Yasuda “three times sharper and more particular than me.”1 Takahata, who worked with her on Grave of the Fireflies (1988), said glowing things about her abilities. He pointed to the worn-out pants of one character in that film:

[S]he chose a color that looked faded from many washings. Although I say ‘chose a color,’ in reality, she was choosing texture. Whether the fabric is thick or flimsy depends on the color chosen. Yasuda-san has a subtle perception that allows her to grasp such things.2

As Ghibli got established, its colors stood apart. They were more nuanced, more subdued, richer than the norm. That was Yasuda’s area. “The reason animation films suffer creatively has to do with the fact that they all use the same colors,” Miyazaki argued in the ‘80s. “It’s like, ‘Oh, the color of animation.’ … I believe that Ghibli is the only studio that has really managed to develop such unique colors.”3

Yasuda didn’t brag about what she did. Her work was, she emphasized, just a step in the process. “I create colors to add life to the drawings and to communicate the director’s intentions as much as possible,” she once said.4

Even so, the influence of her eye on the films is hard to overstate. Per the writer Yasuko Shibaguchi, Yasuda was a “right hand” to both Miyazaki and Takahata.

The main gist of Yasuda’s job was straightforward. On Ghibli’s early classics, she defined the colors of the characters and objects drawn on cels — the transparent plastic sheets laid atop the background paintings. If you’ve seen Totoro or the Catbus or Kiki, you’ve seen colors in which Yasuda had a hand.

Her credits are impressive by themselves. She was there for Ghibli’s first, Castle in the Sky (1986), whose 300-plus colors she designed without much of an initial plan by Miyazaki.5 From that point, Yasuda touched most of the studio’s output: Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, My Neighbors the Yamadas and more. As Ghibli switched to digital coloring in the ‘90s, she adapted her process to the new tech.

If the gist of her craft was straightforward, the exact specifics weren’t. Yasuda worked to convey the feelings of each film, and cultures and places and times of day, and beyond. She said during the 2000s, “In order to determine colors I always take into consideration the personality and emotional development of each character and the director’s aim.”6

More than that, her decisions played no small part in the sense of reality that typifies Takahata’s and Miyazaki’s films. As Yasuda put it:

Miya-san’s world is fantasy, but he mixes in truth in some way. That is why the Catbus can’t be pink. It needs to have the warmth of a real animal. Then it looks believable to the viewer. We always create elements that are close to the real thing. They have to be such colors that make you say even Totoro might really exist.

Miya-san often says, “Please make it look convincing.”7

It was a preoccupation of Yasuda’s. From Ghibli’s start, her colors were subtler and more diverse than the industry standard. With Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies, she began to design new paints in intermediate shades, many of them on the muted and natural-looking side.

“At the time, society was becoming busier and busier, and there were lots of strong, flashy plastic colors,” Yasuda said. “So, looking for a little more gentleness, I set out to create my own paints.”8

In her mature work, Yasuda shot for color with a “feeling of transparency,” in which the viewer can “sense the air” in the scene. It was a careful balance, she noted, because it’s possible for muted colors to fall into murkiness.9 Yet selecting just the right “restrained” ones creates an impression of depth. If a palette of bright, primary colors tends to flatten an image, Yasuda’s designs did the opposite.

Her color choices on Totoro leaned soft and quiet; on Grave of the Fireflies, they were almost naturalistic. Both palettes made their way into Kiki’s Delivery Service, Only Yesterday, Porco Rosso and other films ahead.

Again, Ghibli’s colors were different. “If other studios end up being influenced and our colors become standard practice,” argued Miyazaki in the ‘80s, “that might transform the industry.”

Long before Ghibli opened, and long before she became a color designer, Yasuda was a veteran in the animation business. She’d joined the Tokyo studio Toei Doga out of high school in 1958. “[I]t was a time when I didn’t know much about animation,” she admitted later. She was simply looking for work.10

But she found a welcoming environment in Toei’s ink-and-paint division, where artists traced and colored the animators’ drawings onto cels. After Takahata and Miyazaki joined the studio as young recruits in 1959 and 1963, she became friends with them as well. Around the time Takahata served as vice-chairman of Toei Doga’s union, with Miyazaki as its general secretary, Yasuda was the secretary.

They discussed art, politics, life. Yasuda was a nonconformist and smart; Takahata and Miyazaki enjoyed talking to her. And she was inspired by their creative drive. “There were all kinds of people at Toei Doga, but I was always amazed at Miyazaki’s drawings and approach on the one hand, and Takahata’s talents as a director on the other,” Yasuda said. “They seemed incredibly unique.”

When Takahata directed Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968) at Toei, Yasuda worked on many of its major scenes as a tracer. In 1972, Takahata and Miyazaki made Panda! Go, Panda! at a different company, and Yasuda once again joined the tracing crew. Then she followed them to Heidi: Girl of the Alps (1974) at another studio.

Although Yasuda was in her mid-30s by then, with some 15 years of experience, she still wasn’t a color designer. It wasn’t a dream of hers, either: the job didn’t really exist as a distinct position. But she stumbled into it during her time at Nippon Animation, the Heidi company.

A breakthrough for her was the studio’s 3,000 Leagues in Search of Mother (1976), on whose colors she collaborated with Miyazaki. In his words:

Because basically I did not like this piece (laughs), I decided to make experimental color combinations and screen compositions. At the time, a series like Sazae-san would serve up fish with pink paint slapped on them, and that kind of thing was acceptable back then, but I couldn’t stand it (laughs). How we could make food look delicious and how to express the sparkling of a glass surface, how we could make the picture stand out by depicting the details of things and designing colors… it was Yacchin [Michiyo Yasuda] with whom I experimented on these things.11

Yasuda began to realize what color-picking could do. She later called this series “the start of my color design career.”

In 3,000 Leagues, color puts across the tactile textures of the world, and the color of a single pond might change dramatically based on angle and time of day. Yasuda and Miyazaki invented whole new terms. “ ‘Underwater color’ is when an object submerged in water is seen from the outside. ... ‘Glass-transparency color’ is when an object is seen through glass,” Miyazaki explained.

Soon, Yasuda jumped to Miyazaki’s directorial debut Future Boy Conan (1978), and to Takahata’s Anne of Green Gables (1979). Her duties expanded: more and more of the color-selection work fell to her, even as she oversaw the painting crew and checked the final cels. Each project, she said, seemed to get harder than the last.

Yasuda often found herself (now around 40) living at the office. Like her peers, she felt the physical toll of Japan’s TV deadlines: her writing arm swelled up during Anne, and she fell to 88 pounds. In her rare off hours, she went out drinking heavily to de-stress.

Despite the conditions, she was achieving things. By Conan, Yasuda was expanding the usual number of paints in TV animation. She noted at the time that the colors of Art Nouveau were her preference, even if she couldn’t always put them on screen. “In the case of cels, it’s hard to get that kind of atmosphere, you know?” she said. Conan’s colors were a cut above nonetheless.

On Anne, Takahata needed realism. Yasuda expressed it in color. Although TV paints tended to be harsh, she managed a subtler and more natural look. Anne’s faded clothes, for one, wowed Takahata. And, already, Yasuda was taking storytelling into account: “I started to think about the characters’ personalities when deciding on the colors of their clothes and accessories,” she said.

For Yasuda, those years were a lot of struggle, and trial and error, and learning from the background supervisors at Nippon Animation. But she gained things while surviving the pressure cooker of Japanese TV.

Along the way, she began to notice color in the world around her, and to use what she saw:

Even when I was walking, if I happened upon a dead leaf that had fallen into a puddle, I’d find myself staring to see how light hit it and which parts shined white. … I started observing things constantly, like how, when the wind blows and the trees sway, there’s a restlessness over here and shadows fall over there; or how, on clothes with a green-and-blue pattern, the pattern looks blurred when seen from a distance and the colors also seem softer.

A few years later, Takahata brought Yasuda aboard Miyazaki’s feature Nausicaä (1984). She outlined its 262 colors in a short time, working with a high-luminosity, low-saturation scheme. “The colors in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind were restrained compared to previous films,” she noted.12 But the look remained more stylized and less natural than she and Takahata would’ve liked.

Yasuda was still learning. With every one of these productions, she learned. Only in the late ‘80s, for example, did she notice that “there is color even in shadows,” and that she could use “deep or vivid colors” inside them rather than a default “black or gray.” And, as she learned, the richness of Ghibli’s images increased.13

By the time of Princess Mononoke, colored partly on cels and partly digitally, Yasuda was the best anywhere at what she did. She had a superhuman memory for color, and she understood how each paint would look when shot on film (working with the camera people was a specialty of hers).

Between 500 and 600 colors went into Mononoke. In the six-hour documentary on the film’s creation, you can see Yasuda wrestle over some of those colors with Miyazaki. They fight like old friends. At one point, he insists on a garish, high-contrast pairing of light and shadow. “This combination looks unthinkable to me,” she protests, and she finds a compromise.

Even with Ghibli’s shift to all-digital painting after Mononoke, Yasuda stayed at the top of animation color design. She continued to learn. On My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999), that involved the struggle to output proper colors from computers to film stock, a far trickier thing than the old photography process. And, in that movie and the ones ahead, the team overcame the flatness of computer art.14

By her 50s, Yasuda was looking for successors and thinking about retirement. As it happened, though, it wasn’t so simple to emulate what she did. Some younger artists, on films like Porco Rosso, buckled in her role. Yasuda kept coming back.

After all, there was no formula to copy. As Yasuda once explained:

In their artistic quest, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata demand the closest attention to precise color design. Therefore, our work involves developing new colors, trying them out with each shot, each new film. Even Studio Ghibli hasn’t come up with a defined color scheme because it’s always evolving according to the approaches and requirements of each new film.

Yasuda could operate in that place. Behind her decisions wasn’t a formula, but that eye she’d trained, and the endless research she’d done. Her job never became easy: up through Ponyo and The Wind Rises, each film stayed a new problem. But Yasuda always adapted. All the work and thinking she’d done allowed it.

Obviously, color design was just one role. Yasuda didn’t make these movies on her own: in interviews, she often spoke about the group, and about the ideas of the directors. But take a close look at the subtlety of the colors in Fireflies or Mononoke, how the films balance muted tones without going sludgy, and you’ll realize that you’re in a master’s world.

2. Newsbits

• The American researcher Jacob Pruitt unearthed a trove of material about an abandoned Disney Frankenstein movie from the ‘90s.

• The Art of Cartoon Saloon: 25 Years is a new book about Ireland’s most famous animation studio. See a preview via Animation Magazine.

• In America, hundreds of jobs were cut at Pixar. According to The Wrap, one reason is that Hoppers’ revenues left it “slightly shy of break-even.”

• Jazza, an Australian YouTuber, put out a fascinating breakdown video on a short stop-motion animation he made.

• In Russia, a new round of pitches to the Cinema Fund took place. Included were a number of shady GenAI projects, and propaganda was a theme — see this report, for example.

• The American distributor Deaf Crocodile is starting a video store.

• Also from Russia: the French scholar Joël Chapron discussed France’s funding ecosystem in incredible depth with ProfiCinema.

• In Italy, director Enzo D’Alò (Lucky and Zorba, How the Toys Saved Christmas) had strong words for GenAI, Italian funding for animation and the American production system.

• The Chinese film All Wishes Come True is doing well at the box office, with roughly $114 million in revenue since its release earlier this month.

• In Japan, Toei is preparing to release restorations of Magic Boy, Journey to the West, Animal Treasure Island and other films on Blu-ray. Given the quality of the company’s past restorations, this is exciting news.

3. Last word

Thanks for reading today’s issue! We’re wrapping up with personal comments from the two of us:

Jules: Hey, everyone! It’s been a very productive few weeks on our end — somehow it feels much longer. Among other goings-on, we discovered a number of new art and history treasure troves, and we’re excited to share what we’ve found. Also, I mentioned in my last afterword that I was looking forward to working on a children’s book idea during the break: I’m happy to report the project has been going very well!

John: For this break, one goal was to watch movies we’ve been meaning to watch. It’s a paradox of writing about animation. To paraphrase Amid Amidi’s post last month: covering the medium actually reduces your time to be a viewer of the medium. So, among others, we finally caught Heroic Times (Hungary) and Art College 1994 (China) — two fascinating films with hyper-specific visions. Neither aims to be for everyone, but we enjoyed both a lot.

Until next time!

Welcome! Glad you could join us for a new issue: a wrap-up of our first half of 2026.

Back in February, the Animation Obsessive newsletter reached its five-year anniversary. Running a publication for so long (with 73,000-plus readers signed up now) is never something we take for granted. We’ve been thinking a lot about how to keep things fresh and continue to push ourselves. It’s guided the work.

And we’re very lucky. Thanks to readers’ amazing kindness and support this year, we’ve gotten to do some of our favorite issues to date.

Today, we’re looking at a few standouts of the year so far. And, at the end, we’re rounding up great animation that’s come online for free in 2026. Let’s go!

Big moments

Most of the stories we publish begin as ideas on our list. A number of them linger on that list for years, as we gather research material and allow ourselves to bump into sources organically.

The first article of January, Miyazaki’s Sherlock, was stuck on the list for maybe four years. Finally pulling it together, in that last study-and-production rush, was tricky. But it’s a story we love, and one of our most popular of 2026 — right now, it ranks in the newsletter’s top 10.

Another addition to the top 10 this year: Designing One Hundred and One Dalmatians. The film has serious fans online, especially on Substack, but the response to this one still took us by surprise.

Even more surprising was How the Little Guy Moved, about the rotoscoping of Prince of Persia (1989). The newsletter tends not to cover video games, so we didn’t have high expectations — but the piece did extremely well, and the shout-out from creator Jordan Mechner was a highlight.1 We also cut a promo clip for social media that we enjoy rewatching:

Yet the biggest surprise of the past six months was Dangerous Light. Artist Josh Fagin, or spktra, wrote it for us. The topic: that searing, glowing light you’ve seen in cel animation like The Secret of NIMH and Akira.

Josh uncovered its secrets and digitally recaptured its look for his music video Spirit Jumper (watch). His excellent article reveals what he learned. As he explained in one section:

My initial tests to recreate this, using stock glow effects, looked horrible. They were flat. They sat on top of the image instead of inside it. Researching how light falloff occurred made it clear why I was failing. Standard digital glows usually rely on a simple Gaussian blur, which is uniform. They fade gently and evenly, like a gradient. Real light is aggressive. It follows the inverse-square law. It stays hot and dense for a long time before falling off exponentially.

Josh’s technical breakdown spread farther than most could’ve foreseen — it was a lot of fun to watch.

It’s always a good time when an article takes off. For us, though, the big moments of 2026 haven’t only been about virality. Many come down to a specific person’s reaction, or to the feeling that we’ve done a particularly strong story, or to the completion of a longtime goal.

That last one was very much the case with Congolese Animation That Needs to Be Seen. For years, we’ve wanted to share the film Machini (2019) with more people — but it never came online. Finally, in January, we contacted the studio behind it, and the folks there kindly set up a free two-week release. The directors were generous enough to take time out for a few questions, too.

Getting everything in order was a six-month process, but this is the exact type of story we started the newsletter to publish. It was deeply meaningful to see the response. (As a note: the free release has ended, but Machini is on VOD now.)

Elsewhere in 2026, quite a few of our Thursday issues have been milestones for us. They’re for a smaller audience and allow us to tackle subjects that don’t always fit the Sunday slot.

For one, The Legends and Luxo Jr. is among our all-time favorite pieces in the newsletter — a fresh look at Luxo that aims to untangle decades of corporate myth-building, while reaffirming the film’s value. Similarly, The Serious Cartoon reassesses Animal Farm and the CIA’s infamous meddling in the project. And The Next in Line deals with the modern-day sabotaging of artist Anton Dyakov.

Meanwhile, The Roots of China’s Animation Boom links the old Chinese Flash scene to the recent rise of the country’s animation. Two pieces on Jiří Trnka — The Present in the Past and Exactly How They Did It — broke new ground in English coverage of his films. And Escaping Cartoons is a look at the emergence of the word “animation” in Japan. As we wrote:

When Japanese animation swept America in the ‘90s, the refrain that these films and series were “not cartoons” was hard to avoid. … A lot of work from Japan felt new. The loan word “anime” (a key tool of American marketers back then) came to represent animation amenable to many styles and tones, and stories that weren’t just for kids. …

Yet Japan wasn’t immune to limiting labels itself. A struggle had played out there, too — just a little bit earlier.

The exact terms were different, but the ideas were similar. Mid-century America had print cartoons and animated cartoons; in mid-century Japan, manga referred to both animation and comics. Notably, the word “manga” tends to get rendered in English as “cartoon.” And, decades ago, terms like manga eiga (cartoon movie) were in everyday use. They were loaded.

Animation Obsessive is a research project, ultimately. It’s a rare privilege to invest the time and the money (into old magazines, books and more) to chase stories like these. Digging and connection-drawing are the heart of our work, and we’re grateful that, almost five-and-a-half years in, we still get to do this.

A few others

During 2026, around 50 stories have run in the newsletter. For this recap, we whittled down the list to 21 that felt important to single out. This is the remainder of that list:

• Stepping Inside UPA — sharing the entirety of the book Inside UPA, with the author’s permission.

• The Character Designs of Mulan — on the brilliant work of Chen-Yi Chang.

• Truth and the Budget Have the Last Word — an intro and viewing guide to the films of Faith and John Hubley.

• Pixar’s Believable People — on early attempts to make credible characters in 3D computer graphics.

• The Music of Samurai Champloo — about the competition between image and music in that series.

• The Visualist — a study of the filmmaking style of Rintaro.

• The Origin of Yasuji Mori — about an artist who defined Japanese animation.

• Making Artists — on the impact of Michael Sporn’s studio in New York.

• More Than Moving Drawings — inside the movie magic and special artistic tricks that powered early Disney features.

The final four of those were released as paywalled Thursday issues. For the next few weeks, though, we’re unlocking More Than Moving Drawings for all readers. If you haven’t checked it out before, we hope you’ll enjoy it.

Closing out

Occasionally, we get asked to make lists of animation we like. As we reach the end of the recap, it seems fitting to mention six remarkable animated films and music videos that hit YouTube during the past six months.

Most were made this year. Not all will be to everyone’s taste, and (as a note) some contain adult content. But each of them speaks to us, in one way or another:

• Anton Dyakov’s BoxBallet (2020). One of the great short films of the decade, finally available to everyone.

• AC-bu’s There’s Always Tomorrow (2026). For us, this hand-drawn music video stands with the group’s best-ever work.

• Abby Mills’s My Older Brother Bought an Anime Figurine (2026). The full title is much longer and more aggressive, which matches this barbed, thoughtful student film — our favorite we’ve seen from CalArts this year.

• Émilie Tronche’s it stings a little though (2026). Another music video we keep rewatching: its animation is deceptively simple, and the timing plays very creatively with the track.

• Austin Kimmell’s Dracula 2: The Ride Home (2026). An adult comedy full of really, really funny animation — Kimmell is a filmmaker to watch.

• Rintaro’s Nezumikozo Jirokichi (2023). A reminder that Rintaro is one-of-one as a creator of film images. Even this far into his career, he’s still got it.

Pieces like these reveal how many possibilities animation still has. Samey GenAI slop videos take up tons of space, but there’s original, different-thinking work being done out there. That’s the future that excites us.

With another half-year of the Animation Obsessive newsletter wrapped, our regular July break is about to begin. You’ll receive our next issue on July 26th.

These breaks are partly about relaxing but more about getting ready. Because of our twice-weekly schedule, managing time is a challenge here — and certain articles take too long to prep and research in between deadlines. Breaks allow us to do that extra work, and to avoid running out of new material.

If you’re looking for an animation newsletter to read in the meantime, check out re:frame, Smear Frame and Watermelon Rind Boats. Also, Jamie Lang has been doing fantastic work at Cartoon Brew since taking up the torch as its new owner.

It’ll be exciting to get things done over the next few weeks — there’s a lot in the plans. Our thanks to everyone who’s been reading the newsletter this year, and everyone who’s sent kind messages or invested into this project. It always amazes us. We’ll be back with more before long!

Until next time!

Welcome! It’s a new Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s the plan:

• 1. On Annecy 2026.

• 2. Animation newsbits.

• 3. The last word.

Now, let’s go!

1. Annecy in summary

The Annecy Festival happened this past week. If you keep up with the news in animation, it was hard to miss. It’s the biggest event in the animation world, and it gets bigger each year.

It’s held in France, in the Alps, right near the lovely Lake Annecy. And, at the 2026 edition, there were 19,100 accredited attendees (a high) from 118 countries.1

Annecy is a film festival that doubles as a venue for business. Plus, increasingly, it gets compared to Comic-Con: it’s “become dominated by big companies” in recent years, to quote the journalist Kambole Campbell. That was visible at Annecy 2026, whose opening ceremony hosted the premiere of the third Minions movie.2 The week’s headline stories were often Hollywood-centric.

Pixar showed Gatto, its stylized CG film — director Enrico Casarosa went over its illustrative look and use of frame-rate modulation. The new DreamWorks feature Forgotten Island met with an extended standing ovation. Disney was there; Warner’s slate was massive. The list went on.

“There are more and more [American] studios coming to Annecy, wanting to be in Annecy,” said Marcel Jean, the festival’s artistic director.3 As he told Le Film Français during the week:

We must recognize that, for these large studios, Annecy is a “safe space.” They find an audience of enthusiasts and connoisseurs who have a relationship with animation that is both passionate and respectful. In addition, certain filmmakers whose names don’t have a particular resonance with the press or public at the major general-interest festivals are welcomed like stars at Annecy because all of our spectators know them. … Also, many participants have a real influence on the films’ trajectories. The studios know that, at Annecy, a very high number of Oscar voters attend the screenings.4

It should be said: the American system is Europe’s competitor, too. Industry reports at Annecy 2026 showed as much. Data reveals that America’s stuff takes up roughly twice as much of Europe’s own “viewing time” as European creations. More troublingly, a report noted that “American platforms (Netflix, Amazon, YouTube) capture audiences and advertising revenue, but invest nearly nothing into European animation.” That’s fueling an industry downturn in France and beyond.5

Maybe, then, you could call the Hollywood–Annecy partnership a bit one-sided. For Disney, an Annecy boost is a nice perk. But it’s been life-or-death for smaller, quirkier projects like Europe’s Flow, Robot Dreams and Arco. This is the festival where they really get to shine. It’d be a shame if that work was overshadowed.

The good news: in 2026, the other Annecy was still alive. It’s still a place for the animation of the wide world — not just from Europe, but from everywhere.

Annecy had firsts this year. For example, the first Nigerian short to screen in competition (The Travails of Ajadi), and New Zealand’s first-ever stop-motion feature (Kiri and Lou Go Raaa!).6 The latter is a charming piece of claymation that’s very much a small-scale, handmade thing. Its co-director told Cartoon Brew:

I hope it’s an antidote to the prevalence of digital content. I understand that digital stuff is prevalent because directors and producers can go back and change the work of the animators until it’s just like everything else that’s being made. So there’s a way to make this stuff that’s more in the hands of the animators, that prioritizes creators, and allows the audience to see something new.

Similarly aiming to make history was a film in Annecy’s MIFA area — where pitches get in front of powerbrokers, and deals get landed. The pitch in question was The Wanderers of Time, positioned as the first stop-motion feature from Peru. “The puppets draw inspiration,” wrote journalist Ryan Gaur, “from the Peruvian tradition of creating miniatures as offerings to deities and the dead.”

Behind Wanderers is artist Siwar Peralta (Puririkuy), who’s developed the project for several years and wants it to further Peru’s animation scene. Given that his film was singled out by Variety and then won a MIFA award, it’s well on its way.7 You can watch its teaser here.

Among Variety’s other MIFA highlights was Rise of Ying Ge. Its look caught our notice, too — as did the name of its director, Denis Do, whose Funan (2018) previously won Annecy’s top prize.

Rise of Ying Ge is a co-production between France and China. Its subject is traditional Yingge dance, performed in costumes and face paint, and the film (unlike the very dark Funan) is intended for families. One to keep an eye on.

As usual for Annecy, Rise of Ying Ge was far from the only project with French involvement — the home team is well loved at the festival. There was hype around The Wolf, for one. That film is a work in progress about a shepherd in the Alps, and its team went on location to understand the lifestyle. Here’s co-director Benjamin Massoubre (The Summit of the Gods, I Lost My Body):

… we became aware of the anxiety caused by the possibility of a wolf attack. When there is one, people do not say, “My flock was attacked,” but, “I was attacked.” The wolf strikes at the intimate level. It’s a real dramatic catalyst.8

Another WIP with French roots was Séraphine. Director Sarah Van Den Boom is a veteran, but this is her debut feature. She calls it “a film about humans, a political film at a child’s eye level and a period film.” Le Film Français calls it “almost a miracle.” You can see its pilot below:

European animation was important at Annecy’s 2026 edition. But neither it nor Hollywood absorbed all the buzz. Interestingly, it was India that brought one of the most widely talked-about projects: Baahubali: The Eternal War.

Once you’ve seen the teaser, it’s no secret why such attention surrounds this film. The Eternal War is visually wild, with a stylized CG look that recalls Spider-Verse without simply cloning it. And, although he isn’t its director, S. S. Rajamouli (RRR) is involved. The Eternal War is tied to his live-action Baahubali series.

At Annecy, The Eternal War was presented as a WIP to “a fully packed hall responding with claps and cheers,” reported AnimationXpress. Afterward, Rajamouli told Variety that the film’s concept — “taking Baahubali into the 14 realms of Indian mythology” — came from its director, Ishan Shukla.

This concept has grown into an ultra-ambitious movie whose team is spread across India, Scotland, France and more. Word arrived this week that even Japan’s Studio Khara is on board, with Mahiro Maeda (Gankutsuou) contributing. The goal is “something contemporary,” Shukla told Cartoon Brew. He continued:

… it’s not going hyper-realistic because that ages really fast. Instead, we wanted something more painterly, something closer to the concept art. It’s tragic when you get great concept art, and then the final CG looks nothing like it, so the idea was to mimic the concept art while adding some sakuga-style anime because we have gods fighting.

India’s showing, even beyond The Eternal War, was strong at Annecy 2026. Take the pitch And on That Day… (another Variety pick) by twin directors Kushagra and Kushal Kishore. They posted before the event, “We have been working on this film for the past four years now and we are so excited that we can finally start sharing more about our film with everyone!”

Not to be outdone, Studio Eeksaurus screened its very good India Lens (watch) in the commissioned film competition. It’s a bright collage that, according to director Nijin Nazeem, is designed to express the idea of “jugaad, which literally translates to ‘a clever hack’ or ‘an inventive fix.’ ”

Annecy wrapped up on Saturday. At the closing ceremony, the festival handed out its awards. Unsurprisingly, the Cristal grand prize for commissioned films went to Unloved (watch) — a really popular French ad. The brief and enjoyable Eco Beat (watch), a German-made PSA, took the jury prize.

Again, it’s the norm for Europe and especially France to win at Annecy. And win they did: Iron Boy, Blaise, Core Dump, The Great Dreamscape, The Song of the Storms, Gently.

The Cristal victors among shorts and features, though, were less expected. Don Hertzfeldt’s new piece claimed the first; the winner of the second was a bit shocking. “There were audible gasps as the crowd slowly figured out which film the jury was describing,” wrote Jamie Lang of Cartoon Brew.

That film is The Violinist. When it arrived this year, it was the first Singaporean feature to compete for the Cristal. Now, it’s the first to win one.

The Violinist walked a long road to get here. “This project has taken more than a decade to realize,” said co-director Ervin Han. The process began with his 2015 short The Violin (watch), upon which he built the feature. This time, he teamed up with Spain’s Raúl García, an animator from the Disney renaissance. “It was something almost magical, we really hit it off,” García said.

The film is about World War II and Southeast Asia’s colonial era, and about music. Violin-playing was a key challenge for the animators. “We created a dedicated unit whose only job was animating violin performances. The finger positions had to match the music,” García told Cartoon Brew earlier this month.

For the story behind The Violinist, check out that interview and Animation Magazine’s great feature on the film. The gist is that the project was sprawled across many countries — Singapore, Spain, Malaysia, Indonesia and more — and funded in part through Europe’s co-production system. Slowly, it happened. Now, Gold Derby is calling the film Singapore’s “best chance in years” to get its first Oscar nomination.9

With another Annecy Festival ended, planning for the 2027 event is already underway.

The country of honor next year will be Colombia — its animation is getting a spotlight. And the word is that Annecy 2027 will be Marcel Jean’s last in the artistic director role, where he’s been since the 2013 edition. The festival boomed on his watch, and whoever replaces him will have big shoes to fill.

Each year, the news out of Annecy is an update on the state and overall health of animation around the world. Not every sign in 2026 was a good one. Europe’s industry, again, is struggling; there are threats to cut France’s state-funding apparatus. Meanwhile, a protest erupted over a film with GenAI imagery, amid Annecy’s (and the industry’s) growing embrace of GenAI animation.

Judging by the festival this year, though, the animation world still has fight in it. Annecy 2026 remained a place where ex-pats from Russia’s animation diaspora could share their art, like Natalia Mirzoyan with Winter in March and Anton Dyakov with Black Box. It was a place where ambitious films from Mexico (Lights of April, Insectario) and Chile (Brave Cat) could win prizes and get deals. And, again, it was a place where a long-shot dream project from Singapore could make headlines worldwide.

The really unlikely and really personal stuff is still out there, and Annecy is still a platform for the underdogs. That’s what gets us excited about it every year.

2. Newsbits

• We lost animator Luis De La Rosa (34) and actor Akihiro Miwa (91).

• In America, directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois posted a wordless tribute to the late actor Daveigh Chase, the voice of Lilo.

• In Palestine, two sisters in Gaza have set up a small, homebrew theater that screens animated films for children.

• The French film Patouille and the Parachute Seeds (2021) is newly on YouTube, and worth a look.

• In Russia, Leonid Shmelkov’s feature Restlessness will have a theatrical release next month, despite its controversial snubbing at Suzdalfest in March. It comes as Shmelkov has achieved social media fame with his animations about a blue dog-man.

• Also in Russia: the living legend Garri Bardin posted his new film The Russian Waltz on YouTube.

• In Morocco, the French network TV5Monde invested €1 million into local animation, backing 10 animated series from two studios.

• The Australian animator Alex Grigg posted a great, short tutorial on “contour spacing,” and how to animate more definite, concrete lines.

• Speaking of The Wolf from France: the film just secured an investment of €450,000 from Eurimages.

• Finally: a look at the creative environment that Michael Sporn built in New York City.

3. Last word

Thanks for reading today’s issue! We’re closing out with personal comments from the two of us:

John: Our process with the newsletter runs seven days a week. Work begins a few days in advance for each issue, and we pick article topics carefully, based on the time we’ve got and what’s energizing us that week. The days after deadlines (Monday, Tuesday and Friday) often go to administrative work and prep, and a little breathing. It’s rewarding, but we’ve learned how important it is to pace ourselves. On that note: our regular mid-year recap and break are coming up soon. I’m excited to relax a bit, work on research projects that don’t fit into our regular schedule and clear out my backed-up tabs!

Jules: Alongside the other work and relaxation on the break, I’m looking forward to developing a children’s picture book idea of mine! I think of animation, comics and picture books (and so many other combinations of visuals and storytelling) as branches of “sequential art” — visual art arranged in sequence like words in a sentence. I’ve found that a surprising amount of what works in one of these mediums can carry over into the others, and that they even have surprisingly similar histories of development. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always loved this combination of art and story, whatever form it takes.

Until next time!

Welcome! This is another Thursday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — all about the environment that Michael Sporn created.

His work isn’t discussed enough. We’ve covered some of his gems from the ‘80s and ‘90s (Abel’s Island, Champagne, Doctor De Soto), but he was prolific, and there are more. “Sporn’s numerous sensitive adaptations of classic children’s books,” noted one historian, “are themselves classics of animation.”1

He wasn’t a megahit-maker. For a certain group, though, his films were hard to beat. Sporn was a decorated artist, and admired by the press and in his scene. When Kiki’s Delivery Service reached America, the Chicago Tribune mentioned that it was “the creation of artist-director Hayao Miyazaki, honored as ‘the Disney of Japan,’ and equaled in the United States only by Michael Sporn.”2

When animation for kids was often loud and commercial, Sporn’s was otherwise. In a way, kids weren’t even its target. “I make all my films for myself first,” he once said. “It just so happens that the children’s market has been the most receptive.” Even in projects for “the youngest possible audience,” he insisted on artistry, and on the “adult themes and social values” that mattered to him.3

“[R]ather than commenting on other animated cartoons, [like] so much of animation that is being done today, we try to talk about the world,” Sporn said in the 2000s.4

For decades, a stream of these fresh, thoughtful films emerged from his Manhattan studio, Michael Sporn Animation. His deadlines were tight and his budgets low — but he’d founded the company as a sort of haven for artists, and it stayed one. The films were the result of that environment.

Sporn hired newcomers and old hands alike, and gave them freedom and an almost familial place to work.5 As actor Heidi Stallings, his wife, said a few years ago:

… a lot of the animators would go from boutique to boutique. They would come in and work for maybe six weeks, and then they’d go to another job. But Michael Sporn’s was a very creative space … He employed people for a long period of time, and it was a place to grow together as an artistic community. And that’s how he ran it — like a repertory company.6

Read more

Welcome! We’re back with another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. This is the plan:

• 1. The early development of Pixar’s human characters.

• 2. Animation newsbits.

• 3. The last word.

A note before we start. Last week, we premiered the Congolese short Machini (2019) online, and the response was wonderful. Unfortunately, some readers ran into technical problems with the embedded video, so we’re sharing a fresh link (watch here) that should work for everyone. Machini is available for one more week, and we highly recommend giving it a look while you can.

Now, let’s go!

1. Computer puppets

It was a question that haunted early 3D computer graphics. What makes a credible animated human?

Building realistic people was a fixation of the CG world in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Just take Rendez-vous in Montreal (1987), which tried to resurrect Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe as polygonal models. “You can put actors out of jobs,” boasted its creators.1 But the results were unsettling. And, while cartoonier humans like the one in Tony de Peltrie (1985) were better, they still didn’t totally land.

These problems were known. Pixar’s crew, for one, was well aware of them.

The studio’s first wave of films from 1986, Luxo Jr. and Beach Chair and Flags and Waves, have no humans. They’re about inanimate objects (lamps, folding chairs) and natural phenomena (shadows, water) that were easier to capture. The team didn’t try to do what it couldn’t do, and so those films continue to hold up.

“Modeling and animating a human character on a computer is a difficult proposition,” wrote Pixar’s post-production guy Craig Good in 1988. “Three-dimensional modeling is really a form of sculpture. There is nothing easy about making a statue of a person which is both realistic and pleasing, and making the sculpture move only complicates things. The eye is very unforgiving when it comes to human faces.”2

Pixar did attempt a cartoony clown in Red’s Dream (1987) — a “project which nearly killed us,” Good noted. But the film’s city sets and living unicycle are its real stars. The unicycle emotes and looks believable and commands the screen in ways that the clown, as impressive as he was then, never quite manages.

When Pixar started Tin Toy (1988), it aimed to tackle the human problem. Craig Good called it “our first serious effort at animating a human character.”

In its early years, Pixar wasn’t an animation studio, and its animation division was very small. “We’re a computer company, and we started to create [films] in an effort to advance our technology and research new topics,” said programmer and artist Eben Ostby, one of the core members.3

Ostby had a major hand in Tin Toy. Pixar spent half a year on the film, and “[m]ost people would be aghast at how many all-nighters we put in while making this five-minute clip,” he said. It pairs Pixar’s living objects with a detailed human performance: Billy, a baby feared by all his toys. The team described humans as “absolutely the most difficult thing to try,” but they were tried nevertheless.4

Billy took his name from Bill Reeves, another key figure in the Pixar animation department. One magazine called him the character’s “father, of sorts.”5 Reeves was a technical director on Tin Toy, and an animator, and he was involved in the creation of Tinny, the story’s hero. Craig Good wrote that Reeves had an “amazing ability to sit down and work for hours at a stretch.”

He used that ability on Billy. Reeves began by cutting grid lines into a large clay sculpture by another artist, then tracing those lines with a digitizer pen to bring the shapes into Pixar’s computers. As Reeves said in the ‘80s:

I thought the baby would be an interesting problem. This was my first attempt at doing human forms, but several people in SIGGRAPH … had done work with humans. We based some of our conclusions on what they had done. And we did a lot of experimenting. …

[W]hen we put the head and the body together, they didn’t fit. The neck is proportioned differently in the two pieces. … But it was okay; I managed to bang in the back of his neck with some tools in the computer. In fact the head just sits down on the neck. … If you look closely, there are some shots when Billy is crawling where you can actually see a gap — like he’s coming apart. Thank goodness it’s only five or six frames.

His neck was just one of Reeves’s and the team’s worries. This character was a huge, painstaking achievement, backed up by many hours of research into babies’ movements — Billy’s model had some 40 “attach and pull points” on each side of its face. But Pixar was going beyond its means. “When he opens his mouth really wide, there’s a funny creasing that goes on in the jaw area,” Reeves said. He also mentioned that “the skin wasn’t flabby like a real baby’s would be.”6

“We achieved probably 90% of what we’d hoped with the gross motions,” Reeves admitted at the time.

It was enough to win Tin Toy an Oscar — the first for computer animation. Frank Thomas of the Nine Old Men called Billy “just fantastic.” But other people soon attached other words to the character: “demonic,” “from hell.”

A lot about the baby works, and the film holds together, but not everything is right. Billy’s design is a bit uncanny, his movement a bit stiff. He’s caught at a weird middle point between realism and exaggeration, and the tech didn’t go as far as Pixar needed. While the tin-toy protagonist looks great today, Reeves has described Billy as “weird-looking.”7

After the Oscar victory in 1989, the editor of Computer Graphics World spoke about the reactions to Billy. “It’s really difficult to get things lifelike. The baby — some people find it grotesque,” he said. “That’s the best there is, and it’s not there yet.”8

Following Tin Toy, Pixar went back to objects. They led a lot of the studio’s ads during the first part of the ‘90s, for products like Listerine. As with Luxo Jr.’s lamps, many of these characters are compelling even now.

Along the way, the team developed a Tin Toy Christmas special that ultimately evolved into Toy Story.9 Objects were the stars again, and not by coincidence. Like Ed Catmull said in 1995:

We wanted to play to our strengths for our first film. We didn’t want to start with something where the humans were the major characters. In Tin Toy, we had a problem with the baby, because it looked cute on paper, but in 3D it looked a little grotesque, because the head was so large. It has to do with human perception. We want to make humans that are stylized, not real. The problem is, the closer you get to reality, that’s when the brain starts to kick in with its auto-recognizers, and thinks something is a little weird. If you back off, and make the humans more abstract, audiences will accept it more readily.10

Toy Story couldn’t do without humans altogether — it needed a few in side roles. Pixar made them far cartoonier than Billy, but they remained the most challenging characters, and were animated last.11

One trouble was skin. Toy Story’s skin shader was “phenomenally complicated,” said the studio’s Brad West, and yet “when we put it into a lit scene, it essentially looked like plastic. It was the world’s most complicated plastic shader.” Plus, the humans still couldn’t act quite as effectively as the toys.12

And so Pixar relied on workarounds. To combat the skin, the artists went for “as much clothing as possible” on the characters. There were also attempts to keep Andy, Sid and the others only partly in frame. “[S]ome humans feel stiff at times. So we’ve tried to stage shots where we only see feet, hands,” said Pete Docter, a directing animator on the film.

Yet Ralph Eggleston, Toy Story’s art director, wasn’t satisfied. Like he said in ‘95:

... for all the work we put into them, the humans fall flat. Everything else is so believable, and when you see the people, it’s jarring. In 75 percent of the cases, the people look really great, and the other 25 percent I’m not that comfortable with. Next time we’ll do better.13

It was a little harsh. Toy Story is an excellent film, and the human characters are way more persuasive than the Tin Toy experiment. But it was also true that Pixar hadn’t fully cracked what it was trying to crack.

The ideas were in place: humans who were stylized but convincing, who didn’t feel artificial and who moved with the liveliness of Pixar’s object characters. Toy Story got part of the way there. Geri’s Game (1997) did the rest.

Jan Pinkava had joined Pixar in 1993, drawn by the appeal of Luxo. “It was because of that film that I pursued computer animation,” he said.14 Pinkava became an asset to the ad group: the Listerine Robin Hood spot was his, among others.

Geri’s Game, a short film, was a large step up for him. Catmull was looking for someone to work on human characters, and Pinkava got the job. “Ed knew that in the long term the studio needed to be free to include humans,” Pinkava said, because there are “only so many toy, bug and fish stories you can tell.”15

Here’s Catmull:

Our only directive to Jan before he made it was that it had to include a human character. Why? Because we needed to get better at them. We needed to work on rendering not only the smoothly irregular surfaces of faces and hands but also the clothes that people wear. At this point, remember, because of our inability to render skin and hair and certain curved surfaces to our satisfaction, humans had only been ancillary characters in our movies.16

Serious tech solutions powered Geri’s Game. For example, Tony DeRose used “subdivision surfaces” to create a seamless character who doesn’t split or crease in the odd ways that Billy does, even with Geri’s broader range of motion. Cloth simulation got realistic enough that Geri’s jacket had to be cut properly to hang properly. And his model had a nearly unwieldy number of controls.17

But the tech side wasn’t the only thing: there was an artistic question, too. Pixar’s humans had left Billy behind, but they still occupied an ever-so-slightly-awkward middle ground between anatomical realism and cartooniness. Pinkava and his team completely escaped it.

Geri, the old man who plays chess against himself, became the furthest thing from a realistic human. “I imagine Geri as a super stop-motion puppet ... I really like the fact that he’s not real. ... People have been creating stylized characters in sculptures for thousands of years,” Pinkava said. “We don’t think about it in terms of computer graphics very much, but it’s an incredibly rich tradition.”18

Pinkava credited this realization to his upbringing. He was born in Czechoslovakia, and raised on the work of Jiří Trnka, the master illustrator, puppetmaker and stop-motion director. With Geri, Pinkava told Cartoon Brew that he “completely ripped off” Trnka’s designs, down to the “way he’s proportioned, his nose, his chin, the way his head works, the way the eyes sit in the face.”

Pinkava again:

… I came from an area of Europe where people have been dealing with puppet theater for centuries … I wasn’t inventing anything. I was just copying what I was exposed to as a child. It felt obvious that you don’t get into the debate of making human characters realistic, never mind that, that’s a worthy goal but not for the animation studio. You’ve got to figure out a stylization for the character as if it’s a digital puppet.

The CG world was still preoccupied with photorealistic human replicas who moved like people. Despite the creepy results in Rendez-vous in Montreal, there was a sense that CG imposters could replace actors. Words like “synthespian” were thrown around; Geri got described as one in the press.

Pinkava pushed back a bit. “It’s not, as some people might think, the creation of fake people to compete with living actors,” he said in 1998. “Why waste living talents, anyway?”19

As it happened, Jiří Trnka had reached that same conclusion in his mid-century stop motion. In 1955, he argued, “A perfect imitation of a human — for example a mannequin in a clothing store window display — gives the impression of life neither as a statue nor as a puppet, and the same is true of wax figures from a [wax museum], which always look terrifying; if they moved, we would have no choice but to run.” Naturalistic puppets were likewise “unnatural and morbid” to him.20

For Trnka, puppets were “not replacements for humans.” Instead, they “should be more archetypical than a human actor can be, and portray and serve the idea of a person, not their surface.”21

The hard problem that Trnka addressed came back in early computer graphics. Many projects ended up in wax-figure territory; tech shortcomings usually got the blame. Geri, though, remains a credible character after almost 30 years. As graphically lo-fi as he looks today, the artistic solutions behind him have lasted. He’s carried by his pushed, puppet-like, archetypical design and movement.

One of Geri’s animators, Karen Prell, was herself a live puppeteer with Muppet experience. “It was so much fun getting into Geri,” she said at the time. “If you think of him as a 3D puppet, he’s so amazingly expressive.”

Pixar’s lamps, unicycles and toy figures had always, in a sense, been puppets — it was partly why they succeeded. Geri brought the idea very concretely to humans. Geri’s Game won an Oscar, and its techniques got into Toy Story 2 and many films ahead.

In fact, the short attracted Brad Bird to Pixar. “Geri’s Game made me feel confident that my problems with CG films could be addressed, because here was a human that was stylized, yet had credibility,” he said. Geri’s “tactile and fleshy” look stood out to him, but these traits didn’t lapse into uncanniness.

Pixar’s human-heavy movies of the ‘00s show the lessons of Geri’s Game. Bird’s Incredibles leans into archetypes and broad strokes, and the cast of Ratatouille (originally Pinkava’s film) is visibly Trnka-inspired. And so, despite the age of these characters, they hold up well.

Not everything from the era did. Bob Parr and Edna Mode appeared roughly three years after The Spirits Within (2001), a synthespian project and a big technical achievement.22 That film’s humans were high-fidelity — and yet they’re stiffer, colder and less believable than Geri and the characters made in his mold.

There’s no doubt that tech breakthroughs played a role in Pixar’s discovery: the software and hardware to make Geri’s Game didn’t exist in 1988. But the studio tapped into something older, too, that went beyond tech. As art director Ralph Eggleston said about The Incredibles:

In my opinion it’s always been a fallacy, the notion that human characters have to look photo-realistic in CG. You can do so much more with stylized human characters. Audiences innately know how humans move and gravity works, so if a human character doesn’t feel right, they’ll feel something’s wrong. But if the weight works for stylized characters, the audience doesn’t question it — like the dwarfs in Snow White.23

2. Newsbits

• A new site, Animation Hub, links to watchable copies of European animation from the festival circuit and beyond. It’s a project by CEE Animation, an EU group headquartered in Czechia.

• Speaking in America, Guillermo del Toro discussed GenAI. “We are told images can be generated by artificial means. The existence of an image is not just to be there,” he said. “It is to connect us, to make us feel beauty.”

• Check out A Rabbit Slipping on Banana Peels: The Movie, a student film from Japan, newly uploaded to Geidai’s animation channel.

• Belgian artist Britt Raes is showing off her new series Luce and the Rock, including a clip. It’s based on her very good short of the same name — watchable on YouTube.

• In Croatia, the top prize for shorts at Animafest went to Winter in March by Natalia Mirzoyan. See the complete list of winners.

• Pablo Leon’s feature To the Other Side, produced by Dinamita Animación in Colombia, as a teaser and details.

• On Friday, Australia’s Glitch posted the last episode of The Amazing Digital Circus on YouTube. Views are already close to 50 million.

• The government of Russia is suing Soyuzmultfilm over subsidies handed out more than a decade ago, when the studio was state-owned. Scholar Pavel Shvedov weighed in on the lawsuit.

• The American Center of Puppetry Arts, based in Atlanta, is running an exhibition of stop-motion film materials until November.

• Finally: a look at the inner workings of Jiří Trnka’s stop-motion studio.

3. Last word

Thanks for reading today! As usual, we’re wrapping up with personal comments from the two of us (co-runners):

John: The Annecy Festival started today, and I’ll be interested to see what stories it brings. We aren’t on the ground for the 2026 event (things didn’t line up for it), but we’ll have an eye on the news as always, and we’ll definitely be covering it. Attending in 2025 was an experience I won’t forget, and it’s our hope to be there next year. The big, overriding goal is to take Animation Obsessive on the road across Europe, touring animation scenes and festivals in person and writing about what we see — and I’d love to be doing it by the time Annecy 2027 rolls around. If you’re there this year, hope you enjoy!

Jules: Earlier this week, I was creating the design for a character who travels through a fantastical world. I noticed myself defaulting to giving them a 20th-century-style hand-carried suitcase, and it occurred to me that many children today have only ever known wheeled suitcases. It made me think about other visual iconography and kinds of stories we have hanging on from previous eras that no longer reflect how we live; how there seems to be a certain reluctance in us to mythologize the present. Maybe we could gain something in our understanding of our lives in the contemporary world if we had a few more stories with fantastical wheeled suitcases — just like Kenneth Grahame once put Toad in an automobile, all the way back in 1908.

Until next time!

Welcome! Hope you’re doing well. It’s a new Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and our topic this time is stop motion.

We had a piece about New York indie animation in the works for today, but our area was hit with a power outage that’s forced us to delay. The good news: there’s a backup, and it’s something we were already looking forward to sharing.

An animation story that really speaks to us is the one about Kihachiro Kawamoto and Jiří Trnka, the Japanese and Czech stop-motion masters. In 1963, early in his career, Kawamoto went to communist Czechoslovakia to study under Trnka, whose films he deeply admired. It was an encounter between two wholly separate worlds, and it changed Kawamoto as an artist and as a person, permanently.

We’ve investigated the details for a few years now, buying obscure books and magazines in which Kawamoto discussed the trip — including his published letters and diaries from that time. He learned an incredible amount about stop motion, and he documented the Czechs’ methods at length.

Read more

Welcome! This is a new Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — one that’s been in the works for most of 2026. Here’s the slate:

• 1. A release of Machini.

• 2. Animation newsbits.

• 3. The last word.

Now, let’s go!

1. Material and message

Around five years ago, at a festival, a certain film wowed us. The freshness and ingenuity of it were almost startling. Since then, we’ve waited for a wide release online — to give everyone a chance to see what was achieved here.

The wide release never came. Not, at least, until today.

We’re talking about Machini (2019), created by Frank Mukunday and Tétshim, artists from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The two specialize in animating with stones, chalk, scrap and other found materials, and their work is unlike anything we’ve seen elsewhere. It’s beautifully done and deserves more eyes.

So, in early 2026, we began sending emails. Thanks to the kind cooperation of the directors and Atelier Graphoui, where they animated Machini, we’re thrilled to bring you the film and a little insight into how and why it exists.

Courtesy of Twenty Nine Studio and Atelier Graphoui, you can watch Machini via the embed below for the next two weeks. For the story behind the film, read on.

Machini is about the Democratic Republic of the Congo (for short, the DRC). More specifically, it’s about the Katanga area. Frank Mukunday and Tétshim work there, in the large city of Lubumbashi.

Katanga has long been polluted. In his youth, Mukunday lived close to a disposal site for the Gécamines mining company. Around the time of Machini, the neighborhood that Tétshim’s family called home was an “acid-eaten” place. The DRC is copper-rich, and its reserves of lithium and cobalt are key components in modern batteries. Machini tells of the mining and extraction of these things.1

Because officials didn’t stop the pollution, Mukunday and Tétshim decided to make a film about it. “Choosing this theme is our cry of revolt,” they tell us by email, “against the human and ecological tragedy affecting our loved ones in neighborhoods polluted with toxic waste by mining companies.”

In Machini, you find stone people living beside a chalk-drawn river, with chalk houses and chalk trees in the background. The world is a collection of optical illusions; there’s always some visual trick on screen. Then you come upon the factory, and its poisonous green smoke and sludge. The film’s title refers to this factory: “a giant machine” that consumes the town.2

Machini’s main material, the rocks, came from Lubumbashi. “We started by gathering stones directly from the streets, specifically around the neighborhood of the Gécamines (Générale des carrières et des mines) factory,” they explain.

The idea was to use “the very elements of [their] exploited land to tell its story,” to let “the soil of Katanga speak.” Stones become human-shaped characters who move with an incredible sense of life. This is symbolism, the directors add: the rocks reveal a human “presence that cannot be erased,” despite the circumstances.

Their view is that “the material is the message.” What these stones say, by nature, is unique to these stones.

Mukunday and Tétshim started animating together during the 2000s. Both studied communication in college; they had to teach themselves animation, helped along by guides on YouTube.3

Their earliest attempts ran into roadblocks. “We had neither the equipment nor the assistance to locate funding,” they’ve noted before. “Technically and economically, we were at an impasse. ... [I]t was absolutely necessary for us to find a form of language that was both simple and original.”4

Finally, they discovered “the bas-relief stop-motion technique,” which allowed them to animate rocks on flat surfaces.5 Their first test from 2010, Cailloux (watch), is an action story about a stone man who defeats and absorbs all comers, until a tiny opponent beats him. Mukunday and Tétshim shot it in one night with a borrowed camera and — because they didn’t have electricity at the time — candles for light.

In 2015, they released Kukinga (watch), made with the same stones-and-candles method. It’s an ambitious, Kill Bill-esque tale that follows a mother’s relentless fight to save her child. As with Cailloux, the budget was basically nonexistent.6 But it also shares with Cailloux a real understanding of motion, and its storytelling and filmmaking are strong. The directors’ abilities were obvious.

With Machini, their third film, Mukunday and Tétshim had a breakthrough. As they write:

The production was made possible through a Belgian-Congolese collaboration. The initial contact came through Rosa Spaliviero, a Belgian-Italian friend who heads the production company Twenty Nine Studio. She connected the project with another key player: Atelier Graphoui, based in Brussels.

Atelier Graphoui gathered funds, and Machini became the directors’ first film to have “professional production conditions.”7 They created it during residencies at Graphoui in Brussels, and the studio’s equipment and mentorship let them shine.

For Machini, stones from Lubumbashi were paired with objects from the directors’ surroundings in Europe. “Once we arrived in Belgium, we completed our toolkit with other salvaged materials found on-site,” they tell us. Brand-new objects weren’t needed: they wanted “texture,” things with “a history within them.”

This assorted stuff became film sets, and the hope for each shot was an emotional connection with the viewer — not just an experiment in form. They “built the scenes almost like sculptures before animating them frame by frame.”

All together, around four years went into Machini, most of which weren’t dedicated to the animation part. As Mukunday and Tétshim explain:

The shoot lasted four months in total, but it was disrupted by several forced interruptions. Our stay in Brussels was dictated by short-stay visas, which forced us to take breaks and deal with administrative pauses. This required us to work through parts of the weekends and generated periods of great stress, intense fatigue and sometimes doubt.

The “almost therapeutic” experience of turning rocks and scrap into a film, seeing them move, helped to keep Mukunday and Tétshim going. They were getting results. Paired with Tétshim’s wonderful chalk animation, already so effective in Kukinga, the look was special.

It built up to:

… the “Work in Progress” screenings of our work in Brussels. Discovering the audience’s live reactions and seeing the emotion translate across the screen without needing dialogue was an immense reward.

The earlier Mukunday and Tétshim films had some success — Kukinga even landed on a DVD of African shorts. But Machini won prizes from Kenya to Canada to Spain. Its victory at a major Polish festival humbled the two directors. “[W]e hope that this trophy will give a lot of hope to Congolese filmmakers in general,” said Tétshim. By then, with Machini done, they were back in the DRC.8

For our part, Machini hasn’t left us in five years. It’s very, very good, and one of the most visually inspiring shorts of recent times. Getting so much energy out of rocks, chalk and junk metal — attaching emotion to this stuff — isn’t something you just do. Most haven’t. But Mukunday and Tétshim did.

They’re continuing to do it. At the Annecy Festival last year, the two pitched their new film, Kesho, and we loved what we saw. They’re still using their stone technique, still speaking about the conditions in the DRC — in other words, still sticking to this path that they’re still cutting for themselves. They tell us:

For [Kesho], we are drawing inspiration from the reality of Kolwezi, a mining town where the earth and the daily lives of its inhabitants are literally shaken by industrial activities. Through this work, we want to explore the dignity and resilience of those who, despite everything, continue to envision a future.

We’re looking forward to Kesho, and can’t wait for the project to get the support it needs.

In the meantime, it’s an honor to present Machini to a few more people. Thanks again to Graphoui, Mukunday and Tétshim for their openness to this idea. We hope you’ll take a moment, during the two-week release window, to enjoy their fantastic film.

2. Newsbits

• In America, Jonni Peppers posted a clip of her new series Field Notes from the Orphanage, due on YouTube in August. We’re excited.

• The Mexican film I Am Frankelda appeared on Netflix worldwide. Coinciding with its release, Cartoon Brew did a great interview with the Ambriz brothers, featuring behind-the-scenes art and photos.

• In Cuba, an article digs into the state of the country’s animation industry. America’s long-standing embargo makes it tough to get new computers or to distribute films, and the oil blockade is now leaving just “three or four hours of electricity per day,” hugely expanding animation schedules and costs.

• In China, director Yu Shui says that planning is underway for a sequel to his film Nobody.

• The theatrical release of The Amazing Digital Circus opened to $36.6 million worldwide last week. This weekend, its revenue in America rose to $29 million, according to Deadline.

• Watermelon Rind Boats, a Russian animation outlet new to Substack, is sharing a vast trove of older interviews and films, and adding new ones.

• The American business Crunchyroll has become “the most prolific investor in anime productions, participating in more production committees than any other company, Japanese or otherwise,” reports Animenomics.

• In France, calls to shut down the CNC (which provides state funding to films) have led the agency to defend itself. A new release of data reveals that the country’s state-backed films are, in fact, slightly profitable on the whole.

• Two British animation legends, Peter Lord and David Sproxton of Aardman, were knighted.

• Last of all: we wrote about the origins of master animator Yasuji Mori.

3. Last word

Hope you’ve enjoyed today’s issue! We’re wrapping up with personal comments from the two of us:

John: Now that I Am Frankelda is streaming in most countries, we got to rewatch it for the first time since Annecy 2025. I’d heard that the team revised the film for its theatrical release — cutting out and newly shooting quite a bit — and was excited to see the changes. What I didn’t expect was such a tighter, clearer and more propulsive story. It’s kind of a different film, and an even better one. Cinema Fantasma (and Guillermo del Toro, who consulted on the edits) did excellent work, and Frankelda is now, safely, one of my favorites of the 2020s.

Jules: On the topic of Frankelda (which I also loved), I was amazed by the freewheeling approach the movie takes to its visuals. While watching, it felt like what they filmed was often treated as raw material to manipulate, like the scenes where colors are so drastically hue-shifted or increased in saturation that they distort. There were images they wanted to create, and the sterilizing fear that the effect wouldn’t look “perfect” didn’t stop them. It’s a way of making art I have a lot of affinity for, and — when combined with the detail of the sets and clothing filmed at such high resolution — it adds up to that feeling of overwhelming detail, texture and vibrancy that makes the visual experience of the movie so incredible.

Until next time!

Welcome! It’s another Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this one is about Yasuji Mori (1925–1992).

He was an animator in postwar Japan, and the words used for his impact are grand ones: “fundamental,” “incalculable,” “immeasurable.” At Tokyo’s Toei Doga, he was key to the look, tone and motion of films like The White Snake Enchantress (1958). And he taught the future artists of Japanese animation.1

“I can’t exactly say when I was first able to understand what Mori-san gave me. … I can only say that I gradually became aware of having been handed something very important,” wrote Hayao Miyazaki.2

Those who knew Mori recalled him as quiet, unassuming and shy. He didn’t chew people out, and he hated conflict, and he would cover his drawings when someone approached his desk. Many younger artists at Toei Doga looked up to him, and often gathered near him.

“Around such an important person,” Isao Takahata remembered, “everyone seemed happy and at ease.”3

But Mori was a perfectionist, too. He rarely accepted animation without revisions, and he frequently worked late to correct it himself. Animator Yasuo Otsuka, a Mori apprentice, wrote that his mentor’s critiques were detailed when a pupil was willing to improve. When they weren’t, he was silent — essentially giving up on them. “In that respect, he was truly scary,” Otsuka remarked.

Mori’s mix of kindness and exacting ability made him central to postwar animation. Kazuko Nakamura, an early Toei Doga artist, credited him with inspiring her to stick with the job. “During my time at Toei, in my clumsiness, I couldn’t come close to the adorable, delicate movements and drawings of Mori-san,” Nakamura wrote, “but through my association with him I received the essence; you could call it the joy of putting life or heart into things.”

The Mori known to Toei’s people didn’t come into being all at once. He was made by the postwar era — and the spirit of his animation, which so informed Toei Doga, was born in the medium’s struggling years.

Read more

Welcome! This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s the slate:

• 1. On the art of pacing.

• 2. Animation newsbits.

• 3. The last word.

With that, let’s go!

1. Going for popcorn

During the ‘80s and early ‘90s, Jeffrey Katzenberg had immense creative pull at Disney. He was behind The Little Mermaid’s over-the-top ending, for example.

“Die Hard had been a box-office hit,” recalled director John Musker. “So he came into the office saying, ‘We need The Little Mermaid to be more Die Hard.’ That’s how we got the second action sequence, with an Ursula who is as big as … Nakatomi Plaza.”1

Disney movies of that time reflected Katzenberg’s taste — his crews struggled to get around it. And there was one note, in particular, for which he became notorious. “I’m going for popcorn,” he said, often. In other words: the film was slow, and the audience was tuning out.2

Pacing was a fixation of Katzenberg’s. He wanted to keep kids in their seats — and he would make a movie bigger and faster until they stayed put. “He felt that unless a movie raced nonstop to its conclusion, an audience would inevitably lose interest,” wrote one director.3

For this reason, Katzenberg famously tried to cut Part of Your World from The Little Mermaid. It was too slow, he argued — it was losing kids. Howard Ashman (who co-wrote the song) ultimately saved the sequence. Yet he echoed Katzenberg’s worries.4

“Kids have such a short attention span,” Ashman said in 1989. “Cinderella sings a ballad while she’s scrubbing the floor. It’s a brilliant piece of animation … but the kids run up and down the aisles and get popcorn.”5

Katzenberg’s sense of pacing shaped many, many Hollywood projects — at Disney and beyond. Most of his films have a degree of similarity: they tend to be fast, loud and sharp-edged. Like the Disney artist Francis Glebas wrote:

He sat and watched [a] movie imagining that his kids were sitting next to him, and he would take notice whether they were glued to the screen or were fidgeting around needing to go to the bathroom or get popcorn. In other words, he was thinking about the film, not from the filmmaker’s point of view, but rather that of the audience.6

There’s no doubt that Katzenberg had a method. He turned out big hits. And current Hollywood producers rarely take the risks he did in his heyday — like Chicken Run, which he backed despite market research predicting it would fail.7 Even so, his notes frustrated lots of people. Katzenberg movies typically had little use for subtlety.

That was one reason Hollywood artists idolized Hayao Miyazaki back then. He was willing to be subtle, quiet — slow. “The biggest impact Miyazaki’s work had on me was seeing how he had the courage to let simple things entertain us,” said Glen Keane, the Disney animator. “A situation doesn’t always require a big explosion or a crazy gag.”8

As it happened, Miyazaki came to this approach in the face of pushback, too. In Japan as well, there were higher-ups who worried that kids wouldn’t sit through a quiet film.

Miyazaki’s first major creative role in animation was on Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968), directed by Isao Takahata. They made it at Toei Doga in Tokyo — and it was meant to be boldly different from the studio’s normal work. It was darker, more cinematic and more experimental.

Looking back on Horus, Takahata recalled a sequence maybe 30 minutes into the movie. The hero (that is, Horus) walks through an abandoned, flooded town — looking for the source of a haunting song he hears. It’s slow and atmospheric. Miyazaki designed the area, and many others on the team filled out the sequence’s rich look and feel. Toei Doga’s usual cartooniness and spectacle vanish here.

As Takahata wrote, “[F]or me it was a truly enchanting moment ... [but] at the premiere, small children were running noisily around the theater.” Later, when Horus aired on television, he noticed that the sequence had been omitted.9

It was dispiriting. For years, Horus in general was a source of pain for Miyazaki and Takahata — it didn’t turn out as they’d hoped. “The film’s got everything I feel embarrassed about in it,” Miyazaki said in the ‘70s.10

But the experience with the village sequence didn’t end his and Takahata’s desire to make quieter work. In fact, they went much further in that direction with Panda! Go, Panda! (1972), a short film for theaters.

Panda is based in everyday life and has little in the way of a dramatic arc. Producers were nervous. The whole team was nervous. As Takahata said:

… Japanese animation at the time went at a very fast pace. Because children’s ability to steadily watch wouldn’t last that long. We were told we had to make rapid noises and make things intense and detailed. So, this kind of leisurely film, where it’s kind of soothing and relaxing, was something that everyone thought would be difficult to present. … You see, we were very worried. Even after it was made, there were people at the company who looked doubtful. They were like, “I don’t know, something this slow is...” 11

The team wasn’t sure whether kids would sit through Panda. It was another experiment. But it was an experiment built on ideas that Takahata and Miyazaki had developed.

After Horus, the two of them had tried to make a Pippi Longstocking series in 1971. It didn’t happen. Yet that project was about everyday life as well — and Takahata’s outline for Pippi went into detail about the team’s theories. It would take finesse to keep kids engaged with a show like this one, he wrote. Pippi would need to be carefully handled, moment by moment.

The depiction of everyday life had to be concrete and real, noted Takahata. Kids wouldn’t stick with Pippi unless they felt they could reach out and touch this world and its characters. “[W]e should not only depict the intentions and outcomes of Pippi’s actions,” he argued, “but also clearly depict the process of the actions in such a way that they themselves evoke enjoyment and interest.”

He went on:

While depicting the behavior of the quirky girl Pippi, it is necessary to heighten the expression in a way that expands children’s imaginations and lets them feel the freedom of play and the joy of discovery. …

Can people feel a sense of reality if the expression is just symbols or rote patterns? Unless there’s a tangible portrayal of the lively Pippi as lively, beautiful things as beautiful to the audience, joyful things as joyful and tasty things as tasty, only the story will be able to hold the audience’s interest, especially in the case of children.12

In other words, the viewer needed to viscerally feel the world on the screen. It wasn’t enough for the characters to call food delicious: kids should be able to sense its deliciousness at a glance. Something that makes the characters happy should make the audience happy. Something beautiful in the story should be beautiful to the viewer.

Panda! Go, Panda! grew out of Pippi. It was the implementation of these ideas — the proof of concept. Here was a quiet, slow-paced story about everyday realities, aimed at small kids. It drew attention to the things that most animation glossed over. “[I]n order for the people watching to truly feel and believe,” Takahata argued, “first of all, we had to carefully concoct that foundation, which is what kind of life is being lived.”

When he and Miyazaki went to the Panda premiere with their own children, they were afraid that the younger viewers in the theater would get bored and run around again. But they didn’t. They were rapt. Seeing children immersed in this world was life-changing for Panda’s team. “I’m really glad I made something like this,” Takahata remembered feeling.

Here’s Miyazaki:

At the time it was thought that children liked flashy, noisy films. But we thought that fun and excitement are best found in the small moments of everyday life. We made Panda! Go Panda! in the hope it would be something children would fully enjoy. … [T]he children who came to watch it enjoyed it immensely. At the end they sang along with the theme song. I was thrilled.13

This willingness to slow down, to bring out the interest held in quieter things, became a trademark of Takahata’s and Miyazaki’s projects. It soon got them a megahit with Heidi: Girl of the Alps (1974), one of the biggest animated shows on TV.

They were following through. “[A]fter that [experience with Panda], even though other works such as Heidi had a rather slower pace,” Takahata said, “we thought maybe the children would focus and watch them … as long as the way we were making things and what we were going to show were done properly.”

By the ‘80s, when Miyazaki’s and Takahata’s work really came to Hollywood’s attention, they were masters of this style.

Even in stories about magic or adventure, like Nausicaä or Castle in the Sky, mundane things get a chance to shine. The films don’t rush from one set piece to another: the audience is given time to immerse itself in the visceral believability of the world. This grounds the bigger moments. Miyazaki wrote that, in his early career, he “logically and consciously structured a film with ... a calm scene followed by a dramatic scene.”14

Movies like Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) took over without the help of theme-park-ride pacing. “It can be something as simple as the way the wind moves flowers,” said Glen Keane, “or the sound of a bee buzzing around a girl as she watches the clouds drift overhead. It encouraged me to find atmospheric moments in our films to animate.”

Miyazaki was very important to the Pixar people, too. Which led to battles: Toy Story’s team tried to add breathing room to the story, but the film was subjected to Katzenberg’s popcorn notes. Eventually, though, he left Disney — and Pixar got a bit more freedom to follow Miyazaki’s kind of pacing.

That said, even with Katzenberg out of the room, it’s hard to brush off the sense that the audience might start fidgeting. That’s a persistent worry — not just in Hollywood. The Takahata–Miyazaki approach to pacing was always a bit unorthodox, and it requires a deft touch and a keen eye for detail. The point isn’t simply to add slowness: it’s to hold the audience’s interest by other means.

Some years ago, Pixar’s Lee Unkrich went to the Ghibli Museum. There, he caught one of the Ghibli shorts it screens — the exclusive ones that don’t get home releases. As he explained:

There was a character, a little girl, sitting in a field, unwrapping a piece of candy. [Miyazaki] goes in on this close-up of the hands, holding the piece of candy that’s kind of coveted and very important to this little girl. And she just slowly opens the wrapper, very meticulously. He spends so much screen time on this that part of my brain is just blowing up, thinking, My God, how can he get away with just focusing on this one little detail? But at the end of the day, it’s just this wonderfully, beautifully observed moment. His films are just filled with moments like that.15

2. Newsbits

• We lost Marjane Satrapi (56), co-director of Persepolis and author of the graphic novel.

• After decades as a lost film, The Legend of Miragaia (1931) turned up at a flea market in Portugal. It’s an early achievement in Portuguese animation — and “thought to be the first animated silhouette film” from the country.16

• In Ukraine, the government’s new “Thousand Springs” grant program includes funding for Ukrainian animation teams.

• In Australia, makers of children’s shows are undergoing a crisis caused by lost government quotas and the disappearance of streamer commissions.

• The theatrical premiere of the Amazing Digital Circus finale has earned a strong $21 million in America — a real win for indie animation.

• Artist Alice Rossi spoke to Fumettologica about low pay in Italian animation. Reacting to the uproar around My 2 Cents, Rossi called it “not even the worst-paid project” in Italy, and argued for more nuance and industry-wide reforms.

• In Russia, animator Vasilissa Afanasyeva created a music video for the vintage song Na-Na-Ni, Na-Na-Na. It’s well done, and now on YouTube.

• Also in Russia, a top aide proposed total government control over state-supported films. “[O]versight needs to happen at every stage: the idea, the script, the shoot, the release. … I don’t idealize Soviet censorship, but it had an undeniable artistic benefit,” he said.

• In India, Studio Eeksaurus posted the first episode of its series You Know Who, made for an environmental org.

• Finally: a personal reflection on Disney’s Atlantis and the place of criticism.

3. Last word

Hope you’ve enjoyed today’s issue! Like last Sunday, we’re closing out with personal asides from the two of us (co-runners of the newsletter):

John: Hard to believe it’s already June! I dedicated part of my week to a hobby project: a new translation of Jiří Trnka’s Good Soldier Švejk (1954) film series, built on existing subtitles and the English versions of the Švejk novels. I’ve been at it for around a month, and it’s giving me a lot of appreciation for these shorts (and for the original Švejk stories). Trnka’s work is something I cherish more and more, and spending time in his world, studying his mastery, is like a refuge for me. If you haven’t looked into him before, good entry points are his film The Hand and the sketches and photos in this book.

Jules: I started reading the Odyssey for the first time earlier this week (I think I read a heavily abridged version as a child), and I’ve been especially struck by the specificities of everyday life that appear throughout. For example, squires tipping a chariot against a wall to store it, or an assistant using his hands to show a blind bard where to reach his instrument, or Princess Nausicaä asking her father if she can use their good wagon — “the high one, with good wheels” — on a trip to wash clothes in a river. It’s not what you might imagine when you hear the term “epic poetry”! I don’t recall similar details in the later romances I’ve read from medieval Europe, and they lend a sense of nearness and humanity to the story that I find really amazing.

Until next time!

Welcome! Hope you’re doing well. This is another edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — and it’s a little bit different.

In the first year of our publication, we released a personal essay from our lead writer, John. Its topic was Fantastic Animation Festival (1977), and the format was a one-off. We haven’t used it again.

Today, though, we’re bringing a second one. The focus: John’s childhood encounter with Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), its lingering effect on him and how that’s related to a broader cultural trend. We don’t plan to make this a regular format, but it seems worthwhile to publish this one.

We hope you’ll enjoy!

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Welcome! It’s a new Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s the slate:

• 1. Thinking about the “flaws” of stop motion.

• 2. Animation newsbits.

• 3. The last word.

Now, let’s go!

1. The human element

This week, there was good news in the animation world. Netflix put up the trailer for I Am Frankelda, due on the platform next month. And, on social media, a lot of people responded.

If you’ve been with us for a while, you may know that I Am Frankelda is Mexico’s first stop-motion feature, that Guillermo del Toro took part in the production and that it succeeded in Mexican theaters last year. It’s the work of Cinema Fantasma in Mexico City, and it “might be one of the cheapest stop-motion features of all history,” according to co-director Arturo Ambriz.1

Del Toro posted that Frankelda is the result of “tight resources and endless effort and imagination.” He added, in a viral follow-up, “Made by humans for humans.”

There’s no getting around the film’s human element. It’s defiantly handmade, with puppets and movement that don’t aim to be flawless. Animator Aaron Long wrote this week that it “has the perfect amount of visceral, slightly janky stop-motion flavor.” The artist Tom Smith noted that it’s “so nice to see a stop-motion feature that embraces all the quirks of the medium.”2

We saw that sentiment going around. At a moment when shiny and polished images are the norm, and the flattening effect of GenAI is everywhere, I Am Frankelda is blatantly human. Which stands out. More and more, flaws like these feel less like bugs to be fixed than they do valuable features of the form.

Stop motion in the 20th century had idiosyncrasies. Even the best animators couldn’t avoid them.

Purely smooth movement was rare, and the screen usually possessed a restlessness. Fingerprints appeared and vanished on clay; tiny props on the sets got jostled between frames; the strength or direction of lights subtly changed.

“Mistakes” along those lines popped up in Ray Harryhausen’s work, and in The Blue Apron by Hermína Týrlová, and in A Grand Day Out. They added an energy, though. Del Toro has argued that “the imperfection of it was so gorgeous to look at, because it told you how the thing was done.”3

By the turn of the 21st century, there were alternatives to imperfection. Computers could do without bumps, texture and accidents — unless added intentionally. And smooth, seamless computer graphics felt fancy and new. George Lucas went back and added a bunch of CG stuff to his past movies.

Now, the wind has shifted again. We’re well into a period when even computer animation is often made “jittery” on purpose.4

Steps toward tactility have been a theme — including in this year’s Hollywood blockbusters. Project Hail Mary runs on live puppetry; the Tippett studio got to do a little stop motion for the new Star Wars. The fact is, old-fashioned movie magic is cool again. Especially as GenAI spreads, people want to see evidence of real things, and a human presence, on screen.

And this is benefiting stop motion. The timing of I Am Frankelda’s worldwide release feels weirdly ideal, given that Cinema Fantasma made the film explicitly in opposition to GenAI. As Arturo Ambriz told us last year:

… in AI, you get results. And stop motion is the opposite: it’s about the process. All the flaws, everything that shakes, is a celebration of the process. With the presence of AI turning the industry inside out, we are celebrating that everything is handmade. …

We were very extreme. In some of the camerawork, the camera crew presented me a flawless camera movement. I was like, “Come on, that will never feel credible, because there were no drones in this production. I want it to look like the cameraman lets go of the handheld camera, and they put it on a crane. It’s like this [lowering his hand with an abrupt stop], it shakes and then goes up.”

So, many of those mistakes were put there on purpose — so it would feel like there was a miniature cameraman working with real dollies and such.

There’s a second reason, too, that the attention on Frankelda is promising. It reveals not only that people want tactile things, but that stop motion itself has more options than many believe.

Today, stop motion’s built a reputation as slow, expensive and agonizing — a medium out of reach for most artists. And that can be true. Del Toro’s worthwhile Pinocchio wasn’t a small production, and it cost some $35 million. But the differences between Pinocchio and Frankelda are obvious: del Toro’s film has that clean camera movement, and its animation is realistic and basically spotless.

It belongs to the 21st century, the Dragonframe era, when it’s possible for stop-motion animators to rival the slickness of CG animation. Plenty of teams have gotten good results that way. Still, it’s not the only way. Cinema Fantasma’s movie feels a bit more classical — in some respects, a bit 20th-century.

Back in the ‘60s, a Japanese animator traveled to Europe. His name was Kihachiro Kawamoto, and he wanted to learn from the stop-motion masters in Czechoslovakia, including Jiří Trnka. It’s a fascinating story we’ve told in the newsletter before. When Kawamoto got home, he published an article about his findings — the most in-depth account of the Czechs’ process we’ve read.

What Kawamoto encountered sounds kind of surreal now. Animation was a “very energetic and fast” process; he saw one animator shoot approximately 10 seconds and some retakes in roughly four hours. A few years ago, for comparison, Aardman spent more than four months on 30 seconds.5

Meanwhile, the teams were small. When Kawamoto documented Jiří Trnka’s studio, it had three lead animators, three assistants and only 23 regular staff in total, including office workers. Here’s an excerpt from Kawamoto’s article, which the researcher Matteo Watzky recently translated for us:

One day, I told them about a puppet film we made [in Japan] for the US which required more than a hundred staff members. They could hardly believe me and talked between themselves about how impossible it seemed to them.

They believe that a small number makes for greater skill and strengthens them as a team; furthermore, they hold that their close bond is what makes puppet film possible.6

The animators didn’t have Dragonframe, or even VHS playback, to check their work. Only after a scene was shot could they watch it. They also didn’t use exposure sheets (the tools for planning animation back then), nor did they copy movements from live-action reference footage. As Kawamoto wrote:

… it is mostly on set that, following the schedule, the director explains every shot and scene. Afterwards, animators think on their own, write down a rough timing in a notebook, and then proceed to manipulate the puppets, ultimately becoming one with them. The puppets walk, make evil plans, lie, experience unrequited love…. All of these come from the animators’ own interpretation, and none of these performances is of the mechanical sort that could simply be reproduced with the same timing. …

[The team says] that the performance taking place in puppet films is not about reproducing human movement as closely as possible, but about the creation of movement itself. As such, their main concern is to take away every futile motion in human movement to keep only what is most expressively effective. In this light, the analysis of movement from reference film only gets in the way, and so they do not do it.

It’s far from the accepted pipeline today. Even so, the team created masterpieces like The Cybernetic Grandmother and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The films have imperfections, as was inevitable with such fast, free work. You can see the camera get bumped, the lights flicker, the characters jitter. On the other hand, the screen has a special energy — an almost overwhelming amount of life.

There’s amazing life in I Am Frankelda, too. Although the film wasn’t done with ‘60s Czech methods, it feels more in line with the old ways. And the flaws it contains, its all-too-visible signs of human touch, are starting to feel like advantages.

It means something right now. Take Ray Harryhausen’s old work, long since surpassed in polish and detail by other effects animators. His tight budgets and schedules meant, as he said, that “everything you see … is usually the first take.”7 Up against AI-generated Tung Tung Tung Sahur animations that move with interpolated smoothness, though, the roughness of Argonauts’ animation doesn’t simply look old anymore. Instead, it looks real.

It’s clearly work “by humans for humans,” in del Toro’s words. That in itself has appeal. Which is an opening for all artists — especially those who don’t have the money or time to aim for perfection.

What’s going on is bigger than one movie from Mexico, as intriguing as that movie is. However Frankelda ultimately performs on Netflix, the perceived value of handmade things is growing by the day. What used to seem crude and outmoded may simply have been out of fashion, for a little while.

2. Newsbits

• New Zealand’s first stop-motion feature is Kiri and Lou Go Raaa! — and it’s debuting at Annecy next month.

• In Japan, Nippon TV met with blowback for airing AI-generated animation on its program Zip. Meanwhile, CODA demanded that AI companies cease training on the work of its member companies, including Studio Ghibli.

• In America, Jorge Gutierrez dropped out of his project for Amazon’s “GenAI Creators’ Fund.” (Also, the GenAI feature Critterz is reportedly collapsing due in part to the closure of Sora.)

• In India, Vaibhav Studios’ feature Return of the Jungle had a weak opening at the box office.

• Also in India, Studio Eeksaurus shared the trailer for its new series You Know Who, which starts in June.

• The French school ESMA is sponsoring WIA, bringing in its mentorship program and a “scholarship, events and workshops.”

• In America, the MoMA is holding an exhibition on animation this summer. It will feature art from Sally Cruikshank, the Hubleys, Michael Sporn and more.

• Cartoon Brew talked to the head of Ghana’s AnimaxFYB, which recently hit its 10-year anniversary.

• One more from America: production staff at Netflix Animation joined The Animation Guild.

• Finally, we followed up on three topics from the newsletter this year.

3. Last word

Hope you’ve enjoyed today’s issue! To close out, we’re introducing a new regular section: a few personal thoughts from the two of us (Jules and John, co-runners).

John: Hey, everyone! I’m the lead writer of the Animation Obsessive newsletter; it’s been my role here since we began in February 2021. The inspiration for these personal notes came from an animation newsletter we like, re:frame, that does the same thing. They generously gave us the okay to swipe their idea. The re:frame guys (Rollin, Kambole and Toussaint) are pro journalists, and they run it as a free side project. I read it every week and definitely recommend it.

Jules: Hello, everybody! I’m Jules, the art director and news researcher for the newsletter (also since we began). I’m not quite as used to writing publicly as John is, but I’ve been getting into the swing of it since starting a hobby newsletter on the side a couple of years ago; I think this will be fun! To start off, I thought I’d highlight an animated video (directed by Nikhita Prabhudesai Jeena) that TED-Ed released this week on one of my favorite topics — toys in the ancient world. It’s wonderful to consider that people have grown up playing with pull-toy horses for thousands of years.

Until next time!

Welcome! It’s another Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. And, this time, we’re going a little deeper into three past topics from 2026.

The process behind our newsletter is tricky to explain. We have a long list of ideas, and many of those ideas sit there for years, as we wait for leads and angles to appear (and as we gather material proactively). Maybe four years of buildup, for example, went into our Sherlock Hound article from January.

After an article goes out, it’s common for research to continue. We follow leads, buy more books, confirm details that were originally too tenuous to publish. A lot of work occurs under the surface. Often, it feeds into later pieces. But there isn’t always an obvious place to put what we learn.

So, today, we’re pulling together a few discoveries that haven’t fit elsewhere — tied to our stories on Sherlock Hound, the style of One Hundred and One Dalmatians and the character designs of Mulan. Hope you enjoy!

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Welcome! This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s the plan:

• 1. On the design and animation of Ernest & Celestine (2012).

• 2. Inside early computer animation.

• 3. Newsbits.

With that, let’s go!

1. Its own graphic universe

Animated movies from Europe take risks. Plenty aren’t as far outside the box as, say, Flow — the wordless gem that won an Oscar last year. But a lot of European animation has tried things this century, from The Secret of Kells to Robot Dreams.

For one, European governments support filmmakers. For another, these are small productions with room to maneuver. “The fact that we have low budgets, it’s possible to take risks,” said one director from the scene.1

The speaker there was Benjamin Renner, discussing his Ernest & Celestine (2012). It was another of those risky movies. By now, it’s a modern classic — recommendable to anyone. The film is warm and funny from its first scene, and its Chaplin-and-Keaton-style humor really lands. And then there’s its look.

Ernest & Celestine’s places and characters, and the ways in which those characters move, are gorgeous and light. The whole film is like a moving watercolor sketch. It’s a style that feels spontaneous, even though it was carefully planned. Many, many projects have imitated it since, and the effect still hasn’t dulled.

Achieving the look mattered to Renner and the team. After all, this story about the friendship between a mouse and a bear came from a well-loved children’s book series, and those books have beautiful illustrations. “When we started working on the film, every member of the artistic team wanted to be very faithful to Gabrielle Vincent,” wrote Renner, referring to the series’ late author.2

It was a tricky balance. Producer Didier Brunner explained that it wasn’t enough to do “a mechanical conversion of Gabrielle Vincent’s work.” Instead, as Renner put it, they “had to avoid imitation in order to adapt the original style to the big screen in a fitting manner.”3

When Benjamin Renner got offered a position on Ernest & Celestine, it was around 2007. He was young — only 24. Renner had just graduated a few months earlier, and he hadn’t done much beyond his very good student film A Mouse’s Tale.4

That year, though, Didier Brunner was hunting for fresh talent. It was something he did. He’s in many ways the architect of modern French animation — and European animation generally. Kirikou, The Triplets of Belleville, Kells and more bear his name. Here, he was seeking someone to adapt Vincent’s books, to which he had a personal attachment. He’d read them to his daughter in the early ‘90s.5

“Looking around a bit at the directors I knew at the time, I didn’t see a personality suited to this kind of project,” Brunner recalled. So, he scouted French animation schools and got a lead from the unbeatable La Poudrière. He detected promise in A Mouse’s Tale.6

The two met, and Brunner pitched the idea. “[H]e gave me some of Gabrielle Vincent’s books, which I had never seen before,” said Renner, who immediately loved the art and stories:

I accepted because that was exactly what I wanted to do when I left the school — to illustrate using very clean lines, minimalist yet accurate. I wanted to convey emotions and sentiments in just a few lines, and movement through subtle animation.

Already, Renner was influenced by Studio Ghibli. (“I wasn’t allowed to watch Japanese anime before I was 18 years old. Spirited Away was quite a shock!” he said.) And Ernest & Celestine put him in mind of Isao Takahata’s My Neighbors the Yamadas — a film of low-key vignettes in a watercolor world, not unlike Vincent’s books. “I thought I was going to do a French Yamadas,” noted Renner.

It didn’t quite turn out that way, but Yamadas stayed a major reference. Renner went for the impressionistic type of digital animation that Ghibli had pioneered.

Soon after that first meeting, he animated a few tests in Flash. “The goal was to find the energy of Gabrielle Vincent’s drawings and interpret it into motion,” he wrote.7 Brunner later called them “simple, dynamic and magnificent.” The project was on its way.

Ernest & Celestine began with a four-minute pilot, created by roughly 12 people over the course of a year.8 Renner was hesitant to direct, so that role went to Grégoire Sivan at first. It was Renner’s job to crack the style.

As he said:

Gabrielle Vincent always drew like sketchy, very spontaneously. … We learned that when she was drawing she would work on a single drawing and if it was not correct, she would not correct it but she would always take another piece of paper and she started redoing it, and redoing it, and redoing it until she was satisfied.

For the animation I wanted to have the spontaneous feeling, so the animation, as you can see, it’s not really clean, the lines are dirty, they are open, because it is more like you are sketching an animation rather than making something very precise.9

Working with him on the pilot was Marisa Musy, key to the look of the world. “Marisa played a huge part in our decision to do the sets in watercolor,” Renner said. Her test backgrounds captured something about Vincent’s own watercolors that, he felt, computers couldn’t.

Musy and her partner, who works under the name Zyk, did tremendous research for the film. They sketched studies of Vincent’s books and original art, met with people who’d known her, visited the city where she’d lived, used paper similar to hers. The two of them called Vincent’s style “very lively, very gestural,” with watercolors that are “soft, all in blends.” They took the same approach.10

Vincent’s art even impacted the staging. As Renner said, she used a “theatrical illustrative style” — in that her compositions are wide and stage-y, like a play. Likewise, Ernest & Celestine is full of old-fashioned film grammar, with wide, static shots and often extended takes. The team minimized close-ups and fancy camera angles, which suited Renner:

I don’t necessarily like these kinds of shots; I respond more to work like that of Chaplin, almost theatrical, where there is just the right framing that brings forward the actors’ performances.

Chaplin’s films became a reference, as did Keaton’s. Didier Brunner referred to the books themselves as “sweet, modest and Chaplinesque,” and it comes through in the film. There were other references, too: The King and the Mockingbird, Tokyo Godfathers, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Only Yesterday, My Neighbor Totoro.11

It’s not easy to follow in the steps of movies like those, especially without disappearing into your influences and making a lesser copy. The same was true of Vincent’s work. Over time, Renner and the team came to understand the need to bring their individuality to the project. As he wrote:

How could we not betray her making this film? That was the question we always had in mind ... We didn’t think [of] the film as a film she could have made because we couldn’t imitate her; it would have been pointless.

When I was a kid, I used to read comic books or novels that I loved so much that I drew them to make new stories inspired by those universes. Ernest and Celestine is like that. In a way, it is a drawing we made inspired by her work that we want to share with her.12

The need to break away from Vincent grew more obvious after the pilot, which hewed closer to her art. Some changes happened organically. As Renner kept drawing Celestine, for example, her proportions drifted based on what his hand naturally wanted to draw. Although he was trying for accuracy, he’d “appropriated the character without meaning to.”

When the feature started development, Renner finally accepted the director job, but he asked for a co-director as backup. He got two: Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar of A Town Called Panic. “[T]hanks to them, I let loose,” Renner said.

The film’s final style owes much to the team around the directors. Seï Riondet, the character designer, shaped Ernest & Celestine’s cast — scouring the books for ideas. “She worked maybe one complete year before we could have a complete lineup of all the characters,” Renner wrote. “She designed more than 170 characters and she [did] an amazing job.”13

Marisa Musy and Zyk were all-important as well. They handled the color script, and Renner credited them as “the creators of the artistic design.” The pair oversaw the backgrounds and created a number of them personally.14 Each was done in two layers (ink and watercolor), then composited. As they wrote:

… all of the backgrounds were drawn traditionally. On a first sheet, we made a sketch in blue pencil. We didn’t get into details too much because the aesthetic of the film rested more on the dynamics of the line and the balance of the forms. On another sheet, we redrew that sketch in ink with the help of a light table. Then we went back to the first pencil drawing to apply watercolors. It was necessary to stretch the sheet over a wooden board [to combat warping]. … After the paper was dry, we erased the blue pencil to keep only the watercolor.

Meanwhile, the animators worked in Flash on the characters. One of the standouts was Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec, put in charge of “a large part of the sensitive scenes,” including the hug between Ernest and Celestine toward the end.15

Thanks to the animation’s looseness, color had to be done as creatively as the lines were. “You cannot just click in somewhere to fill a field with color,” said Patrick Imbert, who led the animation staff. “The paint had to be painted correctly, and we got animators for it.”

These passes resulted in flat, cel-style visuals. Another layer was added from there. To match the backgrounds, and channel Vincent’s art, the team needed an animated watercolor effect. That was one of the challenges with Ernest & Celestine, but custom software by Digital Graphics (in Belgium) solved it. Applied during the compositing stage, it made all the difference.16

Ernest & Celestine was never meant to be avant-garde. The script by Daniel Pennac has a classical feel, and Renner and his collaborators filmed it in a classical way. Even the artwork belongs to the world of children’s literature and Franco-Belgian comics — both popular fields.

But the film was still a risk. Not much animation had ever looked like this: even My Neighbors the Yamadas isn’t a one-to-one comparison. Renner was an unproven director, and Ernest & Celestine was made with unproven methods, and Vincent’s books were hardly a mega-franchise. Plus, while the budget of €10 million was small by American standards, money was still on the line. It was “a very substantial sum for a French animated film,” as Renner said.

These risks allowed Ernest & Celestine to become as interesting as it is — so interesting that Hollywood itself took notice, and has been inspired by it ever since.17 The film turned into an Oscar nominee and a symbol of what Europe’s co-production system can do.

And you can see that risk and its payoff at a glance, in the film’s wonderful artwork. It’s something Didier Brunner has always emphasized. Around 23 years ago, he put it this way:

... the uniqueness of European animation studios, and especially French ones, is the strong particularity of each film, which has its own graphic universe. This French and European uniqueness is a wealth that must absolutely be protected, because it is this which will differentiate [us] from “Hollywoodian” animated cinema.18

2. Worldwide animation news

2.1: Uncovering early CG animation

An important documentary came out this month — not in theaters or festivals, but on YouTube. Its title is Inside the Works, and it examines a place often overlooked in animation history: the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab.

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, it was a greenhouse of early computer animation. Pixar’s co-founders Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith spent years there (both were interviewed for the documentary). As we hear from the lab’s Michael Chou, a “who’s who of everybody in computer graphics went through those doors.”

And at the documentary’s center is The Works itself: an ambitious, unfinished attempt at the first all-CG feature.

Inside the Works was assembled by Jacob Pruitt, author of Drawing for Nothing. It began with a coincidence. In early 2024, he was researching The Works and contacted Amber Denker (formerly of the Computer Graphics Lab). Here’s Pruitt:

Amber told me about a college student who spoke to her a few years prior named Oliver Levine. Oliver was working on a paper about The Works, which later turned into a short documentary that he ended up shelving in early 2021. He and I got in touch, and he sent me the couple of interviews he’d done with Alvy Ray Smith and Ed Catmull. From there, he essentially handed me the torch.19

Pruitt did “off and on” work on the documentary from March 2024 until this month. A list of lab alumni guided him to his interview subjects — and to people with lab animation and related footage in their possession. “I had a box of 11 [U-Matic] tapes shipped to my house,” Pruitt notes. They were “warped, extremely moldy and hadn’t been played in decades but surprisingly had wonderful results.” These were just one source of the material in the doc.

“We have at least one piece of animation for every year between 1978–1992!” Pruitt writes.

Before he could compile it all into a film, Pruitt had to organize his interviews — in some ways, a pretty low-tech process. “The interviews were transcribed automatically and I made notes about topics that were talked about when and where,” he explains. “I printed out those notes (with time stamps), cut them into strips and sat down in front of a table and sorted for hours to tell one big story.”

Tying Inside the Works together are its animated host segments. Two lo-fi characters from the lab’s film 3DV (1983) were recreated with the help of surviving references, like wireframe printouts. Pruitt was the writer and director here; most of the visual side came from artists under the pseudonyms Ubern, Dooble and Maximized Animation. “The tape filter we used for those animated sequences was made from scratch in Blender by my friend Ike Henderson,” Pruitt writes.

They were only part of the crew involved, joined by sound designer Tamar and the voice actors. Pruitt adds:

I’m eternally grateful to the team for volunteering on this project because we were never sure if we’d even make money from it. So far, we still haven’t due to copyright issues. In the end it was a passion project that, regardless of the result, we wanted to see finished.

Along the way, they broke real ground. There’s wild footage and information in Inside the Works — this is a rare peek into the strange, little-known world of computer animation before Pixar. And Pruitt isn’t done digging. “There was one very large discovery made at NYIT, but I’m not sure if I’m allowed to talk about that yet,” he writes. “The master to The Works was also recently recovered, so finds are going to keep emerging!”

You can find Inside the Works below:

2.2: Newsbits

• We lost Tom Kane (64), the voice of Professor Utonium and countless others.

• In Ukraine, the Dovzhenko Center reports that it’s secured the rights to almost 400 of the country’s animated films. It plans to upload new scans on an official channel.

• Cartoon Brew has a great interview with the Japanese cinematographer Atsushi Okui about his work with Ghibli on Whisper of the Heart and Arrietty.

• The Japanese film Nezumikozo Jirokichi (2023), directed by Rintaro, hit YouTube with English subtitles.

• There’s an intriguing three-minute clip available for Light Pillar, a new Chinese feature. An American distributor recently picked up the film and is planning a theatrical release.

• In the Dominican Republic, director Tomás Pichardo-Espaillat (Olivia & the Clouds) is working on his next feature, Where the Bees Sleep, in collaboration with Nika Zhukova. He recently shared materials from the project.

• The Mexican studio Cinema Fantasma, of Frankelda fame, released a demo reel that includes footage of its yet-to-be-completed Ballad of the Phoenix.

• In Russia, Sergey Kapkov has another animation history book on the way.

• In America, Deaf Crocodile announced a new batch of animated film releases for this year, including the fourth volume of its Treasures of Soviet Animation series. This one is dedicated to The Adventures of Mowgli.

• Last of all: we looked at the move away from “cartoons” in Japanese animation.

Until next time!

Welcome! It’s another Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this one’s about a revolution powered by a single word.

The term cartoon has been loaded forever. It calls to mind simplicity and broadness, and often humor. Plus, in some circles, the view survives that cartoons are for children exclusively. There are a lot of wonderful cartoons, and the label doesn’t feel as limiting as it sometimes did in the past. But the stigma isn’t fully gone even now.

When Japanese animation swept America in the ‘90s, the refrain that these films and series were “not cartoons” was hard to avoid. Which made sense, all things considered. Jan Scott-Frazier, an early foreigner in the anime industry, summed up the thinking well. “I wanted to make films, not just cartoons,” she said, “and anime was the only place they were doing that in animation.”1

A lot of work from Japan felt new. The loan word “anime” (a key tool of American marketers back then) came to represent animation amenable to many styles and tones, and stories that weren’t just for kids. This was a world beyond just cartoons. To many, it looked like freedom: even Disney’s artists were reinvigorated.

Yet Japan wasn’t immune to limiting labels itself. A struggle had played out there, too — just a little bit earlier.

The exact terms were different, but the ideas were similar. Mid-century America had print cartoons and animated cartoons; in mid-century Japan, manga referred to both animation and comics.2 Notably, the word “manga” tends to get rendered in English as “cartoon.” And, decades ago, terms like manga eiga (cartoon movie) were in everyday use. They were loaded.

Directors Rintaro and Toshio Hirata were two who felt trapped by this language, as they worked together on children’s cartoons during the ‘60s. A couple of decades later, when the pair collaborated again on the film Bobby’s Girl (1985), it was clear that the situation had changed. Bobby, adapted from the hip novels of Yoshio Kataoka, is a semi-arthouse tragedy about a teenage runaway.

The film isn’t a cartoon. When it came out, Hirata pointedly referred to it as “animation.” That was a loan word from English, and a key tool for Japanese marketers back then. It represented work that wasn’t just for kids, that could tackle all kinds of stories. For Hirata, it meant freedom. As he explained in the ‘80s:

Back when animation was known as manga eiga (cartoon movies), both Rintaro-san and I were busily making manga eiga.

We were very dissatisfied.

After all, the prevailing view was that manga eiga was something for children to watch.

We would talk about our dreams, saying that there should be all sorts of possibilities for animation. We were like literary youths (bungaku seinen).

And now it’s Yoshio Kataoka. It’s astonishing. We’ve entered an era of Yoshio Kataoka animation. “Amazing!” I think. It feels like the times have totally changed. … We’ve become able to make all sorts of things.

Animated films (animeshon eiga) have finally branched off from manga eiga.

More and more animated films of all sorts will surely continue to be born. Bobby’s Girl is just one of them.3

Read more

Welcome! This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the lineup:

• 1. How Winnie-the-Pooh was reimagined in the Soviet Union.

• 2. Animation newsbits.

Now, let’s go!

1. Reinventing Pooh

During the ‘60s and ‘70s, in the USSR, there emerged a series of films based on Winnie-the-Pooh. It’s a treasure. Each entry handles Milne’s stories precisely, and with incredible charm and humor. They all remain hugely popular today.

And at the films’ core is their take on Pooh himself. He isn’t quite Milne’s Pooh, or Disney’s. Many hands at Moscow’s Soyuzmultfilm made him what he is.

A precious book from recent years is Legends of the Soyuzmultfilm Studio. Historian Sergey Kapkov wrote it — gathering some 400 pages of interviews with people from the studio’s classic era. Winnie-the-Pooh veterans were among them. Director Fyodor Khitruk, animator Violetta Kolesnikova and designers Eduard Nazarov and Vladimir Zuikov all spoke to him about the mysteries of Pooh.

The idea to animate these stories had been on Khitruk’s mind since the ‘40s. It was only in the ‘60s, though, that he encountered the Russian edition of Winnie-the-Pooh. By then, Khitruk was a top animation director in the USSR — his Story of a Crime (1962) helped to bring about a stylistic revolution. With the Winnie-the-Pooh translation in hand, he and his circle of artists began their struggle to bring the character to the screen, without having watched the Disney adaptation.1

Their goal was to make “an absolutely new bear,” unlike any animated before.2 Khitruk didn’t want to copy the original illustrations, either. In Legends of the Soyuzmultfilm Studio, we hear from Eduard Nazarov about Vladimir Zuikov’s initial design sketches:

At first, Volodya Zuikov brought a completely unimaginable character. It was not a little bear, but a crazed dandelion, a creature of ambiguous form: woolly, bristly, as if made from an old mop that had lost its shape. Its ears — like someone had chewed on them but hadn’t had time to eat one of them. A nose somewhere on its cheek, asymmetrical eyes, and everything was pointing in different directions. But there was something in it! And Khitruk clutched his head: “Hell, what have you come up with?!”3

Zuikov gets his say in Kapkov’s book, too. At the time of Winnie-the-Pooh, he was somewhat new to animation — he’d just worked with Khitruk on the design for a movie title sequence and for the classic Film, Film, Film (1968). Khitruk took to him in that period. “I felt that this artist was born for animation,” the director said.4

As the team revised his wild Pooh design, Zuikov played an essential role. To quote his interview in the book:

Edik Nazarov always laughed, saying that I’d drawn a dandelion. But that was the first version. Then I remembered that, in my childhood, I had a scruffy teddy bear with a flattened ear and one eye, because I had horsed around with it a lot. No neck; the head was simply flat against the body. That’s how I drew it. And Khitruk asked, “Where’s the neck?” I answered, “What for?” And then we came up with the idea that he wouldn’t have a neck and would turn with his entire body.

It was a process: not much about the character came easily. Many members of the team tried their hand at Pooh’s design. In fact, it’s hard to credit his final look to a single artist — the flattened ear was Zuikov’s, but Nazarov contributed the uneven line weight to Pooh’s back.

As Zuikov wrote elsewhere, “No one can imagine how much trouble had to be endured at the beginning of work on Winnie-the-Pooh.”

The problems went further than design. Khitruk had long been nervous to adapt these stories — “every line … was dear to me,” he wrote. Making a short film out of Milne’s books would mean careful condensing, plus visualizing the spirit of the text.

Khitruk needed to “translate all the inexpressible charm of the language” into images, as he put it. The books rely on subtleties of wording and rhythm for their effect. He cited the passage, “Rabbit and Piglet were sitting outside Pooh’s front door listening to Rabbit, and Pooh was sitting with them.” How do you draw that sentence?

As a director, Khitruk favored just-so timing, editing and movement. You see them in The Story of a Crime and in the films that followed. This sensibility allowed him to put humor and interest into a scene through a tiny pause, or a slight change in delivery, or a gesture that’s a little awkward. He had a mastery of tone — and he used it to capture Pooh’s character and the magic of Milne’s world.

Yuri Norstein, a pupil of Khitruk’s, highlighted the moment when Pooh falls from a great height in the first Winnie-the-Pooh film. He’s stunned after he lands — he freezes in a single pose as Piglet worries over him. But, while Pooh doesn’t move, the scene never deflates. It uses timing and rhythm to get subtle humor, and “inexpressible charm.”

“Khitruk knows how to hold the composition for the necessary time: it doesn’t hang in space; it is taut,” Norstein wrote.5

Still, again, much of the thought behind Pooh’s mannerisms and acting wasn’t Khitruk’s alone. In Legends of the Soyuzmultfilm Studio, we learn about the origin of Pooh’s famous walk from animator Violetta Kolesnikova:

I came to the group a month later because I was finishing work on a previous film. The group was in mourning — the character’s walk wouldn’t turn out. ... I suffered, followed all the details, caught the rhythm of the walk, how the paws should work... and Winnie-the-Pooh walked.

The final effect she got was unique. In the films, Pooh travels on floating feet: he has no legs. But breaking the laws of physics in this way gave his walk an infectious bounce that’s memorable after one viewing.

Pooh’s design was odd enough to demand new solutions from the animators. He’s built with thick, inflexible shapes and can’t move normally. Nazarov said that the character was “made up entirely of impossibilities,” in the sense that every part of him resisted animation. “But this is where the interest emerges,” he added.

The effort to move this character led to discoveries — some of which were accidents. When the talented animator Maria Motruk (Khitruk’s wife) tested a scene where Pooh marched along, a mistake occurred during the in-betweening process. “And the bear on the screen suddenly waved his arms senselessly. We laughed so much!” said Kolesnikova. After the team persuaded Khitruk to keep it, Pooh’s poor coordination became a signature of his character.

For Khitruk, Pooh was fundamentally “a philosopher, a dreamer.” He’s a deep thinker with sawdust in his head: naive, but completely serious. He bumbles along according to his personal nonsense logic. And that’s, really, the engine of the Soviet Winnie-the-Pooh films. Khitruk made a point of removing Christopher Robin — and with him any higher authority who could call into question Pooh’s philosophy of serious nonsense.6

Khitruk liked to credit one person above all for crystallizing this spirit of the character: Pooh’s voice actor. As Khitruk said, “[T]he success of Winnie-the-Pooh depended to a large extent on the work of Yevgeny Leonov.”

Casting the films was tough — Leonov was one of many actors who auditioned. At first, Khitruk wasn’t sure that even he would fit. “Every day I became more and more convinced that Leonov’s voice was absolutely... unsuitable for Pooh,” he said. Then George Martynuk, the sound editor, pitched the idea of speeding up the recording. And it was perfect.

Khitruk used Leonov’s performance during the sessions as a reference for the animation. He once wrote:

[Leonov] didn’t simply recite the text written in the script into the microphone, but somehow immediately and precisely picked up the character of the hero. Here he stood before the microphone, froze for a moment, adopted some kind of pose, his gaze became pensive — and we felt the state we had been seeking for so long; this is exactly how our hero should be. Leonov managed at once and unmistakably to find the image of this eccentric dreamer.

I called to the animators: look, draw.

Some on the team, though, have mentioned a different main source for Pooh. In his awkwardness and daydreaming, even in his gestures, they saw Khitruk. “You just have to look at how he turns around, how he moves his hands and how he puts his hands to his head, as if they were paws,” said Eduard Nazarov.7

Khitruk admitted to Kapkov that the Pooh-like director in Film, Film, Film was based on his own experiences. Yet he implied that Pooh’s similarities to him were, if anything, a coincidence.

That said, he didn’t need to add those similarities for them to be intentional. The animators for the Winnie-the-Pooh films were watching the people around them. Violetta Kolesnikova wore oversized glasses at the time and constantly pushed them back up her nose. Another animator gave that tic to Rabbit. It’s easy to imagine the same happening with Khitruk and Pooh.

Which reinforces a point. Soyuzmultfilm’s Pooh didn’t belong to any one person who contributed to him. Khitruk guided the process, but even he didn’t make every decision that created the character. Pooh’s depth came from teamwork — including the team’s collaboration with Boris Zakhoder, who wrote the Russian edition of the books and helped with the films.

That teamwork led to a very, very special character. When Khitruk later visited the Disney studio, his Winnie-the-Pooh won praise from Wolfgang Reitherman, who directed several of Disney’s Pooh films. Khitruk loved Disney’s classic characters — but he and his whole team had delivered one of their own.

2. Newsbits

• We lost Yuji Ohno (84), longtime composer for Lupin the 3rd, including The Castle of Cagliostro and The First.

• In Japan, Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira fame is reportedly working on a film at his new animation studio, Oval Gear.

• In Cuba, Animaluz Academy continued its animation workshops for children this week, despite another loss of power. Meanwhile, the head of the ICAIC spoke about efforts to boost independent filmmakers in the country, including animators. (Cuban indie productions were made legal in 2019.)

• The rights to Matt Braly’s canceled Hollywood movie Afterworld were picked up by an animation company in Thailand: The Monk Studio.

• There’s a major new documentary on YouTube about the early history of computer animation in America. It comes from the creator of Drawing for Nothing, and a lot of research (and interviews) went into it.

• Keanu Reeves boarded the Japanese feature Hidari as the voice of the lead character. “He’s not just lending his voice to Hidari,” added director Masashi Kawamura, “he’s helping us shape and expand this world.”

• The Russian stop-motion film Hoffmaniada is getting a Blu-ray release stateside through Deaf Crocodile. (We have a special feature on this one.)

• On that note: Bulgakov, the latest by the director of Hoffmaniada, landed on YouTube. No official subtitles yet, but it’s one of the more acclaimed Russian shorts from the past few years.

• Among the recent CalArts student films in America, a definite highlight is the one by Abby Mills — which has a long title and a sharp point to make.

• Production of Newplast, the modeling clay behind Aardman’s films, ended in 2023. Now, Britain’s Animation Supplies seeks to replace it with a new material called Chroma Clay.

• A few weeks ago, Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia picked up a big award in Australia. In the States, it streams for free on BYUtv.

• The Stuttgart festival in Germany handed a special mention to Amarelo Banana (trailer) — a very strange, very fascinating film we enjoyed last year. Shanghai Animation’s A Story About Fire was also recognized. See the full list.

• Last of all: we wrote about the animated Animal Farm (1954), and the unusual circumstances of its creation.

Until next time!