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!

Welcome! Thanks for joining us. It’s another Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — all about a British classic.

By now, it’s clear that the latest Animal Farm has bombed in theaters and with critics. If nothing else, though, it’s put a different adaptation of the story back in the news. Variety, The Telegraph and The New York Times, for example, all recently brought up the Animal Farm from the 1950s.1

It was Britain’s first commercial animated feature. For years, it was celebrated. When it appeared in 1954, not many animated features existed at all, anywhere — and this one was unusual even then. Adapting George Orwell’s story required it.2

In the words of author Roger Manvell, who chronicled the production:

To turn this satire into an animated film was to face the issue of dramatizing an animal story in which the characters must be as seriously portrayed as in a human story. No animal could be sentimentalized for the sake of box-office ... Once this story was selected, a new kind of cartoon film was to be made — a serious cartoon. A style of presentation in sound and image must be evolved to interpret this on the screen.

The result is dark and has a pointed message. For all its Disney elements, it doesn’t feel like a Disney film. This is a fable about a people’s uprising, and the overthrow of capitalism for communism — and the turn of communism toward dictatorship. That’s daring material to animate even today, judging by the edits to the new Animal Farm.

Still, a shadow hangs over this earlier adaptation.3 The story emerged a few decades ago: part of its budget was supplied by the CIA, and the agency influenced the project. Since then, the film has often been written off. Reviewing the recent Animal Farm, The New York Times dismissed the first animated version as something actually “produced by the CIA.”

In reality, artists were behind it. The masterminds of the 1954 Animal Farm were directors Joy Batchelor and John Halas, whose company Halas and Batchelor mattered a lot, despite its obscurity now. One historian noted that it “almost singularly defined British animation until the emergence of Aardman.”4

Batchelor and Halas were caught in a complex political moment, but they weren’t simply Cold War tools. And their Animal Farm is just as complex as the time in which it found itself. It deserves a serious look even now.

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Welcome! This is a new Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and our plan goes like this:

• 1. On Chen-Yi Chang’s designs for Mulan.

• 2. Newsbits in animation.

With that, let’s go!

1. What Chen-Yi Chang did

Mulan is a well-designed film. It’s been said many times, but it’s worth repeating. In style, the project was possibly Disney’s most ambitious and different of the ‘90s, during its renaissance era. The artists really did something.

One of them was Hans Bacher, the production designer, whose work on the film we’ve covered before. Mulan “still was supposed to be a Disney movie,” he wrote — but one mixed with aesthetic ideas from China. In his style guides, online here and here, Bacher explained in painstaking detail what that meant.1

But Bacher didn’t create the look by himself. Maybe even more crucial to Mulan’s style was the character designer, Chen-Yi Chang. “I could not have designed Mulan without him,” Bacher wrote. “He very patiently explained everything about China, gave me the real books and background information.”2

One of Mulan’s directors, Tony Bancroft, argued that the film’s “unique and consistent” design came from “the combination of these two strong artistic visions.” And Chang was, in many ways, the linchpin. Producer Pam Coats referred to him as a “walking library” and “our salvation on this movie.”3 By the time Bacher joined, Chang had spent roughly a year on Mulan already.

From the start, Chang studied and experimented. “I was trying to figure out what makes Chinese art look Chinese,” he said. The answers he reached, both alone and with Bacher (an artist he admired), helped to make Mulan special. Chang treasured his time on the film; he called his art for it his “best work so far.”4

Yet the job was challenging, too. “Mulan was a big responsibility,” Chang said. “If I hadn’t done it well … I’d have felt that I’d let down the Chinese people. The pressure was enormous.”5

Chen-Yi Chang wasn’t a Hollywood veteran when Mulan came along. Even so, he’d been in animation for well over a decade.

As a child in Taiwan, during the ‘70s, Chang saw an article about Disney in Reader’s Digest. It sparked a lifelong interest in animation. Around 1979, he began working at Cuckoos’ Nest in Taipei, a major outsourcing site for American cartoons.6

Somewhere along the line, Chang stopped caring for Disney. “[W]hen I was in my late teens and early 20s, I fell in love with those animated shorts from Eastern Europe, especially those ones from Zagreb,” he said, referring to the Zagreb School of Animation. He became an experimental animator as well — his Childhood Impressions (1985) won a major prize in Taiwan.7

A few years later, Chang traveled to America to learn more. As he wrote:

I went to CalArts to pursue what I’m really interested [in], experimental animation. But, in order to have a job, I also took a lot of classes at the character animation department: design, animation, layout, storyboard... anything related to animation.8

His talent stood out. In the early ‘90s, he got a Disney internship — and a character design job on Batman: The Animated Series, which shaped his future style. In the same period, Chang “started to love Disney again,” he said. And, when the Mulan project revved up around 1993, he got an offer to change studios.

“The likelihood that Disney would make a second movie with a Chinese theme was close to nil,” he said, “so I couldn’t pass up the chance.”

Chang, an alt artist, landed in the center of Hollywood animation. It was the start of his fight to really, genuinely put old China into a Disney feature film.

Right from the initial development of Mulan, Chang submerged himself in ancient Chinese art and architecture and fashion and more. He was looking at materials from a thousand (or close to two thousand) years before.

One of his research methods was to draw studies of old paintings. “I just go over it with a sense of cartooning, and kind of make those ancient paintings into cartoons,” he said, “and try to find out if there’s anything I can copy from them — or, I should say, steal from them.”

Chang pulled ideas from a mountain of reference books, many of them in Chinese. For the team, he assembled a reference bible by scanning key photos and translating the descriptions beneath. Copies were distributed throughout the studio, reported Taiwan Panorama, so that everyone could see what he was seeing.

You find that type of research in action across the film. Take Mulan’s armor, based on the intricate lamellar armor of the Tang dynasty. Chang had trouble stripping it down for animation — until he saw a mural from the Kumtura Caves, in which the same gear appears in almost symbolic form. “Oh, this is how ancient artists see it,” Chang said. “And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a really good way of doing it.’ ”

The armor solution grew out of Chang’s wider plan for the film. Visually, he wanted to adapt eras of China that were relatively near in time to the story of Hua Mulan itself. He was fighting against preconceptions of China, as he said:

I got a lot of confusion and headache at the beginning of development. Because at that time I knew I was facing two hurdles. One was Westerners who had a stereotypical idea of how ancient Chinese should look. I mean, like, long mustaches and pigtails. Totally false. And so I was wondering, “If I present the real look of ancient Chinese, they would get shocked, and they would probably think I didn’t do any research at all.”

The other audience group is Chinese, most of whom grew up, like I did, with low-budget TV and movies that used the Ming dynasty culture to represent all of the previous dynasties, which is totally wrong. If I go back to the time that Mulan is supposed to have lived, and create a more accurate representation of that era, the Chinese might be shocked, because not many of them know much about it. It will be educational for everybody.

Chang settled on a blend of the medieval Tang dynasty with the earlier Han dynasty of the 200s. “The art from the Han dynasty is more primitive, and we liked that direct approach a lot,” he said.

Meanwhile, they relied heavily on the surviving Tang “sculptures, figurines and paintings,” with their “curvy motifs.” In Chang’s words, “[T]heir recurring design elements became the main resource for the style that was developed for Mulan.”

He knew that this direction could be controversial. Sure enough, even in the ‘90s, stuff like Mulan’s hanfu and white makeup drew criticism from people unfamiliar with the ancient past. Her fashion was Japanese, some argued. But, as Taiwan Panorama reported in 1999, Chang:

… can’t help taking issue with such comments. He explains, if you look at facial portraits of women from the Sui and Tang dynasties and the Five Dynasties era, you will see that in ancient times women made up their faces by first applying white powder and then applying rouge. This form of appearance was common down through the Qing dynasty. The fashions and apparel of traditional Japanese culture were originally adopted from Tang Chinese culture. Today, most people have turned cause and effect on their heads, and that is why they think Mulan has a “Japanese” flavor.

The exploration by Chang and Hans Bacher (who joined around late ‘94) led to a design system with a set of guidelines. Mulan’s look would be old China run through cartoons — and not just American cartoons. Bacher wrote that Chang exposed him to “original Chinese comic books ... with very delicate black and white drawings.” He was stunned by the lianhuanhua artwork of Lu Hua.9

One rule that research brought Mulan was reduced detail. The film needed to focus on general, graphic, flattened shapes rather than “unnecessary wrinkles, folds, things like that,” Chang said. The idea was “to imply instead of to show,” as was common in traditional painting.

Similarly important was the “S-curve,” the elegant swoop visible throughout each character. It was Chang’s discovery. As he said, “It’s a graphic motif I picked up from ancient Chinese art. … [Y]ou see this flowing-, running-water-like elegance.” He took that motif and boiled it down into repeatable graphic design.

It had to be systematized. Making Mulan at Disney’s industrial scale meant training a large team “to draw like Chen-Yi,” as animator Aaron Blaise put it. Mulan’s art director, Ric Sluiter, mentioned that Chang used:

… real simple S-shapes, one line leading into another, simple, graphic, elegant shapes and so to get that, you have to design each character with a lot of rules. It’s like a schematic formula that has to be laid out and embedded into each artist.10

Many of the designs Chang sketched were ultimately developed by others on the crew. Still, it’s hard to miss his hand in Mulan. Some designs, like Mulan’s horse, came basically straight from his concept art.11 Plus, his sense of caricature is all over the film.

Chang placed a big focus on caricature. Like director Barry Cook said, “He showed us ways to do fun caricatures that weren’t demeaning or insulting.” Floyd Norman, who worked on the film, noted that the plan wasn’t to “soft-pedal the facial features.”12 Everyone is pushed, down to their shapes and sizes.

Mulan’s soldier friends, the so-called gang of three, are an example Chang gave. Chien-Po (“our big Buddha”) is very tall, and is all soft edges and circles. Yao is short, stocky and squared off: a “bulldog.” Meanwhile, Ling is thin, of medium height and defined by triangles. These are caricatures built out of the three basic shapes, Chang said — and the three basic sizes.

“There’s only big, medium and small,” he explained. “I know it sounds very stupid, but, trust me, a lot of artists, when they are working on characters, they tend to forget it.”

Chang put real effort into caricaturizing the background characters, too. One of his key words for Mulan was variety — he wanted a broad set of looks and personalities. He’s argued that using “just one single type of graphic element to overgeneralize,” as earlier cartoonists did “every time when they drew a Chinese,” is the mistake that causes caricature to become stereotype.

As he said:

After we finalized the main characters, I told the directors that I would like to do the secondary characters, because I’m concerned that artists here — because of their educational environment — don’t really have a good set of graphic icons to portray the individuality of Asians, and this would be my opportunity to do so. Even though they are secondary characters or background people whom the audience probably won’t single out, I still tried to make them look like individuals, people you would see if you went to Asia.

Mulan was, like Chang said, a high-pressure thing. Because of his status at the studio, he had an unusually large say in this film. Which meant that his successes would show up on screen — as would his mistakes. Only he knew enough to get it right, and so he needed to get it right.

Luckily, he did. Chang’s work, coupled with Hans Bacher’s, remains one of the high points of Hollywood design over the past 30 years. And, despite some controversy inside China, Mulan enjoys a pretty good reputation even there: it has a very solid rating of 8.0 from Douban’s harsh users.13

Over the years, Chang often hasn’t gotten enough credit for what he did here — or for how much time he spent on his research. That’s normal with Disney. The studio’s name tends to absorb attention; the individual artists who make the films rarely become famous.

Still, Chang’s team knew what he’d pulled off. In the ‘90s, Aaron Blaise called him “just amazing” and “one of the best artists on this picture.” Hans Bacher, who isn’t easily impressed, has praised him for decades. And Tony Bancroft once said:

If it wasn’t for Chen-Yi and all his amounts of enthusiasm and research for costuming and that sort of thing, Mulan wouldn’t be nearly what it is today.

2. Newsbits

• We lost Tatsuo Sato (61), director of Cat Soup, and the veteran Ukrainian filmmaker Yevhen Syvokin (88).

• Guillermo del Toro says that his upcoming Buried Giant, animated by ShadowMachine in America, will be a “fascinatingly difficult stop-motion movie for adults.”

• Submissions are open for the Factual Animation Film Festival, based in Britain and Germany. Its focus is animated non-fiction, including docs.

• On that note, It Wasn’t Bourgogne is an interesting French film based on the memories of the director’s grandfather. It’s now on YouTube.

• Also on YouTube is the Japanese film In the Big Yard Inside the Teeny-Weeny Pocket (2022), a pretty mind-altering watch.

• In America next month, the Muskegon Museum of Art opens an exhibition on women in animation, including the work of Mary Blair and Lotte Reiniger. Curating it is Mindy Johnson, author of the excellent Ink & Paint.

• Also in America, a new post from Cartoon Research gets into some of UPA’s obscure latter-day work, with links to rarities we’ve never seen before.

• In Greece, the government is putting €750 million into film and television, including animation. Cineuropa calls it “the most comprehensive state-backed framework for the country’s creative industries to date.”

• The rise of original South Korean animation received long-form coverage from CNN.

• In Czechia, the Karel Zeman feature Krabat – The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1978) was restored, and just screened at the Anifilm festival.

• Last of all: we wrote about the life and work of Raoul Servais, the Belgian master.

Until next time!

Welcome! Glad you could join us. In this Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, we’re talking about an animation master.

Raoul Servais’s name came up last week, in the Luxo Jr. piece. When an early Pixar tech demo about lamps traveled to Belgium, Servais watched it. The demo grew into a full story at his insistence. Even the shortest of films should tell a story, he argued. Which changed the course of Pixar.1

By then, Servais was already respected for his teaching. He’d founded “the first school for animation on the European continent” — in 1963, in the city of Ghent. Servais gave young artists what he never had. The techniques of animation were “trade secrets” in his youth, so he’d studied on his own through trial and error.

“[M]y students learned in 3 months,” he said, “what I had acquired in 10 years.”2

It was during the ‘40s, as a teenager, that Servais had begun trying to animate. His first camera was a homebrew affair with a cigar box for a case. From there, he spent years “tinkering.” Not until the ‘60s, when he was in his 30s, did he finish what he called his “first real film.” Its 10 minutes took three years, and he still wasn’t happy with the sound or animation. Technical stuff remained a problem.3

What Servais didn’t lack, though, was something to say. That first short, Harbor Lights (1960), is “the tale of an outcast” — a bent streetlamp at which the world laughs. Then he made a film about a failed organ grinder in poverty, and one about an evil army that drains the world’s color and imprisons a city’s people.4

Each of them was visually inventive. And, in each, the underdog wins out.

That theme emerged from his own life and views — from his experiences during and right after the war. And it stayed in his work. Across his career, Servais took the side of people in trouble. “I want to communicate to the widest audience,” he said about his films, “the things with which I disagree.”5

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Welcome! This is another Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and our slate goes like this:

• 1. A story for the centenary of The Adventures of Prince Achmed.

• 2. Animation newsbits.

Now, let’s go!

1. Reiniger on her creation

It was a century ago this weekend. On the Sunday of May 2, 1926, the first public screening of The Adventures of Prince Achmed took place in Berlin.1

The film is the earliest animated feature that survives today. It predates Snow White by more than a decade — and, after one hundred years, it’s still an incredible thing.

The author Cecile Starr once wrote, “The Adventures of Prince Achmed is an acclaimed masterpiece … [that] is also amusing, surprising, frightening, passionate and entertaining, which means that it can easily hold its own against non-masterpieces as well.” She was absolutely correct.2

Behind the film was animator Lotte Reiniger, a member of Weimar Germany’s bohemian art scene. With silhouettes cut out of cardboard and thin lead, and joined at the joints with wires, she told gorgeous stop-motion stories. Even before Prince Achmed, artists like Marc Chagall had praised her. Then this film drew eyes around the world; even an American paper quickly declared it a “masterpiece.”3

Pulling from the One Thousand and One Nights, Reiniger and her small team made a movie whose magic is hard to believe. That’s true even technically. This is an hourlong piece with rich colors and a complex, synchronized score, done before the era of talkies or color films, and at a time when animation was short as a rule.

The film was unusual, too, in its use of animated drama — and in its social points. “In the 1920s equal rights for women and homosexuals formed part of the agenda for socialists, and Reiniger also treated those issues with good consciousness,” wrote the scholar William Moritz. Reiniger’s work was visibly affected by the liberation movements of that period.4

We covered the making of Prince Achmed last year, in one of our favorite issues we’ve printed. That said, getting the story from the director herself is a different experience. And, fortunately, Reiniger made that possible in her lifetime.

Around 56 years ago, she penned a wonderful firsthand account of Prince Achmed for a journal called The Silent Picture (1968–1974).5 To honor the film’s hundredth birthday, we’re sharing it below. We hope you’ll enjoy!

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

or

What May Happen to Somebody Trying to Make a Full-Length Cartoon in 1926

In the year 1919 I, Lotte Reiniger, was introduced by Paul Wegener, the leading figure of artistic film making in Berlin by this time (Student of Prague, The Golem, etc.), to a group of young people, who opened up a studio of scientific and artistic films. This group was called Institut fuer Kulturforschung, under the leadership of Dr. Hans Cuerlis, a friend of Paul Wegener. In this Institut I made my first silhouette film, followed by various others, and they did quite well in the cinemas and in advertising. It was the time of the inflation, and the dollars they brought in made us go along quite well.

We had not so much the idea to make money with these films, but more to be able to carry on. For at that time animation was in its infancy; there was just Felix the Cat, Fleischer’s cartoons and so forth, Mickey Mouse was far away in the future. For the film-makers of this period, those were the days: with each film we could make new discoveries, find new problems, new possibilities, technical and artistic, we were most eager to execute. The whole field was virgin soil and we had all the joys of explorers in an unknown country. It was wonderful.

Yet, when in 1923, a Berlin banker, Louis Hagen, visited the Institut and saw us at work, and asked us whether we could consider making a full-length picture in silhouettes, we had to think twice. This was a never heard of thing. Animated films were supposed to make people roar with laughter, and nobody had dared to entertain an audience with them for more than ten minutes. Everybody to whom we talked in the industry about that proposition was horrified.

But we did not belong to the industry. We always had been outsiders and we always had done what we wanted to do. Our friends were artists of the same caliber who approached films in their own ways, such as [Walter] Ruttmann, [Berthold] Bartosch, [Hans] Richter and [Viking] Eggeling and others. So we were not afraid of the challenge.

As the making of those silhouette films did not require very expensive equipment nor a great personnel, and money in this time of inflation became less valuable from day to day, our conscience was not over-burdened in that direction. So we decided to accept that most tempting proposal.

The banker did not want this film to be made in the framework of the Institut and offered to install a studio for us above his garages in the vegetable gardens of his house in Potsdam. So we went there. We being me and my husband Carl Koch, who had married me meantime, and later on Berthold Bartosch, who had also worked with us in the Institut.

The studio was very low, being an attic under the roof, so the shooting field with its glass plate had to be very near the floor in order to get the camera up high enough in a suitable distance, with just enough space to place the lamps underneath. I had to kneel on the seat of an old dismantled motorcar to execute my manipulation. I liked this very much; it was a much more comfortable position for me than sitting on a swivel chair as I had to do later on.

The whole contraption looked like a four-poster bed, the camera being supported by sturdy wooden beams, on which we could fix and take off to our heart’s content every construction we might need for our special effects. In the Institut I had obtained my stop motion with the aid of a bicycle pump, which worked very well. But this time we intended to be as modern as possible, and so at the advice of cameraman Guenther Rittau, who worked for no lesser person than Fritz Lang, we had a motor of a special design installed. I did not take kindly to that motor at all, for it had to be set to work by a lever, a movement which distracted me from my attention to the figures on the glass plate, who demanded a rapt concentration throughout the shooting, whilst the reclining movement of pulling the string of the good bicycle pump allowed my eyes to be fixed on my scene perpetually. Furthermore, I could do it with my left hand and keep my right steady and free from blood pressure for the touch of the figures, which had always required utmost delicacy. Many years later, when I had a technically much more advanced rostrum installed, I ruefully went back to my old-fashioned bicycle pump.

As the theme for this long lasting enterprise we had chosen the Arabian Nights. The action had to show events which could not be performed by any other means. So from all the 1001 stories we sorted out all the events which fell into that category; the flying horse, magic islands, fantastic birds, djinns, sorcerers and witches, transformations and all there is to be found in abundance in these tales, and out of these items we formed the script.

I felt very bashful towards my serious collaborators, to engage them in such a fairy tale world, but for me it was real. “What has this to do with the year 1923?” said Walter Ruttmann. “Nothing,” I could only say, “but that I am alive now, and I want to do it as I have the chance.” But he did the most wonderful things for this film, and the bits I did together with him are the ones I am most proud of.

I am very proud also of the magnificent sea journey Berthold Bartosch composed and executed for Aladdin’s flight. Nowadays, of course, waves are often seen in animation, but this was absolutely brand new. We could not stop Bartosch experimenting with waves afterwards. Only too natural, for one can do anything still better, but we had to finish the film one day. Here it was to the great merit of Carl Koch, the producer, who stopped us from going to seed with endless experiments. He was a real gardener.

So we started in 1923 and finished in 1926. Starting with black-and-white only and gradually developing more scenery as movable backgrounds, using soap and sand and paint on different layers, sometimes two negatives, each done on different animation benches and composed by the different artists entirely after their own conception. The anxiety of this process was sometimes almost unbearable. Whilst working you only see your figures on your composition in one position. What will it look like when it moves, or what the two compositions, which might look all right in themselves, will look like when they are printed together, were riddles whose solution could only be awaited with hope. Many of the things we did are nowadays a household word, but we really did them for the first time. Often we had to experiment for weeks until we got them ready for shooting.

Although this was the time of the silent film, we were anxious to provide our picture with every support to ensure its coming over well to its audience. So we had the musician Wolfgang Zeller collaborating with us throughout this time, composing the score. When for instance a procession was wanted he composed a march, we measured with stop watches and tried to move the figures according to its beat. Or a Glockenspiel was executed to measure. In this period the better theaters employed an orchestra and for the more ambitious films special music was composed. In our score, for this purpose, small pictures of the film were cut out and pasted in, so that the conductor knew where he had to place his intended effects.

For the first performance of the film in London and Paris Wolfgang Zeller was invited to come and conduct the orchestra himself.

The most troublesome time for us came when the inflation stopped. Money was worth something now and we were only half way through. Would our financier allow us to carry on? We finished in Spring 1926.

When the film was finished, we did not find any theater which wished to play it. So we arranged on our own a first performance at the Volksbuehne, a theater in the North of Berlin, where Wolfgang Zeller was in charge of the orchestra. His musicians had consented to play for us on a Sunday morning for his sake. We invited the press and all the people we could think of on postcards. As we had led a very remote life during the production, we had not had much contact with the press; our friend Bert Brecht helped us a great deal to invite the right people. It had to be on a Sunday morning, and as it was Spring and good weather had broken out, we did not think that many people would sacrifice a beautiful morning to see a mysterious, never-heard-of silhouette film in an out-of-the-way theater. But they all came and the theater was over-crowded.

There were rows going on among the audience about their seats, which were not numbered, and some people took the numbers of their cloakroom tickets for seat numbers and claimed them angrily. I also saw people who were of great importance to us, like Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, sitting on quite unfavorable seats right in front of the screen. Then Dr. Karl With, a renowned expert on the arts, started his opening speech, and the audience calmed down. But became restless again as he talked on and on, much to my amazement, as we had agreed that his address should be only short. Anyhow, finally he stopped and the film started, and the audience reacted very favorably to it.

Only when I went behind the curtain in the first interval (by this time films were projected in reels) I heard what had happened. Just before the start, the projector lens had broken. It was Sunday morning, where on earth could we get another one? To step in front of the already angry audience and tell them that they had made their journey in vain required more courage than any of us possessed. In his despair my husband took a taxi and drove to the big Ufa house. He well knew that it was closed on Sundays, so whether he intended to smash the shop windows or what, I don’t know. He stood there and looked at all the brilliant equipment displayed in the windows, when a gentleman approached the entrance, he had a key, and proceeded to open the door. Koch dashed towards him and told him in moving words of our desperate situation in the Volksbuehne, and the gentleman was not only willing to help, but could help. So Koch arrived back at the theater triumphantly with another lens, and Karl With could stop his unwillingly prolonged speech.

But this was not all. In the middle of the performance, which was enthusiastically received by the audience, a policeman arrived behind stage and ordered us to stop the performance for the theater was overcrowded. Koch, who was responsible, took flight, climbing a ladder into the upper stage, where the wings were hung, like in a Marx Brothers film. He came down only when the end of the next reel was acknowledged by the audience with a burst of applause. Koch grabbed me by the arm, and introduced me to the baffled policeman as the budding artist on the brink of an obvious success, who would be completely ruined. And what would the enthusiastic audience say if he would stop it with just one more reel to come? The audience clapped on, and I went out to take my bow with a heartrending look at the stern defender of law and order, who said threateningly, “You will hear from me...” and went away.

But the real fright was yet to come. In the last reel of that film there is a big battle between black and white spirits, but I saw suddenly something on the screen, something which was neither of those spirits, but obviously smoke. As I knew full well that we had not shot any smoke in that sequence, my heart stood still. Something must be burning on stage. I ran there very frightened, for in that period film was still very inflammable, and if the audience would get the faintest inkling what that smoke meant, panic would be the result. (How right the policeman had been.) But the reason was harmless enough: the stagehands, who wanted to see the film, had placed some wet sacks on the central heating and forgotten to take them away, and they had started smoldering just in front of the projector. The audience, however, had taken the clouds as an artistically intended effect! And so this performance came to a happy ending, especially as its success was followed by a real first night in Paris and later on in the Gloria Palast in Berlin.

2. Newsbits

• We lost Kazuo Ebisawa (72–73), among the longest-serving artists in anime background art. He touched Akira, Kiki’s Delivery Service, X and many more.

• In the Netherlands, the Blender Foundation backed away from a long-term corporate sponsorship by Anthropic.

• The Mexican film I Am Frankelda will have its worldwide release on June 12, via Netflix.

• A highlight of this week is Dracula 2, an indie short by the American animator Austin Kimmell. It’s an adult comedy that really gets the value of funny, clever drawings and movement — with lots of great timing.

• In France, the Annecy Festival revealed its feature film lineup for 2026. On the list: Viva Carmen, Cartoon Saloon’s Julian and the Chinese hit Nobody.

• A Russian Telegram channel we like, Watermelon Rind Boats, now has a Substack newsletter. It launched with a cool archival article penned in the ‘60s by director Fyodor Khitruk (Winnie-the-Pooh).

• On that note: this week, we discovered You’re an Animal through the same Telegram channel. It’s a cutout film done with recycled plastic bags, put together in Armenia by students of the Invisible Friends collective. No subtitles, but the visuals and soundtrack are pretty lovely by themselves.

• The Bones (2021) was released online for free. This is an unsettling one from Chilean animators Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña. As with their cult film The Wolf House, it isn’t for everyone. But it hasn’t left us since we first saw it.

• At Cannes Film Market this month, Ghana’s AnimaxFYB will seek partners and investors for Oraya, a feature.

• Last of all: we took a fresh look at Pixar’s classic Luxo Jr. (1986).

Until next time!

Welcome! We’re back with another Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Our topic this time is a landmark: Luxo Jr. (1986).

You’ve likely watched it — and you’ve definitely seen its little lamp character bounce on the i in Pixar. The film comes from the studio’s first year, from the early days of computer animation. Its place in history is a big one.

Luxo Jr. was a test — of technical stuff, but not only that. It used Disney’s 12 principles (like anticipation and squash and stretch) to get people invested in CG characters. Which worked. The film was an achievement calling for “some kind of a medal of honor, award or Hollywood contract,” noted one paper.1

In 1986, Time argued that this short:

… manages to charge two perfectly realistic desk lamps with the emotional intensity of a father-son relationship. When Luxo Jr. accidentally bursts his bouncing ball, the film evokes sadness, compassion and remorse with nothing more than the wave of a lamp cord and the dip of a smooth, metallic head.2

The film became a piece of the story that people told about Pixar, and that Pixar told about itself. Its eventual Oscar nomination wasn’t the first for computer animation — but that reality wasn’t often brought up. And, although Luxo Jr. was a non-commercial festival short that didn’t launch a massive series, comparisons to Mickey Mouse and Steamboat Willie arrived anyway.3

For years, a certain narrative hardened around the film. “It also marked the point when journalists, guided by Pixar’s publicity department, began associating Lasseter with the legacy of Walt Disney,” wrote the author Richard Neupert.

Today, that makes Luxo Jr.’s story a bit murky. The film had a real impact, and it remains a charming watch. But all of it is more complicated than it once seemed.

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

• 1. What Dreaming Machine was supposed to be.

• 2. Newsbits from the animation world.

Now, let’s go!

1. Machines with dreams

In his lifetime, Satoshi Kon never made a commercial hit. Projects like Perfect Blue and Paranoia Agent attracted fans, and became very influential, and gained legendary status with time. But Kon was still fighting for a breakthrough with the public when he passed away in 2010, at age 46.

He spent his last years on the movie that could’ve taken him into the mainstream.

Its title is Dreaming Machine. Kon once called it “a ‘road movie’ for robots,” and it was well underway when he died. “A storyboard exists, as do 26 minutes of footage, colored and edited but not voiced,” noted Pascal-Alex Vincent, director of the documentary Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist. There were attempts made to complete the film after Kon’s death, but none succeeded.1

Still, enough information has come out about Dreaming Machine to get Kon’s basic idea. And, even though the film’s storyboards are mostly sealed away, one page has been published. All together, this stuff reveals an artist in his prime — and in the middle of a really, really interesting movie.

With Dreaming Machine, Kon was working with a different type of idea than he’d ever used. It’s about “the future of the future,” he said. What that meant was made clear in the proposal document for the film. Kon wanted to show us:

The near future that people around the world once dreamed of. A future world where transparent tubes ran in all directions between skyscrapers, hovercars came and went, and “Astro Boy,” the child of science, wielded his iron arm… This “near future that was supposed to come” has been destroyed.2

All life has vanished in the future-of-the-future. Humans are long gone — as are animals and plants. What remains is a gutted space-age world, full of cars, buildings and robots that look like the handiwork of a mid-century artist.

In essence, Kon was building a retrofuturistic post-apocalypse. Think Fallout, but for Japan. It’s Astro Boy gone wrong.

Kon was a child of the ‘60s, and all too familiar with the “shining future” that’d been promised. He mentioned the illustrator Shigeru Komatsuzaki, for example, who spent years conjuring optimistic future-tech worlds. In Dreaming Machine, this kind of world happened, but utopia failed somehow. Kon observed a similar feeling in the 21st century, where things haven’t played out as expected.3

Even as Kon drew the past’s future in ruins, he wanted to get into the spirit of it. So, he immersed himself in the cartoons of his childhood.

In 1960s Japan, animation was often called manga eiga (cartoon movies) and terebi manga (TV cartoons). By the time Kon started Dreaming Machine, both terms sounded impossibly naive and old-fashioned, and they brought to mind animation in the same vein. But that’s what he hoped to channel. “A story of love and courage, a boy’s growth and adventure,” Kon wrote on his blog in 2002, half-joking. “The royal road of manga eiga.”4

While working on Dreaming Machine, Kon listened to a 120-track playlist named “Shining Future.” It was four-plus hours of Japanese cartoon themes from the old days: Leo’s Song, Super Jetter. In these shows, Kon wrote, justice and love triumphed over the “bad guys” and scientific progress saved the day. The work still appealed to him, in a way, even though he saw right through it.

Especially key was a song from Toei’s Rainbow Sentai Robin (1966–1967). Its name is Robin’s Space Voyage (listen) — a bombastic, self-serious anthem that feels like a Kon-penned parody of ‘60s cartoons, despite being from that time. He loved it.

Despite the irony in Dreaming Machine’s cracked retrofuture, there are layers here. “He was really clear … this was a family film that he was trying to make,” recalled Aya Suzuki, an animator on the project. That is, a Satoshi Kon-style family film. “I want to make it a dual-structured movie,” Kon said, “in which children can enjoy it as a fantasy while adults can find the other message in it.”5

In Kon’s words, this is “a cartoon movie pretending to be for children.” It’s manga eiga deconstructed, but not totally rejected.

As mentioned, there are no humans in Dreaming Machine. The characters are all robots. Aya Suzuki noted that they’re leftover “machines that were created by people to do labor.” They’ve kept working in the post-human world.

The story opens in “a paradise of electricity,” per Kon. Artwork for the film portrays it as a skyscraper lined with tiled halls, large windows and synthetic plants. Only its top pokes out of the water — it’s a little taller than the buildings around it, the rest drowned by a risen sea. In this sanctuary, a small, headless, nameless robot lives alone.

Another robot, Lirico, washes up in paradise one day. She’s a “nanny” machine, Suzuki said, who was “built and programmed to take care of children.” Lirico was styled like a “cuddly toy” by her creators (her design was referenced in part from an actual doll).6 And she gets the ball rolling by giving that nameless, headless robot a name and a head. He becomes Robin, our hero.

There’s symbolism here, as Suzuki pointed out. Kon saw this paradise as his film’s Garden of Eden, and Lirico as its Eve. Not long after Lirico’s arrival, she and Robin are “driven from paradise by a tsunami,” according to the now-offline website for Dreaming Machine.7

The film’s mix of elements, particularly its biblical references, may recall Pixar’s WALL-E. In fact, Kon panicked when he discovered that film. “While I was developing the script,” he told Impact, “I heard about a movie called WALL-E… and I got a little nervous that it might be similar to mine. I can’t tell you how relieved I was when I learned that the two stories were totally different.”8

They are different. This is firmly a Kon project, and no one else’s work is quite like his. He may have aimed the film at a broad audience, and hoped to get “as many people as possible watching” (like producer Masao Maruyama said), but the unique sensibility behind Paprika and Tokyo Godfathers is still visible in Dreaming Machine.

Leaving paradise, Robin and Lirico find that life outside is harsh. Electricity is scarce, and robots die without it. The two of them are in danger. But they get word of a magical “Land of Electricity” where the power never runs out, and they go on a quest to find it — teaming up with a blue “combat robot” named King.

It’s a clear-cut setup, which was Kon’s goal. He wanted to break from the “surreal interaction of reality and dreams” that had come to define him. “[I]t’s not healthy to keep using the same motif again and again, neither for the audience nor creators,” he said in 2009. Instead, Dreaming Machine is an adventure movie.

On their road trip across the ruined world, Robin, Lirico and King come across odd characters and challenges — like an army that hoards electricity. And Robin “grows up” as the story progresses. Here’s the proposal again:

… he is born as a small child. In his travels, he inherits the parts that allow him to grow from other robots of the same type, and through his experiences he develops wisdom and knowledge, growing from a “boy” to a fine “young man” robot.

Along the way, Japanese adults would’ve noticed the nods to the mid-century. Robin and Lirico, after all, take their names from Rainbow Sentai Robin. Meanwhile, one vehicle is based on a ‘50s Cadillac mixed with Ryusei-go from Super Jetter (1965–1966). Kon wrote that it came to resemble a car from Speed Racer.

In many respects, Dreaming Machine is Kon’s crowd-pleaser. It even puts music front and center. “It’s not a musical, but it can be said [to be] like a ‘music animation,’ so to speak,” Kon said. He did one scene in which the characters dance to the track Hansen 108 by Susumu Hirasawa, his longtime composer.

The film’s title, actually, came from Hirasawa’s 1990 song Dreaming Machine. He recorded a new version of it for this project. When you listen to the original (here) and look at the film’s artwork, and think about the world Kon made, something clicks: Dreaming Machine is very strange. It has a zany, warped, almost phantasmagoric soul.

It isn’t a safe, warm piece — Kon never was. “When you read the script [for] Dreaming Machine, there’s quite scary stuff in it, and there’s a lot of dark points in it,” Suzuki said. “And there’s a complexity in the narrative as well.”

In short, Dreaming Machine is entertainment with teeth. And there’s a real message buried in it, beneath the irony, as the proposal document explains:

This work is a very simple adventure story, chiefly an entertainment film. But it doesn’t stop at mere amusement; it is also a story with substance to encourage and share with children and adults living in today’s stressful times.

In this work, I would like to convey the simple and healthy way of thinking that “purpose is born by living.” Even if you don’t understand now, if you keep living, purpose and meaning will be born later. That is what humans are capable of, and it is the core theme of this work.

Dreaming Machine is sometimes (incorrectly) called The Dream Machine. It’s an important difference, because it hints at what Kon was going for. Madhouse, the film’s studio, once put out a statement that Dreaming Machine is about “the concept of life itself generating dreams and objectives.” Not sleep dreams, but dreams-as-in-goals. Dreaming machines might just be machines with dreams.9

Kon was on fire with this project — whose script he wrote solo, unlike with his earlier features. And he’d assembled an impressive team: on board were many of his top collaborators, like art director Nobutaka Ike. (Plus, as Suzuki said, the film was intended to train up-and-coming animators, bringing new blood into anime.) Dreaming Machine had every reason to be good.

It will probably never be finished. A huge amount of unseen material exists, though. Among other things, Kon managed to draw more than 500 of the film’s 1,500 shots in storyboard form, according to Madhouse insiders Fuuta Takei and Hiroyuki Okada.10

Judging by the page included above, those boards were Kon’s most complex yet. He’d put more and more effort into this step over the years, until his boards became comics in their own right. Flipping through the Tokyo Godfathers storyboards, for example, you learn that the film already existed before it was a film. With Dreaming Machine, that might be more true than ever.11

When Kon died, his career wasn’t done. Really, it had barely started. Reading about Dreaming Machine makes that obvious.

“Each of my previous works is indeed a memorable and meaningful one for me,” he said in 2007, as he prepared the film. “But if you ask me which one I love most, I’d say my next project I am already working on is the one.”

Reportedly, the surviving material from the production is trapped in a rights dispute. Pascal-Alex Vincent’s documentary about Kon was meant to include Dreaming Machine footage; it was cut. Kyoko Kon, the director’s widow, has floated the idea that the storyboards could be published one day. So far, that hasn’t happened.12

But Kon’s final film hasn’t disappeared — it’s there in the script and boards and concept art, and stray notes, and animation, and a little music. Whether or not it becomes a completed movie, Dreaming Machine exists somewhere, in some form. And we might one day get to see the shining, demented future that Kon was building.13

2. Newsbits

• In Japan, AC-bu animated an excellent music video. After all these years, the group still has it.

• Suzie in the Garden (2022) is a Czech film done with paint on glass, and it’s now free to watch on YouTube.

• In India, Vaibhav Studios of Lamput fame will bring its self-funded feature Return of the Jungle to theaters in May.

• The stop-motion feature Hidari, by dwarf studios, will make an in-development appearance next month in France, at Cannes Film Market.

• In America, a Hollywood artist (Yaron Farkash) is working with an independent team (Studio Ursa) to release the series Catus Magus on YouTube.

• The Australian animator Alex Grigg posted a video tutorial for Procreate Dreams 2.

• Later this month, an exhibition opens in Italy, at Comicon, dedicated to the work of Aurélien Predal. He’s a veteran artist who’s worked on everything from Shaun the Sheep to Genndy Tartakovsky’s canceled Popeye.

• An exhibition dedicated to Takamura Mukuo, key to the backgrounds of Isao Takahata and Rintaro films (and Sailor Moon), has opened in Japan.

• Director Pablo Leon (Remember Us) is developing a feature film based on the children’s book To the Other Side. Colombia’s Dinamita Animación is involved.

• Last of all: we looked inside the unusual Kawamoto–Okamoto Puppet Animashow, a turning point in the history of indie animation.

Until next time!

Welcome! In this Thursday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, we’re looking back at a pivotal event in the history of indie animation.

On a fall evening in 1972, in Tokyo, an audience took its seats inside the famous Sogetsu Hall for an unusual show. When the two hosts (one thin, the other stout) went on stage, an attendee remarked that they looked like Laurel and Hardy. Except this wasn’t a vaudeville kind of thing. It wasn’t much like anything else.1

“Kawamoto–Okamoto Puppet Animashow” was the title on the flyer. It came with an explanatory note: “Animated Film + Puppet Show.” Children weren’t really the target, despite the name.2 Again: this was something different.

As the event got underway, adults cracked up at the live puppet segments, like the skit about an old man bathing. And the films were left-field. One was a dark, stop-motion horror story told with bunraku-style puppets. In another, a tale of childhood love (painted on cels in a childlike way) ended in sudden tragedy. That one left the man who’d mentioned Laurel and Hardy in tears; he adored it.3

This stuff was far removed from the work of giant animation studios like Toei Doga. Standard cel cartoons were nowhere to be seen. The films came from the other side of Japanese animation, from the two hosts who definitely weren’t Laurel and Hardy: directors Kihachiro Kawamoto and Tadanari Okamoto.

They were independents with their own ideas. Okamoto disliked the “conformity” of the anime industry and its “mass-produced goods.” Instead, he pursued what he called “the unlimited expressive potential of animation.” And Kawamoto was on a quest to master the art of puppets, both live action and stop motion. To him, they were almost mystical objects, with a deep power.4

The first Puppet Animashow was a success. For a few years, it became a recurring event — which helped to turn Kawamoto and Okamoto into icons of Japan’s indie scene. Through it, their profiles and abilities grew. As Kawamoto said in the ‘90s:

If it wasn’t for Tadanari Okamoto-san and a relationship like the Puppet Animashow, I don’t think my animation would have come this far today. I believe that the era of the Puppet Show was a truly valuable one, in which my artistic style was established.

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

• 1. Notes on process.

• 2. Newsbits from the animation world.

With that, let’s go!

1. Figuring it out

If there was a way to make art perfectly to spec and vision with zero time or effort, would you use it?

That question was put to Coleen Baik this year, in slightly different words. Baik is an animator, and her work takes time and effort. Right now, she’s animating on paper. “[I]n the era of ‘let the machine do everything,’ I’m increasingly drawn to do more of the labor myself,” she wrote in her newsletter, The Line Between.

When she got that question about the no-effort, no-time alternative, she replied, “What would be the fun in that?”1

In the 2020s, there’s a lot of discussion around closing the gap between first thought and completed project. Tech companies are making it possible to render a spitballed outline very quickly. Using their tools, the process of creating an image (or a song or a script or a film) shrinks. It doesn’t take much thinking; the machine does the heavy lifting.

But art isn’t really about jumping from an idea to a finished piece. Art emerges from process — the middle part, which some companies hope to erase.

There’s a famous Ed Catmull line about Pixar’s method. Years ago, he called it “going from suck to nonsuck.” His studio’s best movies didn’t start as its best. “Every time we show a film for the first time,” Catmull admitted, “it sucks.”2

Early ideas for the likes of Toy Story and WALL-E were often startlingly bad. Made “perfectly to spec and vision with zero time or effort,” the films wouldn’t have been worth watching. The team knew it.

What saved these projects was the long, slow, painful, confusing process of their creation, as endless decisions were made and problems solved. The films grew out of the time and effort itself. “In fact,” wrote author Peter Sims in 2011, “directors say that Pixar’s films will suck virtually until the last stage of production — problems are constantly identified and fixed.”

Not everyone pushes it that far. Even so, there’s no escaping process. It’s where art happens.

Watching a Hayao Miyazaki film, there’s a sense that everything’s in its place. His mastery shows in each shot, musical cue and frame of animation. Yet none of it simply pops into being.

Miyazaki doesn’t imagine a movie and execute. All of his productions were made up in large part along the way — down to their storyboards. A Miyazaki film radically evolves as it’s produced, as he and his teams answer creative and technical questions in the moment. His friend Isao Takahata once put it like this:

Hayao Miyazaki stopped writing screenplays some time ago. He doesn’t even bother to first finalize the storyboards. As long as he has a revelatory idea for a world structure, and as long as he has a clear image of the appealing protagonists who will be crossing swords with each other in that world, he can plunge into building that world, relying solely on the images and plots he has in mind. After diving into the process, he begins creating the storyboards while doing all his other work, from key animation on down. Using his powers of continuous concentration, the production starts to take on the elements of an endlessly improvised performance. … [H]e throws himself into the one-time, multilayered form of combustion that production itself represents.3

Something like Princess Mononoke (1997) couldn’t be created otherwise. Miyazaki had starting ideas and followed them — but the project grew in an organic way. Notoriously, he realized that another 15 minutes of film were needed toward the end, with the deadline nearing. Mononoke had become a different, richer story in the making of it, and the earlier plans had to change.4

Even when Miyazaki draws a single picture, he’s considering the individual lines and their interrelation, figuring the piece out as he goes. Miyazaki’s drawings are defined by the thoughts and feelings and solutions that arise during the process of drawing. His art’s power comes from those things. There’s no shortcut around them.

This stuff isn’t unique to Miyazaki or Pixar. Many of the greatest in animation have made similar points. Take Yuri Norstein, one of Miyazaki’s influences.

Norstein is an animator-director, and his films from the Soviet era (especially the ones made with Francheska Yarbusova, his wife) remain magical. You might be familiar with Hedgehog in the Fog or Tale of Tales from the 1970s, for example.

As with Miyazaki’s work, it’s hard to imagine what could be different about Norstein’s films. What they are, they are perfectly. Yet he’s a deep believer in an organic creative process. Filmmaking, for him, is far more than taking an outline and putting it on the screen. Like he said in the ‘80s:

I think a film should be constantly changing, developing. … The film grows of itself while it’s being shot. And during this time I never look at either the treatment or at the shooting script. … But the storyboard, on the other hand, isn’t something you just do at the beginning. You do it every day. It’s alive. And sometimes, out of some little detail, out of some action not foreseen in even the most detailed, strict storyboard, sometimes when you’re already shooting, a whole scene grows, a whole sequence.5

The poetic, spiritual energy in Norstein’s films wasn’t simply planned. It involved planning — but, again, it was grown. Norstein’s false starts, agonizing, experiments, mistakes, breakthroughs, on-days and off-days led to these creations.

“[A]lmost everything that you see on the screen,” noted author Clare Kitson, “is gleaned from either painstaking research to solve a particular problem, or from one of Norstein’s childhood experiences, lodged since then in his memory, or … from a completely fortuitous chance.”

In Tale of Tales, for example, the little wolf’s eyes arrived randomly. A friend’s son found a “crumpled ball of paper on the ground,” and it contained a haunting photo of a cat. When Norstein saw its eyes, that was it. They weren’t part of his first idea, but they became an emotional center of the film.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the ‘70s, the American legend Tissa David touched people with this same type of approach. (“Although her name is not familiar to the general public,” wrote historian John Canemaker, “several generations of audiences grew up seeing and responding emotionally to Tissa David’s work.”)6

David’s animation for the Hubleys and on Raggedy Ann (not to mention in films like Abel’s Island) is still beautiful and original. And that animation was something she discovered in the process of drawing it. David imagined a movement and worked it out frame by frame, detail by detail, with a great deal of improvisation and without reference footage.

Over time, scenes grew. Like she said:

I never know what will happen in a scene ahead of time. I know what should happen, and what the story calls for. It will happen as I am going on, but how it will happen is just as much a surprise to me as to anyone else. I find out the personalities of the characters in a few scenes and then I let them go the way they feel like.7

As with Pixar, not everyone takes it as far as Tissa David did. That goes for Miyazaki and Norstein as well.

Every artist grapples with process, though. Even limitations play in — navigating time, money, skill level. David often worked within small budgets, which helped to make her one of the finest users of limited animation. Miyazaki’s first feature, The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), was only allotted four or five months of production, and solving that impossible problem led to a classic.

To put it simply: more goes into making a film, or even a single sketch, than a raw first idea. A project built “perfectly to spec and vision with zero time or effort” wouldn’t contain much — because not much would go into it. The middle part, even if it’s short, is where the real interest blooms.

Plus, there’s the other question — the one about who’d want to work that way, even if such tools existed. As Coleen Baik said, “What would be the fun in that?”

2. Newsbits

• The Pied Piper (1986), a Czech classic, is streaming for free on YouTube.

• Australia’s Studio Spud made a very interesting animation test with Moho, bringing a detailed illustration from the ‘40s convincingly to life.

• Meanwhile, Australia’s Glitch Productions is having a great deal of success with ticket presales for the theatrical release of the Amazing Digital Circus finale.

• In America, new images from Beyond the Spider-Verse dropped — and they take the style of Across even further. Producer Phil Lord posted one with the note, “This is a frame from a movie.”

• On the topic of Yuri Norstein: the Russian government revoked his trademark to the bear in Hedgehog in the Fog. It comes as part of his and Yarbusova’s ongoing rights dispute with Soyuzmultfilm.

• Japanese animator Honami Yano (A Bite of Bone) has returned with a film called Eri — selected for Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. See the trailer here.

• The Indian feature Baahubali: The Eternal War was picked for an Annecy work-in-progress showcase. Hype for this one is rising. The full list of WIPs is here.

• The BFI Film Classics book series is getting a rare entry from the animation world: My Neighbor Totoro. British journalist Andrew Osmond is the author.

• Japan has seen a rise in full-time employment for animators in recent years. It comes as “anime studios try to secure reliable talent during the anime industry’s persistent labor crunch,” reports Animenomics.

• Last of all: we looked into Jiří Trnka’s classic film The Cybernetic Grandmother.

Welcome! Glad you could join us. In this Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, we’re looking at a classic film by Jiří Trnka (1912–1969).

If you’ve read us for a while, you know our feelings on Trnka’s work. He made stunning films with puppets — beginning with Bethlehem in 1946. From there, he quickly established himself as the grandmaster of stop motion.

Echoes of Trnka’s influence remain all around us. Pixar made its breakthrough with human characters in Geri’s Game — whose director said that his solution was just to “rip off one of [his] childhood heroes, Jiří Trnka.” The impact of Trnka’s films has reached many: Yuri Norstein, Kihachiro Kawamoto, Rebecca Sugar, Reiko Okuyama, Jan Švankmajer and more.1

By the mid-1960s, Newsweek was calling Trnka “the most celebrated animator in Europe.”2 His films were beautiful, thoughtful, funny, emotionally resonant. As one example, take The Cybernetic Grandmother (1962).

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

• 1. Reviving the book Inside UPA.

• 2. Animation newsbits.

With that, let’s go!

1. A creative environment

Animation changed in the ‘40s and ‘50s. For years, the Disney studio had ruled. It was the benchmark, with its storybook worlds in which rounded figures moved with endless complexity. Yet some of its artists were feeling stifled.

A new generation was rising, and the limits of Walt Disney’s ideas were showing.

For one, people chafed against Disney’s way of running his business — his vast “plant” (his word) where his control was total. When his younger crew tried to unionize in the early ‘40s, he warned them, “[I]t’s the law of the universe that the strong shall survive and the weak must fall by the way, and I don’t give a damn what idealistic plan is cooked up, nothing can change that.”1

The same young people had fresh stories to tell, and fresh visual ideas to try, but they often couldn’t. Although Disney had pushed animation to amazing heights, he liked what he liked, and what he liked was increasingly old-fashioned.

In 1943, a new Hollywood animation studio began to absorb the Disney rebels. At first, it took the long, drab name Industrial Film and Poster Service. Then it became United Productions of America. Eventually, most knew it as UPA.2

UPA overturned Disney’s model. The studio was artist-driven, a place for open creativity. It went beyond fairy tales, cartoon animals, realism and hyper-complicated movement. And it was Walt Disney’s political opposite. UPA’s Bill Hurtz referred to himself and his peers as “thinly disguised Reds.” There’s a story that someone once sang the Song of the Red Air Fleet in the hall, only to be joined by much of the staff.3

The most iconic UPA building sat in Burbank at 4440 Lakeside Drive. It was as new as the company’s spirit. “Far from being a monolith [like the Disney studio], it was a fluid and light structure,” wrote author Amid Amidi (now on Substack).4

That structure is gone today. But it’s still possible to step back into it — and into UPA’s other buildings. This is what Amidi’s book Inside UPA (2007) allows.

Inside UPA is a photobook about UPA’s spaces and the artists who worked in them. You might call it a companion to Amidi’s Cartoon Modern, which we scanned and posted with his permission in 2021. But a lot of people haven’t yet seen Inside UPA; its print run was small.

So, again with Amidi’s permission, we recently scanned it. And we’re sharing it for free in this issue. With the links below, you can download Inside UPA or read it via browser on the Internet Archive.

For a little more on UPA, and what this book contains, read on.

Read Inside UPA

Download Inside UPA (316 MB)

We’ve mentioned it before: UPA cartoons were different. It showed from an early stage in stuff like Hell-Bent for Election (1944), a pro-FDR film, and The Brotherhood of Man (1946), created to help a union integrate. That latter piece “rip[ped] the hide off Jimcrow,” in the words of The Daily Worker.5

The contrast with Disney’s work from the same period was visible. “Whereas Disney promoted a sort of small-town conservatism,” a writer once argued, “the artists of UPA were openly leftist and pro-union.”6

Backing up films like Brotherhood were forward-thinking visuals: modern design, limited animation and so on. The industry’s younger, often art-school-educated people were excited to test these things. Here’s David Hilberman, a UPA founder:

[Y]ou had designers who had art training who were beginning to push out and feel their oats. People who know who Picasso was and could recognize a Matisse across the room. And here they were at Disney, Warners, working with this really corny, cute stuff. They were ready. UPA was the first studio that was run by design people, and we were talking to an adult audience, to our peers. Not the family audience, not the kiddies. So given that the design just came out.7

By the first half of the ‘50s, UPA pieces like Gerald McBoing-Boing, Rooty Toot Toot, Madeline and The Tell-Tale Heart stood with the best animated films in the world. That was true in their design, but also in their writing, motion and music.

UPA became a new model, copied worldwide, like Disney had been. “Without exaggeration,” wrote historian Giannalberto Bendazzi, “it can be inferred that the very idea of animation as an art form, in the United States as well as in other countries, became commonplace with UPA.”8

Most of the studio’s finest films were done at the Lakeside Drive location. It was built to order by John Lautner, a modernist architect. “[M]y challenge there was to get a decent artists’ working space for absolutely minimum money, and I did,” he said. The studio was constructed on the cheap — in the ballpark of $30,000, Lautner recalled. That would be well below $500,000 today.9

It was a “bright and optimistic” mid-century place.10 As it was underway, word got out that “all offices and artists’ rooms, with glass to the floor, open on a central patio, giving the illusion of working out of doors.” That was another contrast with Disney — a studio of “factory cubicles with artificial light and no view,” according to one director.11

Calling UPA a “plant” was a stretch. This single-story building, in which everyone was on the same level, felt like an artists’ space.

The UPA team moved to 4440 Lakeside Drive in early 1949, in the winter. Even though the windows weren’t fully installed yet, and the crew reportedly lit bonfires to stay warm, the vibe was good from the start.12 Once the building was finished, it was almost idyllic. Artist T. Hee recalled the experience this way:

There were lots of birds flying around, and we’d have our lunches out on the patio, and have music out there, with people bringing their instruments. There was a camaraderie. For lunch people would bring costumes, and we’d dance out there on the grass; everybody had a wonderful time.

At UPA, there was no real house style. Its cartoons differed from each other — and from the wider animation world. Historian Adam Abraham noted that “the artists had the flexibility to give each seven-minute film its own look, appropriate to its subject.”13 The same was true of their sound and movement.

Legends worked at this place. Take Bill Melendez, who later oversaw A Charlie Brown Christmas. John Hubley was designing and directing. The grandmaster of limited animation, Bobe Cannon, was the team’s top animator. Even in the ‘90s, Genndy Tartakovsky was openly pulling from Cannon’s ideas (“I don’t think a week goes by that I don’t reference one of [UPA’s] films,” he said in 2012).14

The studio was popular, too. Films like Gerald McBoing-Boing, watched by some 25 million people by 1952, were magnetic. The Magoo films were a sensation. “[Our approach] hit audiences well; it was critically well received,” said John Hubley. “McBoing was a huge hit. The word started spreading that there was a new look to animation and Disney was finished!”15

Here’s The New York Times in the early ‘50s:

Staffed for the most part by artists with young minds and progressive ideas, whose talents extend beyond the field of the screen cartoon to the fine arts (many of them are exhibited in the galleries of Los Angeles and New York), the UPA studio out in Burbank, Calif., is a West Coast center of artistic industry. The whole place — a cheerful California ranch-type studio building — breathes freedom, imagination and taste.16

In many ways, UPA became the envy of the industry. Ward Kimball, one of Disney’s Nine Old Men, frequently stopped by. “I’d come over here to work in a minute if I could afford it,” he said.17

UPA was a leaner operation than the Disney studio; it couldn’t spend the fortunes that Walt Disney did. As Amidi wrote in Inside UPA, the studio “rarely paid above union scale and didn’t offer the amenities or glamour of the major studios like Disney or MGM.” But that didn’t seem to matter: “animation veterans and newcomers alike clamored for the opportunity to work there during the 1950s.”

In fact, two of UPA’s top animators had been top animators on Snow White: Art Babbitt and Grim Natwick. You see their mastery of the modernist approach in Rooty Toot Toot. Natwick argued that these films were “new, fresh, lively [and] lovable.” As he remembered, “I loved to work at UPA. They had a crazy system there, an idea, a community spirit. ... It really did innovate something there.”18

UPA opened a door. Throughout the ‘50s, many honed their craft at the studio’s Burbank and New York branches: Sterling Sturtevant (Magoo), Bill Scott and Shirley Silvey (Rocky and Bullwinkle), Roy Morita, Jimmy Murakami (When the Wind Blows), Gene Deitch (Munro), Tissa David — the list went on.

It should be said that the dream of UPA was relatively short-lived at the studio itself. The political climate put the team in a difficult spot.

Bill Melendez later wrote that UPA was “too liberal for the times” and for the “skunks” who ran Hollywood then. Its films, and especially the artists who made them, quickly grew suspect. The FBI was paying visits by the late ‘40s. When the military bought copies of The Brotherhood of Man for the denazification effort in Germany, after the war, it was a controversy. Those screenings were reportedly scuttled “out of fear of rubbing some Southern congressmen the wrong way.”19

As the Hollywood blacklist project ramped up, many at UPA were targeted for their affiliations on the left, real or imaginary. John Hubley lost his job. Then there was Phil Eastman, who’d worked on Brotherhood and Gerald and Magoo. Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Eastman refused to talk about any ties to communism — citing the Bill of Rights, and a distant relative persecuted in the Salem witch trials.

He spoke powerfully. Then a congressman quipped, “[T]here were no witches in Salem. There have been a number of communists identified in Los Angeles.” The hearing destroyed Eastman’s Hollywood career.20

Political persecution didn’t end UPA overnight. The studio kept doing great work — The Jaywalker (1956), for instance. But it was a blow, and other blows followed. Lots of people seen in Inside UPA were working elsewhere by 1960.

Even so, the spark ignited in 1943, which became a blaze at 4440 Lakeside Drive, kept going. As UPA’s people scattered, they took the experience with them.

John Hubley went indie; Bill Melendez became the driving force of the animated Peanuts specials. Phil Eastman switched to children’s books (as P. D. Eastman) and made Go, Dog. Go! and others. Rocky and Bullwinkle was stacked with UPA talent. Tissa David eventually turned into one of the world’s best animators. And, again, the list went on.

And their work at UPA left a mark on the wider world. You could see it in Disney films like One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and across the mid-century American industry.21 The impact of this new kind of animation was no smaller abroad — from Japan to Yugoslavia.

With Inside UPA, you can go inside the environment that allowed these great artists to grow in the first place. Like Amid Amidi wrote a few years ago:

Everyone who worked in the building remembered it fondly years later as a place where ideas flowed naturally and creativity flourished. … [T]oday, we can look back on it and remember that animation studios don’t need to look like generic office buildings where businesspeople work. Besides being functional for the purposes of production, an animation studio also has the capacity to be as beautiful, visually stimulating and creative as the work produced inside of it. Lautner’s UPA studio serves as a model for how it can be done.

We hope you’ll enjoy checking out Inside UPA.

2. Newsbits

• Shanghai Animation Film Studio is about to release a feature in Chinese theaters: A Story About Fire. It’s a unique-looking production — see the trailer via Catsuka.

• Cartoon Brew reports that the final episode of The Amazing Digital Circus, produced by Glitch in Australia, will premiere “on the big screen across the US in theaters nationwide.” (Also, new data shows that indie animation is overtaking studio projects for Generations Z and Alpha.)

• The American artist Josh Fagin appeared on John Pomeroy’s channel to discuss his Spirit Jumper video and reveal the techniques behind it.

• Junk World is a Japanese feature from last year, done in stop motion. Next month, it hits theaters in France.

• An event in America: Los Angeles Filmforum shows the unusual collage films of Stacey Steers this coming Tuesday.

• The venerable Russian studio Soyuzmultfilm is being pushed toward a “hybrid” GenAI pipeline.

• In Britain, the BFI more than doubled the budget of its Global Screen Fund — which covers animation.

• A Cuban animated film called Double Play recently had its premiere at Havana’s Cine Yara. Animados ICAIC put up photos of the event.

• Mu-Ki-Ra, a full-length film from Colombia, will have its festival debut in a couple of days. You can see it in motion here.

Until next time!

Welcome! Glad you could join us for another Thursday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. In this one: an interview from the ‘90s with animator Toshiyuki Inoue.

If you know anime, you’ve seen Inoue’s work, and may recognize his name. His mastery is visible in films like Akira, Tokyo Godfathers, Jin-Roh and The Boy and the Heron, and in the beautiful apartment sequence from Mamoru Oshii’s Innocence.

Inoue specializes in animation with a weighty, physical believability — he was key to the development of realist anime in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The style evolved project by project. Often, artists would jump from one realist film to the next, building on top of the work they’d just done.

One result of that process was Magnetic Rose (1995), part of the Memories anthology. It’s about a space crew that boards a haunted station, a vast, Rococo maze belonging to an opera singer. Satoshi Kon wrote the script, working from a story by Katsuhiro Otomo. And Inoue was the character designer and animation director — overseeing and correcting the key animators below him. Many have tried to copy the style he pulled off here, often without success.

Read more

Welcome! This is a new issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s our plan this Sunday:

• 1. Miyazaki’s concept sketches.

• 2. Animation newsbits.

Now, let’s go!

1. Ideas on paper

Watching The Boy and the Heron, back in 2023, wasn’t a theater experience like any we’ve had. We were a little speechless when we stood up to go — the credits rolling, white letters on blue. A stranger seated toward the front row had clapped at the ending. Mostly, people were quiet.

At age 82, Hayao Miyazaki had reinvented himself again. It was hard to find the director of My Neighbor Totoro in The Boy and the Heron, just as the link between Totoro and The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) had been faint. Miyazaki’s changed and adapted since his career began at Toei Doga in 1963, more than six decades ago.

What’s stayed consistent is his habit of sketching ideas. His “image boards.”

“An image board is something drawn to prepare for a work,” Miyazaki once explained. They aren’t storyboards — they’re for loose ideas, not strict continuity. He did his first image boards at Toei: “I myself started naturally [drawing them] with Horus.”1

Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968) was the debut film by the late Isao Takahata — Miyazaki’s close friend, rival, sounding board, foil and in some ways mentor. Miyazaki was a major artist on Horus, and one of several who drew its image boards. As he said:

Because they decided the overall feel of the film, and were the material that determined the direction of the story, it was necessary to draw as many as possible. I drew quickly and simply with a pencil and glossed it over with a single color — because it was the process of searching for a direction, I didn’t want to expend a lot of effort on each piece. I used to draw larger, but it got more and more troublesome, so they became smaller and smaller.

Loan words from English make up the Japanese term “image board” (imēji bōdo) — but the meaning of “image” drifted in translation. In Japanese, imēji refers to something more like a mental image, an impression, an idea.

Which is to say that an image board is concept art.

That’s how Miyazaki’s endless Horus pieces were used. He noted that they were stuck to the studio’s walls to give everyone a feel for the project. “People who were participating in the preparation and those who weren’t could freely take a look at it, and go, ‘This is going to be interesting,’ or, ‘This is no good,’ ” Miyazaki remembered.

His Horus drawings could be rough, as if he’d jabbed them onto the page in a frenzy. He was young. His fellow artists on the film, like Yoichi Kotabe, often did cleaner work. But Miyazaki’s sketches had an energy, a range and a cinematic eye that jumped out. Recalling his own time on Horus, Yasuo Otsuka wrote, “[N]o matter how much I drew, my drawing skill couldn’t match Miyazaki-san’s.”2

Soon, Miyazaki’s drawing ability matured further, and that roughness became a purposeful looseness. Horus began in 1965 and premiered in ‘68, and Miyazaki remained at Toei Doga for a few more years. He contributed concept art to Animal Treasure Island (1971) and others — visibly growing as an artist.

By 1971, when Miyazaki left Toei to work on Takahata’s unmade Pippi Longstocking, his image boards had real charm and warmth. The art doesn’t aim for perfection, but the character and atmosphere in it make the project feel real.

Image boards like these poured out of Miyazaki during the 1970s. He drew them for actual productions, pitches, pipe dreams. He was establishing himself as an expert at inventing and fleshing out animated worlds — initially, Takahata’s worlds. Along the way, he openly reused and reimagined his own past sketches. Tons of visual ideas from Pippi were recycled outright in Takahata’s Panda! Go, Panda! (1972).

A Miyazaki memory of the Panda era:

… when I read the wording of the proposal that Isao Takahata-san had quickly written up, I felt my heart swell in anticipation — I could create a wonderful world. The excitement remained without dissipating.3

Beginning with Heidi: Girl of the Alps (1974), Miyazaki’s main work under Takahata shifted to layouts. These set up the camera, backgrounds and animation, and the workload was so huge that Miyazaki couldn’t contribute to the creative side. “Heidi was entirely Paku-san’s world,” Miyazaki said, using Takahata’s nickname. He was often too busy drawing to attend Heidi’s meetings.4

On Takahata projects like 3,000 Leagues in Search of Mother (1976), Miyazaki grew more and more frustrated. They felt like a grind to him. “After Heidi, I didn’t have my whole heart in my work,” he said. Takahata’s shows were moving into naturalism and objectivity, and away from the fantasies of Pippi and Panda.5

In this era, Miyazaki felt that he “lost sight of [his] own themes.” On the side, though, he kept coming up with ideas and putting them down in image boards, even if they didn’t wind up on TV.

Around then, in the mid-1970s, he sketched a certain visual for My Neighbor Totoro. It was the bus stop scene in the rain.6

Miyazaki dreamed of making something cartoony, fun and wild again, and it manifested on the page. Totoro was born as an extrapolation of Panda. “Panda is a very big-hearted, easygoing character,” Miyazaki later wrote. “He makes those around him happy just by being there, without doing anything in particular. In that respect Totoro and Panda are similar for me.”

From there, Miyazaki’s image boards grew, and he became a better and better artist. Yet, at this early stage of his career, he’d already used them to define his most iconic visual.

Ultimately, Miyazaki’s frustrations forced him to quit working with Takahata. He moved to the TV series Future Boy Conan (1978), his directorial debut. And a torrent of his suppressed ideas emerged.

He drew an almost scary number of image boards for Conan, all zany, off-the-wall creativity. His goal was to build on the bright-eyed fantasies of his childhood years. Back then, animation carried the old-fashioned name manga eiga in Japan, and its representatives were cartoons like Fleischer’s Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941).

“[W]hen I worked on Future Boy Conan, I did not try to make ‘animation’ as we usually think of it, but a manga, or a cartoon film,” he noted.7

Although satisfying to do, Conan was a middling performer in ratings. Miyazaki bounced from there to his first feature, The Castle of Cagliostro — another attempt at manga eiga. It flopped. He later recalled:

The Castle of Cagliostro was like a clearance sale of all I had done on Lupin and during my early Toei days. I don’t think I added anything new. I can understand why people who had followed my work were extremely disillusioned. You can’t use a sullied middle-aged guy to create fresh work that will wow viewers. I realized I should never do this again. Neither did I want to. Even so, I did two more (television series New Lupin episodes 145, 155), and it was hell. With every piece I made it was obvious that I was just trotting out everything I had done before. [laughs] Nineteen eighty was my year of being mired in gloom.

Miyazaki was about to turn 40, and he felt washed up. But his creativity hadn’t really run out. In a sense, it was only then being born.

His image boards continued in this era: a thousand ideas raced and morphed in his head. As mentioned in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind: Watercolor Impressions, “The drawings Miyazaki accumulated between 1980 and 1982 formed the basis of all his work, from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to Princess Mononoke.”

Some of these drawings appeared in the book Hayao Miyazaki Image Board (1983), published when Miyazaki’s career was still struggling. He was involved in the Sherlock Hound TV series in the early ‘80s — it fell apart after a few episodes, only to be finished by another team. And he got sucked into the vortex of Little Nemo, a feature film that Hollywood wanted to make in collaboration with Japan.

“I ended up trying out all the different motifs I’d been carrying around with me,” Miyazaki said of Nemo.8 Each and every one of them was rejected. But, in the process, he even further developed the ideas in his image boards. This new trove started to be unleashed in Nausicaä (1984), a film far removed from the manic adventure-comedies he’d gotten known for.

Once again, his evolution showed in his sketches before it hit the screen. Miyazaki had gained new reference points after Cagliostro — like Heavy Metal magazine artists Mœbius and Richard Corben (Rowlf). Their stuff, with its underground-comix leanings, seeped into his image boards across the early ‘80s.9

Around the same period, he saw the animation of Frédéric Back and Yuri Norstein, in which he felt a richness beyond anything he knew from mainstream Japanese animation. It made him feel inadequate, and pushed him. The sense that his films were “manga,” or cartoons, began to put him “in a bad mood.”10

When Nausicaä reached theaters, it wasn’t simply a cartoon anymore. And that turn had started in his image boards. Soon, one of Miyazaki’s stray sketches of a floating castle, done in the early ‘80s, became the blueprint for Castle in the Sky (1986). In My Neighbor Totoro, two years later, even his bus stop drawing was realized on film — just deeper and richer now.

Since the 1960s, Miyazaki has kept to the same pencil-and-watercolor approach, plus the occasional inks, for his image boards. It’s casual, comfortable and fast. To him, he’s just jotting things down. As he said in the ‘90s:

… the idea is not to spend an infinite amount of time creating these things, but to do them as quickly as possible. It’s a totally different approach than most people use when painting with transparent watercolors. In what is completely my own style of doing things, I first draw in pencil, and then quickly trace over that with watercolor, all the while trying to render as many images as possible, with as little effort as possible [laughs], as fast as possible.11

Every Miyazaki movie originates from this jotting habit: his collection, reuse and exploration of ideas on paper. In one proto-Nausicaä image board, you find the same U-shaped arrowhead that appeared over 40 years later in The Boy and the Heron.

He’s always been self-deprecating about the art itself. In the ‘00s, he joked about its crudeness in his guide to watercolors. “Forty years of nothing but this!” yells his pig character. Then a caterpillar mocks him: this method is “all he can do.” A dog later says, “I wonder if he could paint a little more properly.”

But the energy of Miyazaki’s image boards — the loose pencil lines drawn with no erasing, the splashes of watercolor thrown around the page — shouldn’t be underestimated. At Toei, his concept art was sometimes outdone by others’ work. In the end, he took the lead. By the late ‘80s, a powerfully assured technique was visible in these sketches he tossed off so quickly.

There’s a feeling that the Miyazaki of Princess Mononoke, then in his 50s, could draw whatever he needed to draw. That was true in his storyboards as well. Yet so many of his visuals were image boards first, concept sketches on his sketch pile.

In 2001, the year Spirited Away premiered, Miyazaki turned 60. He’d felt washed up 21 years before, but this became his biggest hit, and most chaotically creative film, by that time. A lot of its success was right there in pencil and watercolor, where Miyazaki’s ideas had never been wilder or more concretely rendered. You saw the same in his sketches for Howl’s Moving Castle and Ponyo.

Every line and form is wobbly, but the impression is sharp, exact and effortless. The artist from Horus, all those decades before, was gone. The page was now an open conduit for Miyazaki’s imagination.

When The Boy and the Heron started, Miyazaki was in his mid-70s. The film took seven years. In 2023, ex-Ghibli animator Kenichi Yoshida said in an interview that he still met with Miyazaki to chat from time to time. It was different from before, though. “Miyazaki… is an old man now; he’s the same generation as my parents,” said Yoshida.

And yet the power of Miyazaki’s ideas had, in many ways, never been stronger. His image boards for The Boy and the Heron show a master’s touch, an absolute clarity of imagination. It’s not the phantasmagoria of Spirited Away, but he could still mesmerize with a sketch, and that lifted the film. An anecdote from the production proves it.

When producer Toshio Suzuki was creating the Japanese poster for The Boy and the Heron, something clicked. It wasn’t just him — even Miyazaki agreed, for once. Like Suzuki said a few years ago:

… I’ve been doing movies since, what, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and that poster is the first thing Hayao Miyazaki has ever really praised me for. He said, “Suzuki-san, this is amazing.” … He said it was the best I’ve done. That served as a hint. “So, let’s just go with this!” So, no trailers. Absolutely no TV spots. We’ll do it all. No newspaper ads!12

Suzuki’s mysterious, unplaceable poster helped to lead The Boy and the Heron to Ghibli’s biggest opening in Japan. The film went on to sweep the world. And what appeared on the original Japanese poster is a small snippet — carefully cropped and zoomed — of a Hayao Miyazaki image board.13

2. Newsbits

• We lost Barry Caldwell (68), the veteran storyboarder.

• There’s discourse in Nigeria about state support for artists. It turns out that “over $600 million in funding is available to Nigerian animators and comic creators, yet the majority of studios have not applied.” See The ACE for more.

• In America, some of the government’s moves last year to defund PBS and NPR were overturned by the courts.

• The Palestinian artist Ahmad Adawy won a Mahmoud Kahil Award for his illustrations. His former animation company, Cube Studio, was based in Gaza.

• There’s a government plan in Armenia to revive the dormant Armenfilm — a vital studio in the country’s Soviet era. Animator Robert Sahakyants made classics like Wow, a Talking Fish! there in the ‘80s.

• Last weekend in Cuba, the children’s animation workshops hosted by Academia Animaluz continued, despite a power outage due to the American blockade. (For more on current life in Cuba, see these accounts.)

• Scholar Pavel Shvedov wrote about the loss of the “middle generation” in Russian auteur animation. The recent Suzdalfest was populated mostly by newcomers and seasoned veterans; many of the artists in between have left the country or switched focus.

• An American theater, Metrograph in Manhattan, is screening Czech animation in April — including The Pied Piper and The Revolt of the Toys.

• We revealed a few months ago that the lost Mexican feature Roy from Space has been found and is being restored. Deaf Crocodile is now crowdfunding the final parts of the release, and there’s a trailer with footage.

• Fonzieland did an interesting profile on artist Teri Hendrich Cusumano, who spearheaded labor reforms in American animation but has since left the industry.

• Last of all: a flashback to the Disney Channel’s miniature festival of animation from around the world.

Until next time!

Welcome! Glad you could join us. In this issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, we’re looking at an artifact of the ‘80s.

Animation has always been international. A hundred years ago, films like The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) toured the globe. American and Soviet animators cross-pollinated throughout the ‘30s. The list goes on.

That said, something changed in the mid-century. Stuff like Expo 67, ASIFA and the Annecy Festival narrowed the distance between countries; animation from everywhere began to converge and compete. At a time when the world was divided by walls (literal and figurative), this medium grew almost borderless.

Animation scenes from China to Britain to the USSR were closely interlinked by 1984. The proof was right there on television — on the Disney Channel.

Just over a year into its existence, in June of ‘84, the Disney Channel aired Animation from Around the World.1 It was a one-shot program hosted by John Canemaker, the great historian. He said toward the start:

The philosopher Plato once wrote, “Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.” And certainly animation is among this century’s most enchanting and least lethal deceptions. This “lovely magic,” as it was called, caught the imagination and enthusiasm of artists the world over.

Canemaker’s poetic wording and Plato citation implied things about Animation from Around the World from the outset. This was a thoughtful program. In an hour, it brought together various countries’ animated films and ads — ones highly regarded at the time. “[A]ll of them,” Canemaker said, “carry the common thread of presenting a message with humor and understanding, and exploit an unusual design or technique.”

Today, the program sits on YouTube. And it’s a fascinating trip into the past of the world of animation.

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Welcome! Glad you could join us. It’s another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the plan:

• 1. An introduction to two independent greats.

• 2. Animation newsbits.

Now, let’s go!

1. The Hubley films

An animated sequence went very, very big on social media last year.

It’s about two people in a relationship. At one point, they sit in a rowboat. At another, they have an awkward conversation while wearing masks. Nothing major happens, but their interactions sound natural, unscripted — and they’re animated with artful drawings and a real sense of life. That was enough to hook millions.

The clips came from a little-known ‘70s movie called Everybody Rides the Carousel (watch). It was made for TV, but it doesn’t feel throwaway. In fact, handling this section of the film were two great animators: Barrie Nelson and Tissa David.1

Those artists had already worked a lot, on earlier projects, with the directors of Everybody Rides the Carousel. And the sequence turned out so well for a reason. The film was a Hubley production, after all.

John and Faith Hubley always brought something special to their work. It was never phoned in — even the ads they made on the side, to pay the bills, were left-field and human. Across the Hubleys’ decades together, their films won three Oscars. And they made those films outside America’s big studios.

Back then, from the ‘50s through the ‘70s, an indie animated film wasn’t a simple proposition. It was often impossible to get one funded and distributed. Even the Hubleys had to scramble, deep in debt. “[Y]ou spend a certain percentage — let’s say 20, 30, 40 percent of your day — dealing with matters that have nothing to do with the pure creative,” John said.2

But they kept doing one of these unusual films each year. John noted that “you have to make what you want to make.” For Faith, the less commercial of the pair, it was non-negotiable. “If you are going to grow, stay alive, remain sensitive and valid, you have to keep working seriously,” she said. “If your value in life is to be always doing what comes along, you are abandoning your responsibility as an artist.”

This thinking led them to work like Everybody Rides the Carousel (a lucky commission from a network), whose artistry and humanity still touch people.

That film is only a slice of the Hubley story, though. In this issue, we’re putting together an introduction to their careers — and a viewing guide for their films (with links to watch in bold).

When the Hubleys married in 1955, they’d already been friends for years. They’d worked together, too. Their first collaboration was the educational film Human Growth (1947).3 Faith, who edited it, came from Hollywood’s live-action side. John was an animation guy; he designed its animated inserts.

Faith took many roles in Hollywood: coordination, script, sound. John was a name at UPA, where he did socially engaged and graphically fresh cartoons. Some saw him as a “genius.”4 With creations like Mr. Magoo, John told modern stories in the language of modern art. He rebelled against what he called Disney’s “18th-century watercolor” aesthetics and “sweet sentimental chipmunks and bunnies.”

As the Red Scare began to rage, though, John landed in trouble over his one-time membership to the Communist Party. In 1952, he was blacklisted in Hollywood.5

So, he opened an advertising studio, Storyboard, as a refuge. When Faith married him, Storyboard’s purpose became indie animation.6 It was a must for her: “I have much stronger feelings than John about the risks of spending one’s life in advertising,” she said. They promised in their wedding vows to do one film per year, however they could. (“We make one for them,” John noted, “and one for us.”)7

In 1956, they relocated their studio to New York — leaving the Hollywood ecosystem behind. “As a country, we paid a heavy cost [for the blacklist],” Faith said. “But personally, it allowed us great freedom. I don’t know if Johnny ever would have left Hollywood. I don’t know if we would have had as creative a life.”

The Hubleys’ first indie animated film was The Adventures of * (1957), funded by the Guggenheim. Faith described it as the tale of “a child’s vision, the slow erosion of the vision, and how it can only be regained through the eyes of one’s child.” And, visually, it was revolutionary.8 Here’s John:

Because it was commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum and because they were dedicated to breakthrough art … [it] was mandatory to come up with a new technique in animation. We worked at ways of getting something that was never done and came up with this wax resist. … Take the animation, then we cover the drawing. Turn another piece of paper over and you take a wax candle, like a real paraffin, heavy paraffin and rub it very hard over that shape. And then you wash watercolor ink over it and what happens is you get a natural resist from the wax ... [We were getting] this wonderful texture on this thing and then double-exposing it over backgrounds that were also painted in the same technique … It’s like a painting coming to life.9

The Adventures of * set the tone for their work together. It would be unorthodox, non-Hollywood — movies like canvases. And it would focus on the real and the human, pushing back against the phony corporatization of the mid-century.

As mentioned, that spirit appeared even in the Hubley commercials, made to fund their personal films. Take their major one for Maypo cereal. John had long hated the “prosaic hard-sell dead spots on the air,” and he felt that ads should have the “human elements” that inspired “people to watch TV shows in the first place.”10

The Maypo ads derived from unscripted, improvised audio recordings, spliced into narratives. Faith said, “[W]e just loved the idea of doing something natural and truthful with a non-professional actor.” Here, they worked with Mark Hubley, their young child. The campaign seems to have been a tax write-off for a failing product; the Hubleys got lots of money and unusual freedom.11

But the result, which debuted less than a year before The Adventures of *, had a warm authenticity. People loved it. Maypo’s sales spiked dramatically, and the Hubleys were hired for a whole series of ads — Late for School, Marky’s Sister, the one about Uncle Ralph. “It supported our personal films,” Faith said.12

Take The Tender Game (1958), a short romance. Although the Hubleys weren’t animators themselves, they appreciated the craft — and they hired legends like Bobe Cannon to make their designs move. Paired with music by Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson, it’s beautiful.

The involvement of jazz was key — John and Faith loved it, and they had friends in the jazz world. Benny Carter was a regular collaborator, as was Dizzy Gillespie. (“We have a mutual admiration society,” Gillespie wrote.) The Hubleys’ Harlem Wednesday, from 1957, is just Carter’s jazz over modern paintings of mid-century Harlem life. But that’s enough.13

By the time the Hubleys released Moonbird (1959), their films were clearly different. Once again, it was a visual experiment — paint on paper, double-exposed over backgrounds — with a grounding in reality. It’s based on an edited recording of their sons Mark and Ray (“Hampy”) at play. Bobe Cannon and Ed Smith brought the soundtrack to life with world-class animation.14

Here was the new breed of animated film — self-funded and personal. Moonbird won the Oscar for animated shorts in 1960, a first for indie animation. As John stood at the podium, he said:

I must share this with five people: Bob Cannon, Ed Smith, Faith Elliott and Marky and Hampy.15

By the early ‘60s, Hubley films were known to those in the know, worldwide. Animators in the USSR looked at their experiments with a touch of envy. The painterliness of films like The Tender Game and Moonbird was a topic of discussion in places like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Disney was popular, but the Hubleys got the respect.16

It was painful for John, during the UPA years, that his films didn’t win Oscars. With Moonbird, Hubley family productions began to succeed where he’d failed. Animator Shamus Culhane felt that Faith brought “a lyric quality, a subtle tender approach to filmmaking ... a poetic approach” that John didn’t have at UPA.17

Figuring out exactly what each Hubley contributed to the films is difficult, and it changed project by project. John said that “all of the films, right from the beginning of our stuff, from Guggenheim on up, have always been a very close collaboration, creatively and on every other level.” He hesitated to break it down too much.18 Faith gave it a try:

We collaborate on the story. John does most of the backgrounds and I do some. I do the character rendering. We both work on the soundtracks. As a trained editor, it’s easier for me. The statement, the content, is made jointly.

Recently, their son Ray pointed out just how essential Faith’s work was on the sound side. “As I look at it, I see that Faith editing together these improvised dialogue tracks ... it approaches being something like a writer for the films,” he said.19

Temperamentally, Faith was an energetic go-getter; John was more neurotic and moody. She noted that he was a hypochondriac, and prone to bouts of depression after a project. The two of them were known to argue relentlessly over their work. (“I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with fighting,” Faith said.)

Yet the collaboration only grew stronger. They kept pushing boundaries and making the films that Hollywood couldn’t. Take The Hole (1962) — a gorgeous, funny piece built on a conversation between Dizzy Gillespie and George Mathews. It tackles nuclear war with a human touch. It won another Oscar.

Despite the acclaim, the Hubleys’ films mostly struggled. Moonbird didn’t pay off until the ‘70s; The Hole wasn’t widely seen. John’s dream was to make features, but their first, the visually stunning Of Stars and Men (1961), was a flop that wrecked their finances. Even some festival audiences were skeptical. Faith recalled “banging doors and loud hisses” when it screened at Annecy in France.20

The Hubleys’ studio sank further underwater over the years. Creatively, though, they didn’t slow down. Windy Day (1968) was a project with their daughters Emily and Georgia, and one of their most impactful films. It was shot on layers of underlit vellum. Meanwhile, Zuckerkandl (1968) is a hilarious jab at mid-century America, about a philosopher who argues for “the disentangled life.” A follower of his says:

Imagine … a community all the members of which are unconscious. Let neither choice nor thought nor action destroy this paradise, this nest of softly cooing doves, unconcerned by what people will say because they know that people will all say the same thing. Be unconscious. Be detached. Don’t get involved.

The Hubley films always had a cause — not always openly stated. Zuckerkandl is one of their loudest, and it feels like a response to the Vietnam War. A few years earlier, Faith had told the press, “We make most of our films funny. Everything is really so futile that all you can do is laugh and do your best.”21

By necessity and by design, a Hubley production was a small production. There wasn’t much money to go around, for one — but John and Faith were also resisting the industrial approach. “We try to keep the staff at half a dozen,” Faith said. “This work is highly personal and it suffers terrifically if it gets farmed out to strangers.”

They had a stable of people who worked with them again and again. It wasn’t uncommon for a single animator to handle a whole film. That was the case with Tissa David, who animated their Eggs (1970) and Cockaboody (1973) by herself.

In the ‘70s, David was a go-to animator for the Hubleys. They used her often in their shorts for Sesame Street and The Electric Company: Glad Gladys, Cool Pool Fool, Penguin Rhythms, The M Who Came to Dinner. David was a master at the human warmth the Hubleys needed — and at working with limited frames. She’d learned her craft at UPA, and she stayed committed to the style. As she once said, a low budget:

... does not inhibit me at all. I love simplicity in animation. Even if I had a high budget I would do simple animation.22

When the opportunity to create Everybody Rides the Carousel came along, the Hubleys hired David to animate a good deal of the film. It’s a semi-educational, feature-length story about people’s development. CBS funded it and gave it a half-year schedule, but John and Faith treated it the same as an indie project, and involved their Yale class in the making of it.23

Carousel was one of the Hubleys’ last films together, before John’s death. And it was among their closest collaborations. Faith said she had a large hand in directing Bill Littlejohn’s animation (“I wanted to act out some of the characters”), and that more of her own painting appeared on screen than usual.

Littlejohn was the Snoopy animator — a top-tier artist. Many were hired to Carousel. Tissa David took the lead on the sixth section, with the young couple. Working alongside her, as noted at the start, was Barrie Nelson (Windy Day).

And, in that sixth section, you find all the hallmarks of Hubley animation.

First, the voices. On YouTube, where the film’s views exploded last year, one commenter wrote, “I love the way they talk so naturally. It doesn’t sound like acting. It sounds like we’re listening to a home movie.” The reason: Carousel was another Hubley improv recording edited into a soundtrack.24 (One of the actors for the couple was a young Meryl Streep, in her debut film role.)

Second, the technique. This isn’t traditional cel animation. Michael Sporn, who worked on Carousel, wrote that David’s scene with the masks was done with vellum, light and multiple exposures. “Each stage [of the film] had its own technique and color scheme,” he noted.25

Third, the design and animation. The mask sections get away from Disney’s ideas: once again, it’s like painting in motion. And David’s animation isn’t literal or naturalistic — the characters act with human warmth, but they also transform in unreal ways. All of it was needed for the special “realism” that the film demanded. Like John Hubley wrote at the time:

In the sequence dealing with intimacy versus isolation, it becomes clear to a couple that their relationship is moving toward a deeper commitment to each other. Each must be prepared to share identity with the other. Each feels threatened, their faces turn inward, and masks appear. The masks continue a superficial relationship while the real faces, still turned inward, voice thoughts and feelings about the conflict. They drift apart, unable to remove the masks. When the two do away with their masks on a second try, and make real efforts at intimacy, they succeed in sharing. They reach maturity; the figures become abstract, Matisse-like. The enactment is a ballet — a series of arms, legs, torsos and heads flowing in a dance of love. A literal love scene at this point would be cartoon-like in the old sense, and would therefore present not realism but a flat and ineffective caricature. …

Artists around the world are defying the old “linear shape” order in graphics. Let’s hope they also defy the limitations of the fairy tale and confront contemporary issues. May we be fortunate enough to see the development of visuals that are generated by dramatic and psychological imperatives — to continue to reveal human vulnerability and to increase the understanding of human relationships.26

Everybody Rides the Carousel fell into obscurity, and it isn’t available in restored condition. Even the version that Criterion streamed a few years ago didn’t look great. The copies that went viral last year are bleary; it’s almost hard to tell what’s happening.

But none of that kept people away. The scenes in the sixth part of Carousel are rich with those qualities Faith Hubley cited: they’re “natural and truthful.” At a time when the Hubleys aren’t discussed much, and social media seems like a poor fit for their slow and thoughtful films, millions and millions stopped to watch Carousel on Instagram.

The honesty, uniqueness and personal touch that the Hubleys fought for decades to keep in their films — the very reasons they went indie — are still reaching people. They had to scramble and struggle for those things, but they’re in there, and they’re immortal. In a Hubley independent production, Faith once said, it was “truth and the budget” that had “the last word.” It’s fortunate for us all that they kept finding enough of both.

2. Newsbits

• We lost Sam Kieth (63), the virtuoso comic artist behind The Maxx, adapted into an animated series in the ‘90s.

• In America, OpenAI is shutting down its Sora video generator. (Also, Disney backed out of its billion-dollar investment in the company.)

• Smear Frame published a fascinating meditation on the closure of several college animation programs in America. It’s a new animation newsletter we’re following.

• In Japan, Sunao Katabuchi (In This Corner of the World) put out a short called Map of Fukufuku on YouTube. With 5.6 million views so far, it’s been a hit.

• Also in Japan, Studio Ponoc reportedly came on board Mfinda. The team is best known for Mary and the Witch’s Flower.

• In France, the Annecy Festival revealed its lineup of shorts for 2026. Included are Black Box by Anton Dyakov and Winter in March by Natalia Mirzoyan (two members of the Russian animation diaspora), and Night Song by Karla Castañeda, who worked on del Toro’s Pinocchio.

• The Glassworker reached Blu-ray in Britain. It’s well worth a look — check out our past coverage here and here.

• In Russia, there’s been a fallout from Suzdalfest’s cancellation of the Grand Prix award for Leonid Shmelkov’s Restlessness, seemingly for political reasons. See coverage here and here.

• A film from Argentina, Carlos Montaña (2022), just landed on YouTube. Director Ita Romero has spoken about the film’s relationship to Argentina’s past and her own father.

• Last of all: we looked into the trickery that made Disney’s first features so magical.

Until next time!

Welcome! Thanks for joining us. It’s another Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — and our topic this time is Disney.

Sometimes, a certain idea about older hand-drawn animation floats around. As the thinking goes: these films are about drawings that come to life.

The stars of Snow White, or even of anime from the ‘80s, were the key animators. Artists like the Nine Old Men put motion into pencil sketches, and it defined the films. It’s like magic — even CG animation just can’t compete.

That’s the idea, at least. Plenty of people feel this way, and it shows up in several guidebooks. The Animator’s Survival Kit is a default text for hand-drawn animation, and nearly all of its focus goes to the mechanics of character movement.1

When you look closer at the classics, though, a different theme emerges. Visually, many of them have other things happening on screen — beyond traditional character animation, or even backgrounds. And these other things often provide the magic of a scene, of a whole film.

Last week, we covered the aesthetics of Rintaro, the anime great. His movies lean on effects — colored lights, reflections, shadows, water ripples and the rest. This extra visual information tends to matter as much as the characters’ movement. Or take The Secret of NIMH and Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Running Man (1987), two films whose characters are at times overwhelmed by effects.

The effects in question went beyond pencil drawings. You can’t make NIMH or a Rintaro movie without multiple-exposure techniques like backlighting, for example — not to mention practical trickery like NIMH’s Xeroxed live footage.

The early Disney features are full of other things, too.2 Although there’s no taking away from the importance of their character animation, productions like Snow White and Pinocchio were also special-effects films. Their excitement and believability regularly came down to “secondary” visuals.

Key animators had clout at Disney back in the day. Secondary stuff was done by artists less known in the studio. The impact of their work was clear, though. Like Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston wrote, “[E]veryone saw that amazing scenes were appearing on the screen.”3

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Welcome! This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s the slate today:

• 1. On Crac by Frédéric Back.

• 2. Newsbits.

Now, let’s go!

1. Speaking through beauty

In 1982, Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki were in the United States. They’d come to work with Hollywood on an animated Little Nemo feature. The experience was a frustrating one.

But something good came of it. While in Los Angeles, Takahata went to a screening of The Adolescent (1979), a live-action movie from France. It was touring American theaters as a double bill with an animated short from Canada. Takahata didn’t realize that the short had already won an Oscar earlier in 1982.1

Its title was Crac (1981). Takahata was floored — “completely captivated,” he later said. He had to watch it again, pulling colleagues along.

Miyazaki’s reaction was similar. In his words:

It was a shock to both of us. As we trudged home after the film, I remember saying to Takahata-san, “So, I guess we’re failures, aren’t we…”2

He and Takahata became evangelists for Crac when they got back to Tokyo. Toshio Suzuki, then a magazine editor, heard the raves. “They said that the story, theme and presentation all matched,” he remembered. Even the characters and backgrounds were united in the film’s single, total vision — something Japanese cel animation didn’t do.3

They’d discovered a filmmaker, Takahata later wrote, whose “content and presentation are inseparably linked.”4

Crac’s quiet beauty and emotional pull, and its message about the value of rural living in Quebec, strongly resonated with Takahata and Miyazaki. It became one of their favorite films — and biggest influences. From that point, at least a little (often a lot) of this film showed up in their work.

Crac is about a rocking chair. It’s also about history, and what it means to be happy. The story begins when a man cuts down a tree and lovingly carves a chair from its wood. It stays in his family for decades. We watch life go on: a wedding celebration, the change of seasons, the birth of children, the games those children play. The chair is part of it all — getting painted, broken and repaired along the way.

Then, as modern times arrive, it’s thrown out. Canada’s landscape is destroyed, too, and replaced by factories and identical high-rises. But the chair does find a new life. Although its old world is gone, it survives, and its memories with it.

Crac’s story was relevant to Japan — which had experienced these changes itself. It was a coincidence. Director and animator Frédéric Back was aiming much closer to home.

He was a European who’d lived in Canada since the ‘40s, and he’d come to love Quebec. Crac was his tribute to a local way of life that had faded away — based on his memories and those of his wife, who’d known the old, rural Canada. It was an era, Back said, when people “had the forests to live off and they lived well by the forest.”5

As he put it:

… I expected the film to please Quebeckers, especially. The big surprise was seeing that Americans found it amusing, and that the Japanese found it interesting, and then seeing it accepted around the world.6

Frédéric Back was a latecomer to animation. He’d started around 1968, in his mid-40s, and had slowly worked out his own methods. Fantasia was Back’s earliest influence in animation, but his style owed little to Disney. Much of his drawing and timing were intuitive rather than structured, based on a lifetime as a sketch artist and painter. He was an auteur who did films largely alone — an idea he got from Norman McLaren.7

Unlike McLaren, Back didn’t work for the National Film Board. He had a less prestigious job at Radio-Canada, whose animation department was smaller, scrappier and often under threat of closure. There, he made his name. Back’s Illusion (1975) won awards internationally. All Nothing (1978) was nominated for an Oscar.8

The idea for Crac predated those films. He wrote its proposal in 1973, inspired by a story that his young daughter had composed for school. Hers was Les lamentations d’une chaise berçante, or “The Lamentations of a Rocking Chair.” It was an old, handcrafted chair’s tirade against humanity, which had taken it for granted and moved on to mass-produced chairs with “no personality.”9

The story’s humor and statement appealed to Back. He was an environmentalist, an activist, a tree-planter and an artist with a message — his films always agitated for a better, happier, more just world. Here was a new way to do it.

The History of a Rocking Chair was the name of his proposal, but the project ultimately became Crac. As he said:

That film deals with nostalgia. The title Crac refers to the speed with which change happens to us. Families breaking up, the move from rural to urban settings ... Especially for young people, the change is subtle. There’s not much to remind them of the past, so near to them.10

Back’s first outline for Crac shares a lot with the final product, but its last sequence differs (it’s set in an antique store instead of a museum). He gave the story time to come together. “Crac waited six years for its present ending,” he noted.

Until then, he was working on other things.

Crac’s look, the colored-pencil sketches that became Back’s signature, first emerged during All Nothing. The plan for that project had been to draw on tracing paper — which didn’t work. So, he tested something else:

… frosted cels, a material more commonly used by architects and engineers. This allowed me to reduce the size of the drawings and to use colored pencil, which wouldn’t have adhered to the smooth surface of a transparent cel. The semi-transparency of the frosted cel gives a certain texture to the image and enables great freedom of expression. Wax-based colored pencils (I used Prismacolor) came in a wide range of colors and were readily available.11

With this technique, Back collapsed the stylistic gap between character and background: each one looks like the other. And he got closer to his natural sketching style. In fact, Takahata felt that Back had transferred the art of sketching to animation: the quick, personal drawings of an artist who captures exactly and only what they want to capture, in the moment. Here, impression took over.12

Crac was a new high for this style. It developed Back’s approach to motion, too. The film often moves in an exaggerated and simplified way, but it still feels studied from life — more like sketched movements than vaudeville. In Takahata’s view, Back hooks the audience with “the attraction of human movement as such,” with “the expression of the most ordinary and everyday human activities.”13

Of the small team working with Back, a key member was composer Normand Roger — Back gave him much of the credit for the film.14 There’s no dialogue in Crac, but its folk music plays a storytelling role. For example, it evokes real joy in the dance sequence; and the return of the dance theme at the film’s end is a deep emotional hit. “I worked with traditional musicians who could not read music, but had the real style … they learned by ear very fast,” said Roger.

Back spent more than a year and a half producing Crac. There were around 7,000 drawings, each from his hand. He was a hard worker, always staying late at Radio-Canada. A higher-up at the studio remembered him as “sort of the night watchman.”15

He was a workaholic, a habit driven by his sense of mission. Back had been concerned about animal welfare, war and the environment since his youth — even getting into fights with people who mistreated their horses. He was humble about it, but he was a lifelong activist, and his films were part of it. As he said:

I always felt weak in relation to the dimension of injustice. … One must counterbalance violence. One must react. We can’t accept it. When someone is getting a beating in front of you, the worst thing is cowardice. Intervention is necessary.

On the surface, Back’s anger is more obscured in Crac than in his earlier work. Still, it’s a film dedicated to the same causes, fueled by the same urgent need to act. After finishing it, Back explained:

My films are my gift. I put the very best of myself, of what I believe very deeply, into my work. ... I decided some time ago that I didn’t have enough talent to make revolutionary films. Therefore I would make films that communicate something, films that renew and give new life to the viewer … filmmaking is not just an occupation for me.

The gift of Crac came at a severe cost to him. Its colored-pencil process required a fixative on each cel. Just before All Nothing competed at the Oscars in early 1981, while Crac was underway, that fixative got into Back’s right eye. “I washed my eye out with water, because it was 10 or 11 at night and all the drug stores were closed,” he said.

It did damage. Surgeries followed, which could have succeeded if he’d rested afterward. Instead, he kept animating and ultimately lost his eye. “I should have stopped working for several months,” he later said, “but I continued.”

Nevertheless, Crac came out. It won the Oscar. Back went onstage, in a too-large tuxedo he’d borrowed at the last minute, and accepted his award. He was honored — but, even so, told his producer offstage that it would’ve been better for All Nothing to have won. Its message is more plain.16

Crac deserved it, though. And its added subtlety only makes Back’s statement more powerful. Takahata and Miyazaki came from a different world, but they were stunned in 1982. It changed the trajectory of their work, in ways more obvious (Yamadas, Kaguya) and less. You can read even My Neighbor Totoro as an answer to Crac.

The film’s DNA is inside Studio Ghibli — and inside almost all animation, everywhere. Disney veterans like Glen Keane fell in love with it. Festival-circuit animators like Koji Yamamura fell in love with it. You still see traces of it, even of Back’s approach to staging and transitions, in the work of people who’ve never watched Crac.

Back had hit a new level. Exiting the plane after his return from Los Angeles, he found a dozen of Radio-Canada’s executives there to celebrate his arrival. A reporter heard him say, “I just expected my family.”17 Soon, the Oscar would get him approved to make The Man Who Planted Trees (1987), which would win another Oscar and solidify Back’s place as one of the greatest animation artists.

Yet artistry was only part of the point. Back’s goal with his films was to inspire action, and beautiful images were his means. It’s hard to come away from Crac unmoved — without a renewed desire to appreciate life, or an awareness of the need for change. Like The Man Who Planted Trees, it’s a film with that power.

2. Newsbits

• In America, it looks like the Bob Iger era is officially over. He stepped down as Disney’s CEO this past week.

• On the other hand, in Japan, Hayao Miyazaki is still working and still talking about another film. His latest project is now complete: gorgeous handmade dioramas dedicated to his past work. See them here and here.

• Also in Japan, there’s a new animated music video from Ryu Kato, whose creations have fascinated us for years.

• American showrunner Matt Braly gave a revealing interview to re:frame about the state of Hollywood. “[T]he value of an individual vision, the auteur vision, it is just in the can,” he said. Braly has gone indie and is currently crowdfunding a new series.

• A director from Ukraine, Iryna Tsilyk, received backing in France for an animated documentary about life during the war.

• My Life in Versailles, produced in France and Luxembourg, took the grand prize for features at NYICFF. Check out the trailer on YouTube.

• Suzdalfest happened in Russia, and the feature prize went to Tied Up by Konstantin Bronzit. Leonid Shmelkov’s dark, surreal movie Restlessness (trailer) was strongly praised by festivalgoers but shut out — controversially.

• AnimaxFYB of Ghana won prizes in Tokyo, as part of a program by Japan’s industry to train African talent. Two results so far: The Legend of Asebu Amenfi and the CR Motion+ film Trials of the Spear.

• Animation Magazine published its 2026 list of the rising stars of animation. Among them is Nadia Darries, co-director of Crocodile Dance.

• Yugen is a stop-motion film from Mexico. In honor of its premiere, AWN shared videos and spoke to director Nayelli Ojeda.

• Last of all: we looked into the directing philosophy of Rintaro, the visualist.

Until next time!

Welcome! It’s a new Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — and, this time, we’re looking into the style of a great director.

Rintaro turned 85 earlier this year. He’s still youthful and working. Just a few months ago, he held a master class on his latest film — speaking energetically about the craft of movie-making, which he’s always loved.

Without Rintaro, Japanese animation wouldn’t look the same. It’s been his world since Toei Doga’s White Snake Enchantress (1958), where he had a junior role. Seeing that film inspired Hayao Miyazaki to become an animator himself. By the time Miyazaki joined Toei, though, Rintaro was elsewhere.1 The two of them are masters of different schools.

Miyazaki has spoken about his own style. Following Isao Takahata, he thinks of animation as a continuity of time and space. He creates the illusion that his characters really exist in concrete, three-dimensional worlds. Miyazaki’s camera choices and edits, and the tactility of his team’s art, build this illusion of real-ness.

That isn’t quite Rintaro’s way. He’s argued that animation “is all about creating images.” Even story sometimes takes a back seat for him. “Enjoying the story is the correct way to enjoy movies,” Rintaro said. “But when I was a kid, I’d watch the same movie again to see how the shots were crafted, ignoring the story.”2

A Rintaro film is, usually, an explosion of visual ideas. Glowy effects fill the screen; shots and animation are loudly stylized, drawing attention to themselves. The point isn’t a sense of continuity. In Rintaro’s Dagger of Kamui (1985), even the film grammar changes sequence by sequence. One commentator noted:

It’s like every scene is addressing a different challenge. The camera distance is different in each one, the editing style is different… whether it’s shown through animation, or montage, or through background art. Each solution is completely different.3

The journalist Yuichiro Oguro has described Rintaro as a “visualist.”4 It’s apt. By the ‘60s, Rintaro was already on his lifelong hunt for fresh images — and coming up with new techniques to make them happen.

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