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.

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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

Read more

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.

Read more

It’s Sunday! Thanks for joining us. This is another issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s the slate:

• 1. Useful things for artists.

• 2. Animation newsbits.

With that, let’s go!

1. Five gems

Quite a few artists read this newsletter. Among them are animators — and painters, cartoonists and beyond. It’s something wonderful about running Animation Obsessive. We aim mainly at a general audience, but it makes our day when the work helps artists with their art.

So, sometimes, we do issues for artists specifically. Case in point: our continuing series dedicated to free art guides, reference databases and so on. We come across these things in our line of work. The last time we published a collection of them was in May 2025 — and we’re due for a new one.

Past editions have included treasures like the Don Bluth Studios Animation Archive and Nick Cross’s painting tutorial for Over the Garden Wall. But you won’t find any repeats in today’s issue.

Below, we’ve rounded up tips on walk animation, troves of material on painting and design — and inspiration from the public domain. We hope it’ll be interesting for artists of all persuasions.

1.1: James Baxter on walking

It’s pretty rare for a key animator to get famous — for their name to make eyes widen in recognition not only in the business, but just about anywhere animation is discussed. James Baxter resides in that group.

You’ve seen his work in Disney renaissance movies (Belle, Rafiki, Quasimodo) and in many other places. An episode of Adventure Time was named after him. People lost it over his recent animation for Gumball. Baxter’s work is clean and slick, and its technical virtuosity appeals to pros and to complete outsiders.

So, it was a big deal, a couple of months ago, when Baxter posted a guide to animated walks on YouTube. A legend held a 44-minute master class for free — for viewers anywhere.

Baxter’s video is called “Walks,” and those studying animation have likely already seen it. As one commenter wrote, “If you listen closely, you can hear the cheers of thousands of animation students from across the world as this video was posted.”

Still, for animators who haven’t checked it out, it’s worth highlighting again. Baxter breaks down walks in three styles: realistic, quasi-realistic and cartoony. His tips are clear — at one point, he speaks about limbs that open outward “kind of like an umbrella.” And each walk is realized in the tight, smooth, three-dimensional animation for which he’s known.

Even artists with looser, more abstract approaches can get something from watching Baxter explain what he’s doing and why. “Walks” is a must-see for animators, and one of the 2026 highlights in the animation world so far.

1.2: Cartoon Modern

The book is two decades old, but unsurpassed in its lane. Amid Amidi’s Cartoon Modern maps the break away from the classic Disney method, and the rise of modernist animation in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s.

Years back, Amidi posted an open call for someone to scan Cartoon Modern and put it online for free. That’s what we did in 2021. Watching the book benefit so many people was great.

That said, 2021 was a while ago. When we first shared Cartoon Modern, the newsletter’s audience was roughly 40 times smaller than today (a figure that startles us). For that reason, it feels valuable to re-post Amidi’s book, and to explain again why it’s so good.

Read via the Internet Archive

If you’ve ever wanted to learn about UPA, or the cartoon movement that later inspired The Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack, this is the starting point. It’s an art book that doubles as a history lesson. As Amidi wrote at the front:

The new look of cartoons during the 1950s stemmed largely from the desire of animation artists to move beyond the slapstick routines and “hurt gags” that had been the stock-in-trade of American animated filmmakers up until that time, and instead use the language of animation to convey contemporary ideas and themes. … Animation artists conceived a bold visual style that was derived from the modern arts, assimilating and adapting the principles of cubism, surrealism and expressionism.

In Cartoon Modern, you find the classic films (Rooty Toot Toot, Dalmatians) alongside the industrial and advertising work that dominated the mid-century. Amidi broke serious ground with this book — reintroducing to the canon artists like Sterling Sturtevant, and her contributions to Mr. Magoo and the ad world.

We still use Cartoon Modern ourselves in our writing about mid-century animation, and we don’t plan to stop. Highly recommended.

1.3: Art with Jake Taplin

There are reasons the academic painting of the 1800s fell off. The work of artists like Poynter and Bouguereau had a decadent, glossy, show-off-y quality that came to feel suffocating. Modernists opened the windows. In the playfulness of Paul Klee, or the pure shapes of Kazimir Malevich, there was a raw new vitality.

At the same time, many of the techniques of the academic painters are still useful to know — for all kinds of artists, including animators. And those techniques are hard to learn today, and often misunderstood as grueling art-challenges for perfectionists. Which is a little off-base.

Lately, we’ve been enjoying the articles and videos that Jake Taplin does. He’s a young, self-taught artist who’s studying academic techniques, and his mission is to make them accessible. “Does learning to draw mean we have to suffer and even learn to dread drawing?” he asked in 2025. His answer: “no.”

Taplin brings a sense of excitement and momentum when he talks about drawing and painting. A number of his short videos — like this one — have views in the millions, even though the ideas in them were once seen as bone-dry. (He also keeps his own list of learning resources, most of them free.)

Along the way, Taplin is pushing back against elements of the academic-revival scene, and the current fixation on copying. A recent video gets into Charles Bargue’s exercises (here), related to the ones studied by Van Gogh. Although Taplin is a fan, he offers a word of caution:

Copying the Bargue plates is a core part of many traditional art schools’ curriculum today, but there’s one major difference. Students nowadays line up the drawing in scale, side by side with the plate, and spend dozens and sometimes even a hundred-plus hours copying it. … [The original drawings in the Bargue plates] were done by several of the teachers and students at the École des Beaux-Arts ... [and] they had rigorous time limits for their drawings. They did the entire 18x24 figure drawings in only 12 hours. ...

Some teachers believed that, if you spent too long drawing these plates, your work would become stiff and overly flat. It would be focused on the aesthetics of copying and making it look right instead of understanding.

In the Taplin videos we’ve seen, there’s a lot of humility — and real enthusiasm. It’s hard not to root for him and his project.

1.4: Turner at the Tate

One more about 19th-century painting. A great from that era was J. M. W. Turner — who learned the academic techniques himself, and then exploded them in his mature work. Paintings like Sun Setting Over a Lake (1840) are right on the border of abstract expressionism.

Besides the canvases, Turner was a prolific sketcher. And many of those sketches survive. In Britain, the Tate hosts thousands of them — in its brilliant online archive J. M. W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolors.

This is one for the hardcore. Nevertheless, anyone curious about Turner’s development will find things here, and even animators can learn from it. As director Frédéric Back once wrote:

All too often, young people limit themselves to technical training without first (or at the same time) acquiring the kind of artistic education that opens their eyes and minds, freeing them to be creative with their animation — or to choose another line of work if they find it doesn’t suit them!1

The Tate archive of Turner’s work is organized clearly by date, and painstakingly documented. You get the art and the context. There’s plenty to gain by going through these sketches and rough watercolors — and seeing how casual and non-literal Turner’s lines were, and how much more attention he paid to light than to firm shapes. It’s one of the richest databases we’ve seen for a master painter.

1.5: The public domain

Our last pick today is a broad one — and, at first, it might sound too obvious. Who doesn’t know about the public domain?

It’s here for a reason, though.

In a sense, the public domain is the ultimate resource for artists, including filmmakers, and yet it’s still underused. See the Public Domain Image Archive or Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis, or the public domain collections of the Smithsonian, the Met, the New York Public Library or the Library of Congress (including Citizen DJ). They’re full of things that beg to be reinterpreted as background art or collage, or even as sound effects and music.

There are no limits here. With a little lateral thinking, all kinds of new work could be conjured out of this stuff. (It’s far more than Max Ernst could access when he made his surrealist collage masterpiece A Week of Kindness in the ‘30s.)

But the public domain has a second value to artists — especially in animation. A recognizable story or character can improve a film and help it succeed. That was true when fairy tales gave us Snow White and The Adventures of Prince Achmed in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and it’s still true.

Nancy Drew is in the public domain now. So are Winnie-the-Pooh, and Sam Spade, and As I Lay Dying — and, by accident, a bunch of Philip K. Dick stories. We found out about that last one because an animated film, The Gun (2025), recently adapted Dick’s work.

What’s in the public domain varies by country, and requires care in some cases. Early versions of Tintin, Mickey Mouse and Miss Marple are free in America, for example, but there are restrictions to keep in mind. Still, these are things worth exploring.

Some of the best animated films of all time — like The Tell-Tale Heart (1953) and the Soviet Winnie-the-Pooh (1969) — were adaptations of stories that are currently open to all. It’s freeing to consider. At a time when so much of culture is controlled by a handful of copyright-hoarding corporations, taking a piece of the public domain for yourself is almost rebellious.

2. Newsbits

• At the Oscars tonight, the animated feature and short awards went to KPop Demon Hunters and The Girl Who Cried Pearls. Another win for the National Film Board — and another loss for Disney, which hasn’t taken either category since Encanto.

• In America, the indie animator Jonni Peppers is working on a series called Field Notes from the Orphanage, due on YouTube in August. It’s backed by Cartuna, and there’s a very fun teaser out already.

• Drawing attention this week was a French music video for the song it stings a little though. Émilie Tronche (Samuel) directed.

• In Cuba, where the humanitarian crisis continues to worsen due to America’s blockade, an exhibition opened this past week. Created over a few years, it’s dedicated to Elpidio Valdés and the work of the animation legend Juan Padrón.

• New photos of Hayao Miyazaki emerged from Japan, after Hideaki Anno went to visit him.

• The second season of Yao: Chinese Folktales ended in China last month. It did really well — but not as well as the original. Anim-Babblers investigates.

• American animator Bill Premo is creating a program he calls “Flash if Flash was built in 2026.” Among other things, it aims to revive the long-dead .SWF format.

• Sans Voix is a Swiss short about a burnt-out raver who changes his life, and it’s now on YouTube. Director Samuel Patthey called it a “sort of autobiographical fiction … inspired by my life before and after being a father.”

• In France, Patrick Imbert (The Summit of the Gods) is working on another feature. It’s called Hakim’s Odyssey — he spoke to Animation Magazine about it.

• In Japan, classic episodes of Traditional Japanese Folktales are coming back. Animenomics reports that the “film footage and original drawings were retrieved from warehouses, where they laid dormant for decades, and all of the nearly 1,500 episodes in the series are being digitized.”

• In Britain, the artist and musician Klein is creating an unusual series called Mandela Effect, animated with doodles that move almost at the speed of thought.

• Hoppers has spent two weeks at the top of the American box office. It’s a return for Pixar after the commercial failure of Elio.

• Last of all: we covered an underrated anthology film from China — a key moment in the present rise of Chinese animation.

Until next time!

Welcome! It’s a new Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — and this one’s about China’s independent animators.

First, we need to thank everyone for the great response to the Nobody issue. The film was a breakout hit from China last year — fresh, different, artful and extremely funny. It’s crowd-pleasing, and yet it talks up to the viewer. Similar to Flow (2024), it pairs ideas from the film-festival world with mass appeal. We loved sharing it last Sunday.

But Nobody didn’t come from nowhere. Chinese Flash set the stage for much of what’s happening in Chinese animation now — as we wrote last month. And Flash wasn’t the only factor, either. To wrap up this informal series on China, there’s one more thing to discuss.

Around four years ago, a film died in Chinese theaters. Its title: To the Bright Side (2022). Despite real praise, audiences didn’t show up. Earnings fell below $250,000 — a colossal failure by the country’s standards.1

Many had expected To the Bright Side to flop from the outset. Getting it made was close to impossible — investors didn’t want to touch it. Reportedly, even China’s film review board was skeptical. It was a weird gamble: a commercial project made by non-commercial, art-house animators.2

“[T]hese young people do not bow down to money. They keep their own ways and do things that they love,” said Wang Lei, the producer behind To the Bright Side, about the artists who made the film.3 All of those artists came from China’s indie scene. Their past work was often aimed at festivals — not mainstream theaters.

Yet Wang hoped that the project would succeed anyway. His dream was that a film based in reality, “love,” “beauty,” strong storytelling and “local Chinese art form[s]” could cross over — just through its quality. As he explained:

Everyone considers this film an art film, akin to Like the Dyer’s Hand [from 2020], likely to be praised but commercially unsuccessful. However, I believe that a market exists for genuinely emotional and detailed things. Our goal is simple: to create a work that truly resonates with both parents and children. Successful or not, it’s an attempt, and we hope that more people will attempt new things for Chinese animation in the future.

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

• 1. Nobody, and what’s happening without the Oscars.

• 2. Animation newsbits.

With that, let’s go!

1. The underdogs

Next Sunday, the Oscars happen. The nominees have been public for a while. And, in the list of animated features, there are conspicuous holes.

Major and highly regarded projects got nominated, no doubt. Among them: the biggest box-office smash in Hollywood animation history (Zootopia 2), and the most-watched original film from Netflix (KPop Demon Hunters). The two contenders from Europe, Arco and Little Amélie, have won awards worldwide.

If you follow animation closely, though, you might wonder: “what about China?”

Although Zootopia 2 broke records, Nezha 2 broke more of them. It out-earned every movie everywhere during 2025 — and it’s widely loved. Yet it isn’t present here. Reports suggest it wasn’t even submitted to the Oscars.1

There’s a second Chinese absentee, too. It’s a wonderful film watched by too few outside China. In its home country, it was a “dark horse” phenomenon last year — almost $250 million in revenue, on a budget below $10 million. People fell in love with it.2

It’s called Nobody, and its stateside distribution has been pretty thin. You can find subtitled copies floating around unofficially on YouTube — if you know where to look. It’s our favorite mainstream movie we’ve seen from 2025, and it belongs on any list of last year’s best animation.3 But it won’t be competing next Sunday.

Like with Nezha 2, there are reasons for Nobody’s omission. It didn’t make the longlist, possibly because its brief release in American theaters wasn’t tuned to get it qualified.4 This isn’t simply an oversight by the Academy.

Yet it still makes this year’s Oscars feel a bit provincial. The largest animated feature of 2025 won’t be there, nor will (arguably) the finest. And it’s a shame — because Nobody, especially, feels like a sign of animation’s future.

Before Nobody, Yu Shui wasn’t exactly a nobody himself. Years ago, his student film About Life (2004) won prizes, and his Flash series FOF and His Story (2013) had its fans. But, because the industry was weak in China, animation stayed an indie side project for him. As he said, “At the beginning, I had nothing and worked alone.” His day job was teaching at a university in Beijing.5

Yu was no star as a director. Slowly and gradually, though, he gathered allies — and opportunities arrived. “After more than 20 years in the industry,” noted an outlet in 2025, “Yu Shui finally got his chance.”

For those who haven’t seen Nobody, it’s about frauds. A ragtag band in ancient China sets out to become immortal. All involved are animal-monster outcasts: former bandits, henchmen, con artists. On their quest, they impersonate a few heroes they’ve heard about — namely, the Monkey King’s group. Since they don’t know what Sun Wukong or his friends look like, they hire a concept artist to spitball, and they choose the lineup that feels right.

It’s very funny. There are smart, layered jokes throughout the script. In fact, even the drawings and movement are funny — often subtly, in ways not usually seen.

Then, over time, the emotions sneak up.

In China, Nobody was known to get theaters crying. The frauds — a boar, toad, weasel and gorilla — grow as they try to live up to their pretend roles. What begins as farce turns into halting, absurd, small-scale but real heroism. No knowledge of Journey to the West is required to grasp the arc. It’s universal.

Yu and his team aimed at a broad audience — even an international one. As they said, this is a film about the “nobodies” whose tales aren’t told. “Most of the world consists of ‘nobodies.’ That’s why their stories resonate so powerfully,” Yu argued. Pointedly, his film’s stars don’t appear in the text of Journey to the West.

Yu places himself in this invisible group. Like he put it:

Most people, myself included, are just ordinary individuals. But how do ordinary people establish themselves and navigate life? So many things are beyond our control — whether it’s the demands of our career, family or society. Essentially, numerous external forces collectively shape our lives. The core message of our film is that: can you truly understand yourself and find your own path?6

When Yu’s break came, he was already in his 40s.

Shanghai Animation Film Studio, the most senior company in Chinese animation, released an anthology of shorts back in 2023. First up was a creation of Yu’s — a piece called Nobody (watch). It was an indie film in spirit, but made at industry scale. Surprisingly, it blew up. Yu’s work was suddenly mainstream.

The short is likewise about a boar-creature who wants to become more than a lackey. And, visually, the whole thing is tied to Chinese tradition: ink-wash painting and local styles of cartooning come together on screen. The result was excellent, and people higher up thought it was ripe for a feature-length treatment.

That was the plan even before the anthology was done. When the producers saw Yu’s script in 2021, they asked him to develop it into a feature, side by side with the creation of the short. The art director of the long version, Chen Liaoyu, called it “neither a prequel nor a sequel to the short ... we’ve developed a completely new, parallel story.” They’re different takes on the same subject matter and characters.7

The Nobody feature built on the aesthetics of the short, too. Once again, it’s steeped in Chinese tradition. Like Yu said:

For this film, I did a lot of field research in Shanxi Province, my hometown, and discovered so many treasures. For example, places like the Guanyin Hall in Changzhi, the Chongqing Temple and Faxing Temple in Zhangzi County … I found the craftsmanship of these Buddhist statues [in Shanxi] to be deeply moving. The reason I incorporated these elements into the film is that they’re grounded — they come from real life, from the world around us. ... With this foundation in reality, I felt much more confident in my creative process.8

China’s local visual arts played a large role. For the backgrounds, the team studied ink-wash painting and mimicked the techniques of the masters. For the cartoony characters, they looked to the ink drawings in 20th-century lianhuanhua comics — from artists like Dai Dunbang.9

Yu’s guiding concept for Nobody was “mythological realism,” or a down-to-earth take on Chinese myths. It affected everything — from the asymmetrical character designs to the way those designs move.

“We’re portraying the most ordinary people from everyday life,” explained Chen Liaoyu. “If the little pig monster came out like Mickey Mouse, with elastic, smoothly flowing deformation and stretching, it would just be an American pig monster. But we want precisely the opposite: first, it needs a feeling of lived-in texture, a little bent and clumsy.”10

That said, Yu and the team aren’t isolationists. China was opening up to foreign animation when Yu was young — he saw stuff like Toy Story and Japan’s Lunlun, The Flower Angel, and it stayed with him. Nobody pulls ideas from beyond the local as well.

For one, the team wanted a sense of “believable” and “cinematic” space, as if the characters exist in a solid and three-dimensional world. That isn’t typical for ink-wash painting, where Western ideas of “light and shadow and perspective” are minimized. But Yu’s group combined the two approaches. The art couldn’t be too flat or too photographic; it was a balance.

As Chen Liaoyu explained:

… we had to figure out how to integrate the effects of light and shadow within ink-wash painting. … Traditionally, Chinese painting doesn’t emphasize the portrayal of light and shadow as much. However, as a film, it’s inherently an art of light and shadow. ... Beyond just the ink brushwork, we needed to add lighting, space and even texture. This approach allows the audience to appreciate the beauty of Chinese aesthetics while experiencing the intuitive realism of cinema.

The thought and theory behind Nobody feel like classic Shanghai Animation stuff. In the studio’s heyday, films like Three Monks (1980) came about like this — research, refinement, analytical hairsplitting. Every facet was intentional.

It’s why those projects turned out so well, and so rich. You feel a similar richness in Nobody. In fact, some of the surviving Shanghai Animation veterans were consultants, and they hadn’t lost their “keen eyes,” Chen said. Their feedback helped.

And the success of Nobody proves the old ideas still work. Today, China produces much of the world’s most lavish, over-the-top animation — just look at Deep Sea (2023). Many of those movies are worthwhile. Yet almost none of them were as popular as Nobody, a low-budget 2D film with little in the way of flash.

As Chen said, the mentality was: “it’s not that you can’t be cool, but don’t be cool for the sake of being cool, or show off for the sake of showing off; above all, you need to tell a good story.” The camera doesn’t fly around much, and even the animation in the fight scenes stays clear and direct. But Nobody gets the quieter, more difficult parts really right, and that was enough to grab people.

It shows what’s possible in China’s rising animation industry. It also shows that tiny movies, wherever they’re made, continue to have a shot against giant ones. Nobody is only one instance. After all, Flow made €50 million and won the Oscar last year with even fewer resources.

Nobody won’t have the chance to repeat that performance next Sunday. With or without the Oscars, though, the rise of small, thoughtful and risky animation is happening.11 There’s an audience for it. The untold stories are coming to light.

2. Newsbits

• Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon released the teaser for Kindred Spirits, the latest from director Tomm Moore. Hype for the project was significant at the recent Cartoon Movie event.

• On that note, check out the teaser for Kigali Night that screened at Cartoon Movie in France. We saw the film pitched at Annecy last year — keep an eye on this one.

• One more teaser trailer: Only Rats, a stop-motion short from Spain.

• As the American blockade against Cuba worsens, the animation workshops of Animaluz Academy are continuing — even during power outages. See posts on the group’s Facebook page (here and here).

• In America, animator Coleen Baik became a MacDowell fellow. She continues to offer one-of-a-kind insights into the animation process over at The Line Between.

• That recent Gorillaz video came from The Line in Britain. Writing for Cartoon Brew, Kambole Campbell uncovered the technical processes that gave the animation its retro look.

• Kyra Kupetsky, creator of the American series Chikn Nuggit, reportedly left her project in protest of enforced GenAI use.

• In China, a new season of Yao: Chinese Folktales (the origin of Nobody) debuted earlier this year. Anim-Babblers explored one of the entries, animated with wool.

• A few months ago, the Russian film Father’s Letters popped up online for free. It’s a tribute to the victims of Stalinism.

• Today, in America, Los Angeles Filmforum held a screening called Femme Grotesquerie, featuring work by Sofia Carrillo, Victoria Vincent and more.

• The government of Russia declared it illegal to advertise on Telegram, as part of its growing campaign against the platform.

• Last of all: a gorgeous resource on the art and animation of an Italian great.

Until next time!

Welcome! Thanks for checking in. This is another Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — about a great Italian designer.

He rose right after the war, after the fall of Mussolini. The country was rebuilding; fascism had been defeated. Finally, Emanuele Luzzati could come home — ending a half-decade in exile. (“I had to flee to Switzerland to escape the racial laws,” he noted.)1

In the mid-1940s, when he returned, Luzzati was a young unknown. But he’d been formed in Switzerland during the war — learning the “applied arts” as a university student and encountering Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale on stage. Back in Italy, he used that knowledge.

Quickly, Luzzati began to design sets and costumes for the play Lea Lebowitz (1947). Alessandro Fersen, its director, recalled the situation this way:

Lele had found free lodging in the attic of an old woman who was temporarily hospitalized for a broken leg, and worked there on the costumes for the show. He rose in the morning, cracked the thin sheet of ice that had formed over the water jug during the night, washed himself and — with wastepaper, rags, paste and brushes — started to model the masks for Lea: the famous masks that would later pass through the manuals and histories of Italian scenography, and which even today seem to me the most expressive ever to appear on a Western stage.2

Luzzati’s work was already stunning. In Lea Lebowitz, old-world grotesques were joined with modernist shapes and lines. Photos from the time suggest a kind of living, three-dimensional collage world. And Luzzati’s reputation grew.3 He got involved in illustration, ceramics and more.

Beginning in the ‘50s, Luzzati took his style to animation — in the films he made with Giulio Gianini. They’re stop-motion masterpieces, nominated twice for the Oscar. The duo’s Ali Baba (watch) is a favorite of Yuri Norstein’s.4

Luzzati loved animation; by the ‘80s, he preferred it to the theater. At the same time, though, his work was all one thing. He switched mediums freely. As he once said, “I do nothing but tell the same stories over and over again; all that changes is the vehicle of expression. … I don’t know if I’m a painter, a storyteller or a theaterman.”

“I’d start constructing a set in Genoa, drawing the design,” Luzzati explained, “then I’d go to Albisola for the ceramics and touch the soil; then, if there were cartoons to be made, I’d come to Rome.”

In 1980, the many incarnations of Luzzati appeared together at an exhibition in that third city. His costume and stage designs, his posters, his animation work — all went on display in Rome. Luzzati was one of Italy’s defining postwar artists by then, and this show (“The Magical Stage Curtain”) made it clear why that was.

The exhibition came with a catalog. It’s a trove of design from the mid-century (and beyond), and one of the great print collections of Luzzati’s work. We love it. And we’ve decided to preserve our copy on the Internet Archive.

You can find it below. For a little more on Luzzati, and what you’ll see in this catalog, read on.

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It’s Sunday! Thanks for joining us. Here’s the plan for the latest issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter:

• 1. A story about Iwao Takamoto, Disney legend.

• 2. Animation newsbits.

With that, here we go!

1. A big turn

Today, his name’s tied to Hanna-Barbera. He designed Scooby-Doo’s cast, refined The Jetsons’ look.1 You know his work — and not only from those places. The hand of Iwao Takamoto (1925–2007) is visible in animation’s history.

In fact, he started out as a key player on Walt Disney’s team. Takamoto spent 15 years at the Disney studio, working under different titles: assistant animator, cleanup artist. Generally, his job was to make animation perfect before it went to the inking crew. An animator’s broad sketches of movement became tight, exact, technical drawings under his watch. That was his gift to the films.

He worked closely with Milt Kahl — one of the Nine Old Men, and a perfectionist. They had an understanding. Disney artist Floyd Norman remembered that “Iwao was an awesome draftsman in his own right, and had the chops to follow up Kahl.” To quote one of Takamoto’s apprentices at the studio:

Every little line, everything, had to be perfect. So, I would stand in front of him as he would correct my drawings. And, sometimes, I would just think, “You know ... maybe I should have taken [my dad] up on … getting a license so I could become a barber. Because I don’t know if I’m going to be able to cut the mustard with him.”2

Takamoto entered Disney’s studio in 1945. You find his touch in films like Sleeping Beauty and Lady and the Tramp — he led “quality control” on Princess Aurora and Lady. Among other things, he guided and polished the spaghetti kiss. “Iwao was the only one who could’ve been entrusted in doing that scene as perfectly as it was done,” said Willie Ito, an artist assigned to the same shot.

A Disney career was a big turn in Takamoto’s life. Shortly before he joined, he’d been in the camps.

As a kid in California, Takamoto was a strong student, although not a rich one. He grew up during the Great Depression — in “what might be considered a tough section of downtown Los Angeles, without many prospects,” he later wrote. His parents, Japanese immigrants, got by as they could.3

Takamoto became interested in drawing at a young age. He studied picture books and copied their illustrations from memory, while bringing his “personal interpretation” to them. It was an aptitude — he wasn’t an art student. His closest thing to training, he noted, was calligraphy practice:

It taught me the value of the strength and character that exists in a single line ... and it also instilled in me an awareness of the concept of “negative space,” the spatial quality that exists around the visual things that you see.

Takamoto’s world was small back then — he rarely left downtown Los Angeles, near South Central. His reaction was muted when the Pearl Harbor attack came in late 1941. Many other teenagers he knew felt the same. “It took quite a bit of time for the seriousness of it to settle into our consciousness,” he wrote.

A few months later, he went with friends to visit Terminal Island. They’d heard that Japanese people were being evicted there. What he saw shocked him: families forced to leave behind their homes and most of their belongings, like they were “run[ning] out of a burning building, grabbing whatever they could on the way.”

The government soon came for him and his family, too. Posters filled his neighborhood, informing residents of the eviction and internment ahead. Takamoto recalled that “the FBI was using almost anything they found in the houses of the Japanese families against them,” especially when those things were noticeably Japanese. People started to dump possessions for safety. Like he put it:

... we lost an awful lot of things I would love to still have. And I think that’s consistent with the experience of an awful lot of people like us. ... You know, the displays for Girls’ Day and Boys’ Day, and all these wonderful little dolls, and the court of the Lord, and so on, that they used to display on these steps ... [My mother] had to get rid of those things. And, of course, all the other, more technical things that you had to get rid of, like flashlights [and radios].4

In retrospect, Takamoto saw his family as lucky. They avoided the worst of the mistreatment, and they weren’t sent to the notorious Tule Lake camp. But he rejected the government’s euphemisms for these places — words like “internment” or “relocation.” As he wrote in his autobiography, “They were concentration camps.”

Takamoto and his family ended up in Manzanar, with the Sierra Nevada towering above. Meals, served three times per day, started out “pitiful.” They lived in barracks, four families to each, and they were enclosed by barbed wire and armed guards. People from all walks of life were stuck there. Takamoto met two Hollywood men: “art directors at a couple of the major film studios,” MGM and Paramount.5

The prisoners worked to improve their conditions on their own — planting gardens, building makeshift ball courts. Only so much could be done about the grit and dirt, though. Here’s Takamoto:

Today it is not difficult to find photographic records of life at Manzanar. But there are several aspects of the camp that these pictures fail to convey. One was the wind, which was constant. ... [The effect was] to raise a perpetual cloud of dust throughout the camp. When the wind really kicked up you could not even see the barracks next to yours, and most of our days were spent sweeping out and dusting our living quarters. Even with all that effort, we were lying around in sand all the time.

Takamoto took to sketching life in the camp. Those two Hollywood artists “were quite encouraging” about it, he said. They gave him an idea: why not apply to Walt Disney’s company after he got out? Their impression was that “it was a liberal place when it came to hiring.” A Japanese person might not be turned away.6

Around early 1945, when Takamoto was almost 20, he was finally freed. He moved into a Los Angeles hostel and called about that job at Disney.

He needed a portfolio, so he bought two notepads from a dime store and began to draw. “I filled the pads from page one and just went ahead and drew anything that came to mind from knights to cowboys,” he said later. He surprised himself: the work was good enough to get him an apprenticeship at the studio.

Takamoto kept surprising himself from there. “The expectations were that if I really so-called made it in about eight months, I’d be shifted to a unit with some animator,” he said. “I was selected in about two or three months.”7

Quickly, the government took notice of Takamoto’s Disney career. As he explained:

As 1945 progressed, and so many of the internees were demonstrating reluctance to leave the camps [because there was not a lot to go back to], the [War Relocation Authority] started to get desperate. ... Someone at the Authority found out about this young kid — that is to say, me — who just went out and got a job at the famous Walt Disney Studios ... [which] perfectly served their purpose. They thought it would be a very encouraging piece of news for people who were nervous about leaving. So they set up a photo session in an office somewhere with a makeshift drawing board and I sat there and posed for the camera and pretended to know everything about animation. ...

[M]y entire wartime experience was bookended by signs: one signed by FDR demanding the evacuation of my family from our home to take up residence in an internment camp, and the other one featuring me welcoming all internees back to normal life.

Takamoto became a valuable member of the Disney crew. He caught Milt Kahl’s attention in the 1940s, after doing breakdowns for his key animation in the Pecos Bill section of Melody Time (1948). That got Takamoto invited to Kahl’s unit.

Kahl was a firebrand at Disney — known for his extreme standards and stuttering, spluttering bouts of rage. His ego was wrapped up in his work, and his own mistakes made him at least as mad as the mistakes of others. He was a “rock-ribbed conservative,” too, according to Ward Kimball (one of the few progressives among the Nine Old Men).8

But Takamoto got along with him. He was a perfectionist as well — and that sensibility seemed to put him on Kahl’s good side. In his words:

He was a true Scandinavian. Very strong. No nonsense. ... [H]e seemed to appreciate anyone who was willing to extend themselves in terms of hard work. Consequently he never raised his voice at me. He was very kind. He was not a man who taught. He wasn’t a natural pedagogue. You learned from him by studying what he did.

Takamoto worked with Kahl a lot during the ‘50s — on Cinderella, on Peter Pan. His big job at the studio came through this partnership, during Lady and the Tramp.

Walt Disney felt that Kahl’s design for Lady didn’t have the right “feminine” quality, which left Kahl fretting. “Dammit, he always likes what I do! ... I really don’t know what the hell’s going to make her look more feminine!” he said. Then Takamoto suggested drawing the fur on her ears like a movie star’s hair.

Kahl tried it and liked it, and Takamoto was put in charge of quality control for Lady — checking and finalizing the drawings of all the animators. “I was still a young guy in my 20s,” Takamoto wrote, “and here I was instructing and correcting some artists who were old enough to be my father!”

Yet his presence was needed: he brought his meticulousness to her design. Not every Disney animator was great at drawing, but he was. Animator Andreas Deja once wrote, “He paid insane attention to eyes, eyelids, eyelashes and the raised volume around eyebrows. Iwao’s contribution to Lady’s appealing look is immeasurable.”9

Something similar happened with Aurora in Sleeping Beauty. Takamoto was with Marc Davis there — another of the Nine. The film’s style was complex, and brutally hard for the team to keep consistent. Takamoto had to personally retouch many of the animators’ drawings of Aurora. And, while she wasn’t his own design, he reportedly refined her look.10

He had a big hand in the quality control of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, too. The film replaced Disney’s inkers with Xerox, which put the key animators’ work directly on screen. “Yet when you do this, then you have animators whose mastery of the craft isn’t nearly as strong in the area of drawing, and it was quite a bit of work in making sure their work was consistent,” Takamoto said.

Takamoto ultimately left Disney’s studio in the early ‘60s. The animation team was downsizing — Walt Disney’s focus was elsewhere. Many Disney artists were already going to Hanna-Barbera, where the pay was good and the work was freer. Takamoto made the switch himself.

By that point, the Disney people knew what they were losing. Marc Davis told Takamoto of his “exceptional talent.” Milt Kahl said, “No matter what you decide to do or where you go, you’re going to do fine.” Takamoto was a perfectionist in a studio obsessed with technical perfection, and it would be a long time before a Disney film looked as clean as Sleeping Beauty again.

The loss went beyond his ability: he’d become part of the team. Takamoto wrote at length about their parties and endless practical jokes in his book My Life with a Thousand Characters. He’d found a kind of home at Disney’s studio — and the environment had allowed him to grow into a top professional.

As a kid, Takamoto hadn’t adopted an Americanized first name. Hearing adults stumble over what he pronounced with ease — “Iwao” — gave him a sense of identity and strength. People kept struggling to pronounce it well into his adult years, even at the Disney studio. But the lightly mangled version of his name that stuck didn’t bother him. He found it a little endearing. As Disney artist Willie Ito said:

We used to call him “Ee-woe” at the studio. Because [for] all the hakujins, the Caucasians, “I-wa-o” was a little hard to say. So they said, “Ee-woe.” ... So, he became known affectionately in the industry as “Ee-woe” Takamoto.

2. Newsbits

• In China, the latest Boonie Bears film (The Hidden Protector) is another box-office hit. It’s pulled in more than 941 million yuan, or $137.2 million, after a couple of weeks.

• A new documentary from Archipel covers Mahiro Maeda, a legend in Japan’s anime industry.

• Paramount is buying Warner — foreboding news for American animation. In re:frame, Kambole Campbell writes that “it feels as though the industry is shrinking … in terms of what can be made, who can make it, how they make it and where it’s shown.”

• If you have a Japanese IP address, check out the collection of restored Kihachiro Kawamoto films on YouTube, currently free.

• You may have seen Baby Globe, the mascot that pops up on certain Wikipedia articles (like the one for headphones). A whole team is behind it — including animator Alex Kinnear, based in Canada, who made the character move.

• Italy unveiled a 35% tax credit for animated projects. It’s higher than the one offered to live-action films.

• The project Walk with Me is gathering many different walk cycles animated by many different artists. It’s American, but open worldwide.

• In Cuba, restored films from the Elpidio Valdés series screened at a children’s center in Havana, as the country faces an existential energy crisis due to American sanctions.

• Russia’s Gulag Museum is switching to a more regime-friendly theme. On that note, scholar Pavel Shvedov wrote about the animated docs in which the museum was previously involved — among them The Epplee Brothers (2020).

• In Japan, MAPPA absorbed Contrail, the studio where Sunao Katabuchi is presently making The Mourning Children.

• A Goya went to the short Gilbert, from Spain. It has a charming look — see the trailer.

• Last of all: we looked into the storyboards for three Oscar-winning films from the ‘60s, ‘80s and ‘00s.

Until next time!

It’s Thursday! Thanks for joining us — and a special welcome to our new subscribers. Today’s issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter is all about storyboarding.

The Oscars are getting close; voting will end early next month. Which, admittedly, feels like it shouldn’t matter. Given the situation in the world, it’s easy to ding this show — which is essentially an ad for Hollywood’s empires.

Yet, to the smaller fish, an Oscar win continues to mean something. That’s true in animation, to name one. It’s possible for even an obscure artist, and their personal work, to take the main stage for a moment. Last year’s animation prizes went to tiny films from Latvia and Iran. On occasion, a career is supercharged by a nomination.

Around this time each year, before the statuettes get handed out, it’s interesting to look back at Oscar stories from the past. The animated short category, particularly, has lots of them. There’ve been nominations for gems (BoxBallet), painful snubs (Mt. Head). And films in all styles have won. The Oscars go through eras, but their range across time (Moonbird to Peter and the Wolf) is no joke.

That said, what makes an Oscar-winning storyboard?

More often than not, the core of an animated film is its storyboard. This is where artists — frequently directors themselves — decide pacing, editing, film grammar and so on. It’s why the recent push toward GenAI boarding is doomed by nature. Here, a filmmaker’s taste and experience and, by extension, life all come out.

Below, we’re studying a few end-to-end storyboards for previous Oscar winners. They stretch from the mid-century to the 21st. All are wildly different — and all give us a peek into the artists who created them.

Let’s go!

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

• 1. Creating the sound of Samurai Champloo.

• 2. Animation news.

With that, let’s go!

1. Tension

Hip hop and old Japan have a link. It goes back decades and decades.

There’s a reason Wu-Tang Clan members rapped about “swinging swords like shinobi” in the ‘90s, and Liquid Swords opened with the words, “When I was little, my father was famous. He was the greatest samurai in the empire.” Or look at Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, or even the Samurai Jack title sequence.1

Mixing these worlds feels cool — but also right, somehow, as if they belong together. It’s possible they do. “In feudal times, it didn’t matter what others said, and samurai would determine their own fate with their own sword,” a Japanese director once argued. Many back then were “aggressive about expressing themselves,” he believed, in a way “very similar to rappers.”2

The Japanese director in question was Shinichiro Watanabe. These thoughts were occupying his mind a few years after he finished Cowboy Bebop (1998–1999).

It was during the early ‘80s, during high school, that Watanabe first got into hip hop. He liked The Message (1982). “And then a little later … I got very interested in the new-school style of hip hop,” he recalled, “the music of De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers.”

He favored “underground” stuff — grimier and less “major-label-sounding,” he said. Watanabe used that type of music in a Cowboy Bebop episode never aired abroad: Mish-Mash Blues. Beats by Tsutchie, a Japanese hip hop producer, play in the background. Even a track with rapping appears.3

Watanabe was hunting for a different sound. “I was convinced that hip hop music could be used in soundtracks,” he said. “Some of my other staff said that it was too much of a risk to use just hip hop [laughs]. I shot back, ‘If you think like that we might as well just have normal movie music’ [laughs].”

By the early ‘00s, an idea had taken hold of Watanabe. He wanted to make a new series with hip hop at its core — one about feudal samurai. There was a link between the two worlds, he said. These thoughts led to Samurai Champloo (2004–2005).

Cowboy Bebop was odd, edgy and risky. In fact, it got cut to pieces in its first Japanese airing — around half the series went unshown. But Watanabe’s project turned into a big deal and even, eventually, crossed over onto American television. Its success removed hurdles for Samurai Champloo.

“I was told I could do whatever I wanted,” Watanabe said. That was what he did.4

The plan to blend hip hop and samurai hit him all at once. “When I came up with the character of Mugen I heard hip hop at the same time,” Watanabe remembered.5 The whole thing had a personal appeal to him:

When I make a new anime, it’s no fun for me if I make something that I’m not interested in. So, in the case of Samurai Champloo, I took two things that I’m very interested in: hip hop and old samurai shows … I thought that, if I took two things that I’m very interested in, it would make something even more fascinating for the audience.

The show’s foundation was its music. Before Watanabe had an animation team, he already had someone on the soundtrack. It was Tsutchie — they’d kept in touch since the ‘90s, and he got grabbed by the first vague outline. “I thought it was interesting from the beginning. It didn’t seem strange to me at all,” Tsutchie said.

Watanabe wanted a certain sound in Samurai Champloo. Again, he liked the underground: he was following the rise of what he called “jazzy hip hop.” Beyond Tsutchie, there was another beatmaker high on his list — a borderline unknown with his own tiny label in Tokyo. His stage name was Nujabes.6

He was a record-store owner whose personal sound hadn’t inspired a million imitators yet. His shop in Shibuya was a major spot for underground hip hop releases — and his early singles made a convert out of Watanabe, who frequented record stores in the area.7 There was a “melodious,” lyric quality to Nujabes’s lo-fi beats, before lo-fi beats were a thing. Watanabe was intrigued.

Nujabes stocked his store partly according to what he liked to hear. For him, making music came from the same place: “I wanted to hear music which sampled all the old soul and jazz that I liked,” he once said. His taste and Watanabe’s aligned — and he got hired to Samurai Champloo.

Backing up Tsutchie and Nujabes, Watanabe pulled in a few more of his favorites: Force of Nature and Fat Jon, the latter a producer from Ohio, then living in Germany. Watanabe was “worried” that it wouldn’t be possible to get him, but Fat Jon turned out to be a massive fan of Cowboy Bebop. When Watanabe’s offer came, he said, “I was so, so, so happy that I nearly cried.”8

This group, and the extended circle of musicians around it, would define the feel of Samurai Champloo.

By this point, Watanabe had a special approach to music. It was all over Cowboy Bebop — and he continued it here. As he explained:

Generally, a movie soundtrack just plays a supporting role to complement the visuals, to give them a hand. However, since Cowboy Bebop, I never wanted to do something like that. I wanted to make the music more prominent, to have the music and visuals compete 50:50. Sometimes, I thought it would be more interesting if the music stood out too much. To do this, the music needed to possess that kind of power, and it needed to be high quality enough to rival the pictures.

Watanabe had an outsize role in the show’s music. Beyond picking the artists, he learned Pro Tools and got involved in editing the episode soundtracks.9 Still, he gave each collaborator a pretty free hand. As a rule, he preferred that method.

“People who are afraid of the director are no good [laughs]. It’s always better to do what you’re going to do, even if it is a little off topic,” he said around the time of Champloo. “That’s the spirit of working together on the project. You have to be willing to take risks.”

The result, as Watanabe hoped, was music that drew attention to itself. You find it all across the show. Take the famous sword fight in the first episode, with Jin and Mugen in the teahouse.

Right beside the action, we hear the track Sneak Chamber by Force of Nature, a duo. It’s almost all percussion — a skittering breakbeat. The speed keeps up with the quick, sharp animation, as the two fighters slash at each other and Mugen kicks and spins like a breakdancer.

That said, not much lands directly on beat. There’s a loose swing to the music’s sync with the images — the two parts stand out individually. It creates a weaving effect that’s hard not to feel. After all, Force of Nature’s track is mixed almost as loud as the sword swipes.

Going into Samurai Champloo, Force of Nature had the Ghost Dog soundtrack partly in mind. But Watanabe gave the two very little direction — he trusted them. So, they did a range of things. Sneak Chamber is light and upbeat, and its frenzied drumming made KZA (one half of the duo) realize, “Percussion instruments really suit sword fighting!”10

Or take another fight scene — the one from episode 10, with Mugen in the stream. Here, a Nujabes piece called 1st Samurai refuses to stay in the background. It sits on top of the images, almost clashes with them.

A lot of Nujabes’s best-known work appears in Samurai Champloo. Even if you’ve never watched the series, you’ve probably heard Battlecry or Aruarian Dance. They have the sound of old, dusty vinyl records, and that lyrical quality Watanabe felt. The rapper Shing02, who performed on Battlecry, once said:

Nujabes’s music contains a Japanese-style melancholy. It can be applied to the word “saudade” in Brazilian music, and in English it can be connected to the word “nostalgia.”11

There’s another driving breakbeat in this scene. But the melodic parts of Nujabes’s instrumental — the slowed-down saxophone sample, the flute from the ‘60s — have some of that melancholy. And they’re loud in the mix.

Nujabes gives us something more than just a cool fight. A droning high note swallows up the scene, playing unbroken for more than 20 seconds, as Mugen’s opponent rushes him and falls to a surprise hit. Even when we cut away to another location, the drone continues. It feels a little haunting, a little tragic. The music doesn’t fit snugly into the action or the edits — but that’s why it works.

Techniques like these were used throughout Samurai Champloo. Toward the end of episode five, for example, Tsutchie’s Sincerely plays as a criminal gang is rounded up. A bittersweet, nostalgic loop is front and center. Hearing it over feudal imagery is interesting by itself — but it also avoids just “illustrating” the scene, repeating the emotions or timing of the images. That swing is present again.

You see this stuff, too, in one of the show’s great musical highlights, courtesy of Fat Jon.

It happens in episode seven. A young, misunderstood thief jumps from a window and runs across rooftops, fleeing a gang and the police. And Fat Jon’s low-key 624 Part 2 takes total control.

A faster, more exciting piece of “normal movie music” would match the thief’s desperate escape here. But it wouldn’t work as well — the melancholy piano line and quiet percussion add another emotional layer to these shots. When the thief gets cornered and threatens his pursuers, yelling, the music stays relaxed. And it grows quieter still when a blade moves toward him.

It’s one of those moments where, as Watanabe said, the music stands out “too much.” Fat Jon’s part isn’t 50:50 — it’s more like 60:40. He worked on the show almost entirely without feedback from Watanabe and, once again, the result was music that doesn’t sit comfortably with the images. Yet that’s where this scene’s strength lies.

Watanabe didn’t aim Samurai Champloo at America. As he said, it’s full of references that foreigners miss. Its huge success abroad was a lucky break — because, as he admitted years later, the show failed in Japan. He found that hip hop and animation appealed to different groups in his country back then.

To the outside world, though, this pairing of old Japan and modern music didn’t just work — it was a bit addictive. And the jazzy, melodic, lo-fi, underground sound that Watanabe wanted in his show (and that artists like Nujabes delivered so well) would later be copied to infinity.

There’s something that links these worlds — Watanabe wasn’t the first to realize it. But, for the feeling of Samurai Champloo’s sound, just as important as the links are the contrasts.

In this show, a lot doesn’t fit together on screen in an obvious way. Because it’s not obvious, because elements “compete,” you get tension. In the 2000s, breakbeats over sword fights — and the quiet emotion of Nujabes’s music over a struggle in a stream — had just enough similarity and just enough clash to make the world look, and listen.

2. Newsbits

• We lost Jane Baer (91), a Disney veteran from the Sleeping Beauty days.

• Animation artists are speaking out against America’s blockade of Cuba, which is sending the country into a crisis.

• Netflix picked up the Mexican film I Am Frankelda for an international streaming release. Its directors attended the Annies this week, where Frankelda was nominated.

• Speaking of the Annies, the Chilean series Wow Lisa took the award for preschool animation. See the complete list of winners here.

• There’s a great-looking trailer out for A Foreign Heart, produced by Trollfilm in Norway. It’s a new film from Anton Dyakov (BoxBallet).

• In India, Studio Eeksaurus did a commissioned piece for the Pune Design Festival — in a very cool, sort of ‘90s-throwback style.

• One of the world’s best living animators, Akihiko Yamashita (The Boy and the Heron), did a great little spot for the Japanese company VAP. See it here.

• Also in Japan, the legendary studio Telecom is being dissolved into TMS.

• Last of all: we looked into the first film by Yuri Norstein, made years before Hedgehog in the Fog.

Until next time!

Welcome! The Animation Obsessive newsletter is back with another Thursday issue. This one is all about Yuri Norstein, the animation genius.

It’s a cool story this year: Deaf Crocodile brought Norstein’s films to Blu-ray. (We have an essay in the limited edition.) For America, the last big release of Norstein’s work was a DVD two decades ago. The new one makes his films more accessible than ever, pairing famous shorts like Hedgehog in the Fog with deep cuts like Children and Matches.

Also collected here is Norstein’s directorial debut, in a fine restoration. It’s a piece that many gloss over, ourselves included. He’s known for haunting, quiet film-poems like Tale of Tales — work that inspired Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki. In Norstein’s filmography, his first project sits a little uneasily.

Its title is The 25th – The First Day (1968), and its subject is the revolution of 1917. At a glance, it looks like raw propaganda. We watch the proletariat rise up — its bodies form a red wave of energy that overwhelms the tsarists, and the rounded capitalists in their top hats. Lenin appears; red flags fly. Soviet force triumphs and the music of Shostakovich blares.

There’s no plot, and none of the warm characterization you know from Norstein: the hedgehog and little wolf are wholly absent. By Norstein’s account, The 25th runs on “movement in harmony with the tempo of the music.” He calls the film a “revolutionary étude.”1

Yet higher-ups in the Soviet Union didn’t see The 25th as conformist propaganda. In its day, it was subversive — thoroughly criticized and partially censored. Only backdoor dealing seems to have saved the film from total obscurity.2

This outrage didn’t come from nowhere. The 25th is more layered than it looks today. In fact, historian Georgy Borodin has argued that the film is “not about the Great October” at all, but is really an exploration of Norstein’s own feelings about an “epoch” long past.3

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Welcome! Glad you could join us. This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — and here’s the plan:

• 1. Why animation is for anyone.

• 2. Newsbits.

With that, let’s go!

1. Problem solvers

It’s no secret that animation is tough work. Anyone who’s tried it can tell you as much. And certain styles and studios are especially taxing: more than once, Walt Disney ordered a dozen-plus retakes of individual shots, for example.1

Even Disney’s best artists didn’t reach his standards easily. This type of perfectionism created Snow White (1937) — his people got pushed beyond all they’d done before. Years and immense resources went into training a team to work in the Snow White style on the Snow White level.

That was an anomaly in the ‘30s. Even today, most don’t get the opportunity to learn all that the Disney people learned back then. Like an artist from the Snow White era recalled, the studio:

… was like a marvelous big Renaissance Craft Hall in that it had a terrific teaching program and a lot of training that went with it. Young people coming in got a terrific break, I believe, because they were given a chance to study drawing, composition, animation, action. We studied old movies, layout, art direction. All of us were encouraged to study these free courses. Out of that came advancements, too. They were very anxious to find the exceptional people and move them up fast.2

It’s impressive — and, viewed one way, maybe demoralizing. Who’s got the time or access to learn to draw like Grim Natwick, one of Snow White’s leads? And isn’t that what real animation demands? The competitive, kind-of-elitist attitude of the old Disney school often seemed to suggest it. Maybe you’ve been left out.

These are real feelings. And, in recent years, they’ve gotten used in a core GenAI sales pitch to artists. Allegedly, art is inaccessible and only for a lucky few; slop services level the playing field. The idea is that generated animation gives everyone a shot.

Despite the many problems with GenAI videos and images, that sense of left-outness can be powerful. Drawing like a Disney great really is off the table for some people. But perspective matters here, because the hyper-technical Disney style was only ever one option — one of many. A wonderful thing about animation, especially now, is its openness. Everyone already has a shot.

Last summer, we shared a clip from The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa (1977) on social media. It’s a Kafka story animated with an unusual material — sand. One person pointed this out in a comment that went viral:

“I’ll use AI cus drawing is inaccessible”

Meanwhile people doing animation WITH SAND AND A SOURCE OF LIGHT

Animator Caroline Leaf created most of The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa in her spare time, in her home. She would come back from her job and work into the night. Each frame was her own.

Leaf wasn’t a mechanical person and she kept her setup basic — “I am shy of machines,” she said during production. Fixed above her workspace was a 16 mm camera. The rest was done with sand on a sheet of milk glass, lit from below.3

She didn’t consider herself much of a visual artist. “I can’t really draw; never could,” she said in 1976. “But it is interesting, not being able to draw and trying to find solutions around it. If, for example, I knew how to draw a hand with all the correct shadings and perspective, there would be no problem. But that hand would come out looking like a conventional hand.”

At first, Leaf’s limited drawing skill almost scared her away from animation. Plus, she was no fan of the Disney films she’d seen (“I didn’t like them at all”). As a college student in the ‘60s, though, she stumbled into an animation course whose professor didn’t pay much mind to drawing or to Hollywood cartoons.

“His idea was that you could animate anything,” Leaf remembered.4

Once, Leaf came to class with a container of sand and poured it onto a light box. Something clicked. “There was no tradition of drawing in sand, so I felt free to develop my own style,” she noted. Six months of daily work went into her student film Sand, or Peter and the Wolf (1969), and a major new artist was born.5

The lack of tradition attracted Leaf to sand — but her left-field, iconoclastic thinking was a sort of tradition in itself. It was a strain in animation. Leaf chose to animate in the first place because she’d encountered that strain in her animation class, through film screenings. Among other things, she saw animated collage.

One of her favorite discoveries was Jan Lenica, a Polish director of cutout collage films. “He works with paper cutouts, and that impressed me,” Leaf said. “I like to draw a parallel between the fluid movement of the material I work with (sand) and the one he uses (paper).”

Lenica’s films are about as far from Disney as it gets. They follow no classical rules of drawing and were made from the simplest parts. But the best of them, like New Janko the Musician (1960), have a haunting power of their own.

Collage animation is like that. If Leaf built Mr. Samsa out of “sand and a source of light,” these artists use just as little, if not less, to do a lot. The collage animator Dave Merson Hess (Tight Pants Ultra Bold) told us a few years ago:

There is no canon of required reading for cutout. Truly, the rules have not fully been codified. Yes, there are zines, there are book chapters, there are PDFs of assignments scattered across the internet, but there’s no 500-page tome, no pack of devoted readers hellbent on enforcing the so-called rules. When compared to hand-drawn, this is a point of freedom. The so-called principles of animation exist as a set of potential suggestions.6

A famous example is Frank Film (1973) from America. It’s a mind-altering barrage of stuff, set to dueling narration tracks. At the time, director Frank Mouris called it “the true story of my life from the beginning up to the present and on into the future shown by the images I have cut out and saved for the past six years.”

Mouris was an independent who admitted that he “didn’t draw well.” But it didn’t matter — he realized that he could do something else with cutouts. A lot of people loved Frank Film, even if they struggled to describe it. Mouris’s piece won the Oscar in ‘74.

According to LA Weekly, Mouris “dashed up to receive the Oscar for his animated short, Frank Film, wearing a borrowed jacket, borrowed pants, borrowed scarf and a borrowed sequined belt. The shirt was his own.”7

This collage-aligned school has drawn many, many artists since the mid-century. One of the best worked in communist Hungary — Sándor Reisenbüchler. His films, like The Year of 1812, were utterly homebrew. Movement was often improvised under the camera.8

Reisenbüchler’s masterpiece was The Kidnapping of the Sun and Moon (1968). It’s a wordless fairy tale about a dragon that devours the sun, moon and stars and leaves the world in absolute darkness, until a spark of light appears, and a hero takes it up. The technique is a mix of things: cutout, experimental effects, semi-traditional animation. And the whole thing has a primordial energy.

We’ve loved The Kidnapping of the Sun and Moon for years. Seeing it on the big screen last year, at the Annecy Festival, we were overwhelmed by its emotional force. There were flashier, higher-tech and bigger-budget films at the festival, but almost none hit us like this one. Reisenbüchler managed it with none of the tools of a Disney artist. As he once said:

I made this film on a stool. I lived in the countryside, 30 km from Pest, in Felsőgöd, in dire poverty. […] My son was born just then, and my wife joined in between breastfeeding to fill in the dragon with a grease pencil. It’s actually a family short film. [The author Ferenc] Juhász also told me: you will see, Sándor, your child will bring luck. It’s a folk saying. A newborn always brings good luck that year. I had never been abroad before. With this film, I became popular all over the world. This shows that one can make a film on a kitchen table and a credenza.9

In the ‘70s, when movies were still shot on physical reels of film, Caroline Leaf created animation with sand and a source of light — and it wows people today. Artists like Mouris and Lenica and Reisenbüchler used even humbler means. And there was a wide group of animators who fell somewhere in between.

By the mid-century, there were films made by animating people in stop motion (A Chairy Tale), and films made by directly scratching and painting on film stock (Begone Dull Care). One of Caroline Leaf’s early fans, Norman McLaren, spent his whole career resisting the complex Disney approach. As he wrote in the ‘40s:

… my militant philosophy is this: to make with a brush on canvas is a simple and direct delight — to make with a movie should be the same.10

And, in 2026, the technical hurdles that even rebels like Leaf and McLaren navigated are gone. Anyone with a phone camera can shoot an animated film. Anyone with Blender or OpenToonz, the free software that Ghibli uses, can move images around. There are guides to building a multiplane shooting stand for under $100.

The results might not look exactly like classic Disney animation, or like Ghibli’s films. But that’s when creativity starts — at the point where you can’t just copy. Leaf’s work grew from the problem of “not being able to draw and trying to find solutions around it.” Her solutions, her creative problem-solving, made her an original.

What AI-generated animation promises is a shortcut around that problem-solving. Which is a risk, because it aims at the heart of an artist’s creative growth. After all, we can thank problem-solving even for the best work of the Disney giants. That’s how their discoveries were made.

Most of us will never have the privilege of the “marvelous big Renaissance Craft Hall” that was Disney’s studio in the ‘30s. But many of us have a camera, sand and a light, or a kitchen table and a pair of scissors, and those humbler tools can do a lot.

We love Snow White. Yet it was The Kidnapping of the Sun and Moon that made us cry in a theater.

2. Newsbits

• The Italian classic Allegro non troppo is coming stateside via GKIDS. See the trailer.

• In Mexico, Cinema Fantasma is reportedly prepping another feature film: The Ballad of the Phoenix.

• BoxBallet, from Russia, is an Oscar nominee and one of the best animated shorts of the 2020s. It’s finally out on YouTube in an official capacity.

• Meanwhile, beginning in March, Russia’s government will review audiovisual works shared online for “compliance with traditional spiritual and moral values.” It can order deleted any material found in violation.

• In America, the Hollywood director and showrunner Matt Braly is going independent with a new studio called Fantasy Project. “Why am I doing this?” he asked on Twitter. “Because the only ones who can protect art are the ones who value it. Disney using AI? Yuck.”

• India’s 88 Pictures is set to animate Baahubali: The Eternal War, whose hype keeps growing.

• The Japanese film Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade is coming to UHD Blu-ray with its original colors restored.

• A few years ago, Netflix killed Jorge Gutierrez’s Hollywood project I, Chihuahua. He’s now taken it overseas to Snafu, a British company.

• Amanita Design (Samorost) is a game studio rooted in the animated films of Czechia, its home country. Its latest project, Phonopolis, animates avant-garde aesthetics from the early 20th century — and now has a demo.

• Last of all: director Josh Fagin (spktra) explained the mysterious light effects in ‘80s and ‘90s anime like Akira, and how he’s revived them for the digital age. His piece has generated a lot of buzz on social media.

Until next time!

Hello! Hope you’re holding up okay. This is Jules and John, co-runners.

It’s a special day for us. On February 14, five years ago, the first issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter shipped out. Today marks our fifth anniversary.

In early 2021, we were running a Twitter account about animation. The idea was to attach a publication on the side — the pub…

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Welcome! Glad you could join us for another Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. This one’s all about light.

In January, we received an email from musician Josh Fagin (spktra is his stage name). He was about to drop an animated music video, Spirit Jumper, on which he’d spent five years. His goal: to create digital animation that looks authentically like the cel animation of three or four decades ago.

Fagin and his team (which included a Batman Beyond vet) got very, very close to the mark. Lately, he’s explained parts of their process in conversations with Cartoon Brew and Animation Magazine. It’s impressive work.

And most impressive of all, for us, is the light. Fagin’s video brings back a type of light essentially lost since the analog era. You know it when you see it; it jumps out immediately. He discovered something here.

We were curious about it and asked for a few details — a couple of sentences. Fagin surprised us by writing an article. The piece is so good that we’ve decided to publish it in full, and we’re thrilled to share it today.

Below, Fagin gets into the mesmerizing and little-understood technique of analog light in cel animation: the multiple exposures, the lens trickery and more. And he reveals how he revived this stuff for our time, on a computer — in enough detail to follow his thinking and (for the adventurous) even borrow his toolkit.

Let’s go!

When you look at light effects in pre-digital animation, there’s a magic to them.

Think of the motorcycle headlights or alleyway signs in Akira, or the Running Man segment from Neo Tokyo (1987), or any explosion, light beam, aura or impact effect you’ve seen in classic anime. It has a certain quality that grounds it to reality. There’s a feeling of danger to it, heightening the action and adding a kind of volume you can sense through the screen.

From the ‘80s onward, it was commonplace. Then the medium shifted toward digital, and it disappeared.

One of my goals with Spirit Jumper was to capture the imperfections of traditional cel-animation production. My belief was that grasping the how and why of the whole production process was the only way to come close to replicating the look.

Figuring out light was by far the hardest part, and finding any documentation about how these effects were achieved was equally difficult. Eventually, I learned it was called “backlit animation,” “bi-pack glow” or “underglow,” three terms used interchangeably. In the book Ink & Paint, Disney’s Mark Kimball spoke about how they used backlit animation for the lights in Tron:

The light comes from behind the cel illuminating any clear areas on the cel. By using a holdout matte to temporarily black out areas of the cel not to be illuminated, and placing a colored filter in the front of the camera lens, only the selected portion of the cel will be photographed in that color. This process may be repeated on the same frame using different holdout mattes and different color and diffusion filters until the frame is completed.1

I then came across the most helpful piece of the puzzle from a veteran cameraman, in a forum post I can no longer find:

You have the normally painted animation, and you have a mask for the lighting element which is mostly black, leaving a hole where it shall shine... Repeat for each glowing element with a different color. First you film the animation, then rewind. Second [exposure] is the matte, with a light under the table switched on. Usually you will have a color filter or gel in front of the camera now. This pass will create some lighting with a sharp edge. Sometimes an additional frosted gel is used for blurring that shine, but that takes some light inside the edge of the matte which may not be desired. In that case a third pass is done with the same matte, but out of focus, or with a slightly frosted gel, and/or some additional effects lens.

This unlocked it for me. The look is the sum of multiple, subtle parts. Not just the light, but a combination of light, photography and film stock.

A large part of the look of Spirit Jumper came from processing the animation through film emulation. Most TV animation was shot on 16 mm, while feature or big-budget animation was shot on 35 mm. So, by the point that I was experimenting with light, I’d spent a lot of time researching how film stock affects animation.

When observing still shots from the scenes I referenced, I noticed a distinct series of color shifts from the light source’s edges through its fade-off. It isn’t just fading into transparency; the center light changes color as it fades outwards.

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

All of the light in Spirit Jumper was made with a plugin called Hawaiki Super Glow for Apple Motion, where I composited the entire film. It generates incredibly realistic glows by stacking Gaussian blurs at different levels. You can then tweak aspects of the glows such as radius, gain and colors, as a group or individually.

This allowed me to copy that color shift I saw in my references, and to generate a natural-looking diffused light around light sources without manually masking them, like the analog technique requires. It looked substantially better than stock Gaussian glow effects. Still, without incorporating film components, it felt like something was missing.

Three crucial aspects of shooting to film contribute to the overall look: bloom, halation and grain. I needed to emulate the specific artifacts of film stock.

When bright light hits real film, it scatters back into the red-sensitive layer. That’s why the brightest explosions in anime often have a red or orange halo around the edges of the source — or why, if they’re colored, there’s a color-value shift in the same spots. It makes the light feel hot. According to the developers at Dehancer, this happens because intense light travels through the emulsion and bounces off the base of the film strip.2

Bloom is the diffusion caused by the light scattering through the emulsion layers themselves, or scattering through the optical filters on the lens. Because blue light waves are shorter and scatter more easily, this diffusion often creates a cool, cyan haze around the white light.

Coupled with the diffusion lenses that were often used to boost this spreading effect, it gave that feeling of “dreaminess” to movies. As also described by Dehancer:

While the bloom effect is not directly related to the film itself, film makes it particularly attractive. Additional light scattering occurs in slightly inhomogeneous layers of emulsion and further this diffusion is amplified with development.3

It’s worth noting that halation doesn’t always occur when bloom does. In the Akira example, despite the visible bloom, there isn’t any red shift around the brightest whites.

Why? Since bloom initiates at the lens and upper emulsion layers, while halation occurs at the film base, they are independent events. Because the film stock possessed a “remjet” backing, it prevented the halation (reflection from the rear) while still allowing the optical diffusion (scattering at the front) to occur.4

The last effect, grain, which is added on top of the entire film, brings more texture to the glow, pushing it even further away from feeling digital and sterile. Combined, the image becomes color shifted, diffused and textured. As soon as I began processing the light effects into the film emulation, the light came together.

In Spirit Jumper, I applied this technique to every instance of high-intensity light from the explosions and the monster’s glowing eyes, to make them feel as authentic as possible.

Ultimately, you don’t need a degree in chemistry to achieve this look. You don’t need to understand the physics of why any of it happens. You just need to know what to look for. The key isn’t simulating the science perfectly, but training your eye to recognize the character of analog light through film, so you can recreate the feeling of it.

There’s a sense of irony about trying to recapture this look, in that we’re now fighting the medium from the opposite end. Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, the camera operators were constantly battling dirt to make something clean and presentable. In a digital production pipeline, the computer makes the image perfect at every step. To create something that feels natural, you have to fight to put the dirt back in.

It’s the only way to get that “dangerous” light, the kind that actually feels like it’s burning the screen.

Until next time!

Welcome! Thanks for checking in. It’s another Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the slate:

• 1. Animating in the early days of the personal computer.

• 2. Newsbits.

With that, let’s go!

1. Computer animation

There was a question in the days when video games were young.

People figured out how to move graphics on a screen — see Pong from the early ‘70s, for example. This alone was a feat. Fast forward a decade, and the growth was visible. You had Donkey Kong beating his chest in the arcades; personal computers like the Apple II were running games where helicopters flew around with energy and bounce.

Games and animation went together — that much was clear. Like animated films, these things often (if not always) brought artwork to life. How deep was the link, though? How many techniques from the animation world could really, effectively cross over?1

A twenty-something coder from New York explored that question during the ‘80s. His name: Jordan Mechner. He self-described, among other things, as an “amateur animator.”

Mechner got his first Apple II as a teenager and fell in love. “I wanted to produce animations,” he said. “I knew from making those animations that the computer was powerful, and that it was capable as a games machine.”2

After years of writing games, Mechner released the one that made him a star: Prince of Persia (1989). It drew from the “great old Hollywood swashbuckling movies,” he said — like those starring Douglas Fairbanks. And animation was at the center. “Prince of Persia is the culmination of a lifelong fascination with animation,” noted the game’s manual.3

Famously, Mechner’s project rested on an experiment in digital rotoscoping.

Prince of Persia comes from an era when high-end PCs did way, way less than today’s low-end smartphones. And the game wasn’t made for the best computers of its time. Mechner’s target system, the Apple II, was already a fossil by 1989.

“[T]he Apple II’s memory was 48K,” Mechner said a few years back. “That’s less than a normal text email.”4

The original Prince of Persia displays big, blocky shapes in a handful of colors. Early in development, Mechner noted that the action was planned to run at just 15 frames per second, much slower than a movie. But he knew visuals were about more than tech. How they moved came down to animation technique — and it meant everything. He wrote in his journal:

The figure will be tiny and messy and look like crap… but I have faith that, when the frames are run in sequence at 15 fps, it’ll create an illusion of life that’s more amazing than anything that’s ever been seen on an Apple II screen. The little guy will be … this shimmering little beacon of life in the static Apple-graphics Persian world I’ll build for him. 5

Mechner felt it would work because he’d done it before. He knew how to get believable movement into the Apple II’s tiny memory.

It was what he’d achieved in his game Karateka (1984), whose lead character punched, kicked, walked and ran in a compelling way via rotoscoping. “What made the big difference was using a Super 8 camera to film my karate teacher going through the moves, and tracing them frame by frame on a Moviola,” Mechner said about that project.6

The trick originated in animated films — an aid for the movement of the humans in projects like Snow White (1937). Disney’s animators traced footage of live actors and deviated: they tweaked shapes, removed frames, kept the best poses. Mechner didn’t know that yet, but he did know that his own hand-drawn animation was “stiff,” and not the “realistic simulation of karate fighting” he wanted.7

His father was the one who suggested video footage (he even wore a gi and helped Mechner shoot a few movements). The only problem was digitization. These were the days, Mechner said, when the “challenge was getting [the footage] into the computer, which, of course, is something we can do now by pressing a button on a cellphone.”8

Mechner’s setup for Karateka was wild. Over his Moviola screen, he taped thin paper, upon which he traced key frames from the Super 8 footage beneath. Then he took his pencil sketches to a VersaWriter — an early drawing tablet — and traced them on that. Frames of movement became pixels on his computer monitor. From there, he cleaned them up with an art program he’d coded.9

His animation changed when he started taking from life in this way. The little details he’d missed became obvious. Mechner said:

I remember the frame of the high kick, the fighter leans back and also the arm goes back. … [I]n the beginning, when I tried to do a frame of a high kick, you know, it was more idealized. I didn’t realize that the body would have to move quite that far back.

Mechner recorded his impression of the initial tests in his journal. As he wrote, “When I saw that sketchy little figure walk across the screen, looking just like [my karate teacher] Dennis, all I could say was, ‘ALL RIGHT!’ ”

Karateka was unusual for the time, and it sold well — over 400,000 copies, in fact. The whole thing was a product of Mechner’s ambitious thinking about games. “I was taking film studies classes (always dangerous) and starting to get delusions of grandeur that computer games were in the infancy of a new art form,” he said, “like cartoon animation in the ‘20s or film in the 1900s.”

Those ideas influenced him again when he undertook Prince of Persia, not long after Karateka. He felt that games “had a lot of the same limitations that silent film had,” and he wanted to borrow the solutions of the silent era. Mechner aimed for a game in which “personality is expressed through action.”10

To do it, he returned to digital rotoscoping.

His younger brother David — a rising talent at Go, the board game — helped this time. “He was 16 years old [and] in high school ... He wasn’t the greatest athlete, but he was willing to do it for free,” said the elder Mechner.

In ‘85, they went to the parking lot of Reader’s Digest, near his brother’s school, to get footage with a VHS camera. It was an expensive toy then — “I couldn’t afford to own it,” Mechner admitted. (Guiltily, he refunded it after the shoot.) As he said later:

I made him do all of the moves that I thought would be needed in the game: running, jumping, climbing up on the generator that was sitting in the middle of the parking lot.11

Once again, the problem was converting the movement into animation. Mechner’s method was even wilder this time.

For his Apple II, he bought a “digitizer.” It was a special card that connected to a CCTV camera.12 “[It] let you basically point a little black-and-white video camera at an art stand, and it would digitize it and put it back on the computer [as pixels],” Mechner said.

Early tests were not promising. The images weren’t resizable, and the VHS footage wasn’t in the stark black and white that the card registered well. What he’d shot was “useless” as-was. Mechner needed a workaround: a way to make the movements readable by the card.

So, he hooked up a screen to a VCR, and set a Nikon camera (35 mm) on a tripod in front of it. “[Y]ou basically drew all the curtains in the room and then popped the videotape in the VCR, hit play, hit pause, did a frame advance,” he said. Mechner photographed “every third frame,” reducing his brother’s movement from 24 frames per second down to eight.

The photos were developed and then processed further. “I highlighted these shots with a black marker to produce a series of silhouettes,” Mechner explained. Specifically, he used a Magic Marker and Wite-Out to define the lines of each frame of his brother’s movement as clearly as possible. The next step was to put them through “a Xerox machine to get a really clean silhouette.”

The result: more than a dozen sheets of paper, all covered with black-and-white animation frames in sequence. Those went in front of the CCTV camera to be digitized, one at a time. This whole agonizing process had taken “months,” he said.13

“I love the quality of the just-digitized roughs,” Mechner wrote in his journal toward the end of ‘86, after seeing the tests. The final step was to “clean it up and stylize the figures” — and to “enhance” certain motions, like the long jump, to be larger than life.

Mechner built the rest of Prince of Persia around the lead character’s movement. As he put it, “My basic concept was to create the most lifelike, fluidly animated human game character ever ... trying to survive like Buster Keaton in a world that was dangerous.”

Throughout production, he kept including more rotoscoped motions, which brought extra difficulties. For one thing, there was the hardware — new frames ate up space in the Apple II’s memory. Another thing was his brother’s growth spurt between the first video shoot and the second (“with the magic of my cartoonization process, I was able to correct for this,” Mechner said).

But combat was the big one. Sword fights got added to Prince of Persia in late 1988 — and they needed a bunch of new animation. As Mechner studied the fights in early swashbucklers like Captain Blood for reference, he started to feel just how exciting his project was. “This is going to be the greatest game of all time,” he wrote to himself in December of ‘88.

Ultimately, The Adventures of Robin Hood solved the combat. Going over the film’s climactic fight, Mechner found “six seconds” that matched his needs. As he said:

… the camera angle has them [fighting] in exact profile. This was a godsend. I did my VHS/one-hour-photo rotoscope procedure, spread two-dozen snapshots out on the floor of the office and spent days poring over them trying to figure out what exactly was going on in that duel, how to conceptualize it into a repeatable pattern.

What he got was simple, thrilling back-and-forth action. It captured the thing he wanted: the old Hollywood style in which “the blades clash high and low in a kind of balletic rhythm.”14

Again, Prince of Persia was released for an ancient piece of hardware. By the time the game came out, in September 1989, the Apple II was dying off. Mechner’s project didn’t really sell — maybe 500 units per month at first.

Those who encountered his animation were wowed, though. “You really have to see it to believe it,” noted one newsletter. The game’s packaging hyped up the animated characters in terms that, according to another publication, would “be the height of marketing arrogance if [they] weren’t, quite simply, true.”15

Prince of Persia became one of those long-tail games. It ended up on a ton of platforms, ported by a ton of different teams. Versions reached Japan, Europe. Years later, Mechner met people who’d played it in the USSR: “I was amazed and moved to realize that my game had such a cultural impact, even behind the Iron Curtain, which was an unknown world to me as an American at that time.”16

Over time, it sold millions of copies. The versions people played weren’t quite Mechner’s original — the game’s visuals were redone many times for newer, stronger hardware. The Apple II’s harsh, limited colors went away. Yet Mechner’s animation, the basis of the project, stayed in place. And it stayed strong.

Which was the thing: making the animation believable and exciting wasn’t really about tech. Despite all the tricks Mechner used for it, this was an artistic problem. The arrival of newer hardware, more colors, faster frame rates and higher resolutions didn’t outmode the simple, lively motion in Prince of Persia — how could they? The great animation of the 1920s, a century ago, still looks great now. Movement doesn’t age so easily.

Back in 2020, Mechner published his journals from the Prince of Persia era as a book. On the cover is his game’s hero — rendered in two colors and in razor-sharp, Apple II-style pixels. We find the character mid-leap, in a pose that Mechner got and refined from his brother 40 years ago. It’s still full of energy.

2. Newsbits

• In America, Adobe announced plans this week to kill off Animate — and then backtracked after an outcry, thankfully.

• The Palestinian animator Rama Heib is among the first artists to win a grant from the Palestine Film Fund (for the short Issa and the Forest).

• An American music video, Spirit Jumper, aims to digitally recreate the look of classic ‘80s and ‘90s cel animation. It does an impressive job — especially in the use of light. Director Josh Fagin writes that he went for “that ‘dangerous’ light, the kind that actually feels like it’s burning the screen,” as seen in Akira.

• In Hungary, the Kecskemét animation studio has a new leader for the first time since 1971. László Toth (an animator on The Secret of Kells and The Red Turtle) took over from Ferenc Mikulás.

• On that note, in America, Bob Iger will step down as the head of Disney in March. His replacement is Josh D’Amaro from the company’s parks division.

• A little late, but worth noting: David was produced in South Africa, and its box office of $83 million represents a “breakthrough” for animation from the continent.

• In Germany, new rules require “streaming platforms and TV broadcasters … to invest 8% of their [German] revenue” into projects produced in the country.

• There’s an effort in America to build a National Animation Museum, and CalArts signed on last month.

• The Japanese animator Kazuya Kanehisa was featured by Cartoon Brew in a piece with lots of fascinating insights about his work, based on “Showa-era” cartoons and aesthetics.

• In Britain, the Cardiff Animation Festival revealed its program for 2026. It opens in April.

• Last of all: we looked at three projects from China’s Flash scene — and at how that scene built the current Chinese animation boom.

Until next time!

Welcome! Thanks for joining us today. It’s another Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — and this one is about Flash.

Adobe shocked people this week. For several years, the company’s followed the GenAI road to nowhere. That journey continued, on Monday, with the announcement of a plan to shutter Adobe Animate. Quickly, pushback from Animate’s large and dedicated userbase ended that plan.

The reversal was a piece of good news, at a time when we need good news. Artists won this one — the software will survive a while longer. And the remnants of the Flash era aren’t gone just yet.

Technically, Flash got wiped out years ago. Nobody uses .SWF or .FLV files anymore, and it’s been a decade since the Flash software morphed into Animate. The two programs share a continuity, though. Users of Animate do a lot of creative stuff, from indies (Take Off the Blindfold) to current Oscar nominees (Little Amélie) — and they’re working with the same tools that, in the ‘90s and ‘00s, remade the whole animation world.1

We’ve written before about what Flash unleashed. Suddenly, animators anywhere could reach viewers everywhere, online, with file sizes small enough for dial-up. Before he won his Oscar, Kunio Kato rose through his Flash series Tortov Roddle. Russia’s Flash scene created, for one, the brilliant Sasha Svirsky.

Then there was China, the country maybe most affected by Flash. Xiao Xiao (2000–2002) doesn’t need an introduction — and it was only one product of a wide, wide community.

Flash animation like Cat from 2002 was headline news in China. The creators of this stuff were a big deal, and they came from all walks. Through Flash, anybody could express themselves to the public, share their ideas and maybe build an art career. Animation was now open to all.

China’s animation field has grown a lot over the past 10 or 12 years — and that growth began in the Flash era. You can trace it root by root.

Read more