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

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

• 2. Animation newsbits.

• 3. The last word.

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

Now, let’s go!

1. Computer puppets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s Catmull:

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

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

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

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

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

Pinkava again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Newsbits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Last word

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

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

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

Until next time!

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

• 1. A release of Machini.

• 2. Animation newsbits.

• 3. The last word.

Now, let’s go!

1. Material and message

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It built up to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Newsbits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Last word

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

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

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

Until next time!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

• 1. On the art of pacing.

• 2. Animation newsbits.

• 3. The last word.

With that, let’s go!

1. Going for popcorn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He went on:

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s Miyazaki:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Newsbits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Last word

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

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

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

Until next time!

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

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

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

We hope you’ll enjoy!

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

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

• 2. Animation newsbits.

• 3. The last word.

Now, let’s go!

1. The human element

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Newsbits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Last word

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

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

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

Until next time!

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 2. Inside early computer animation.

• 3. Newsbits.

With that, let’s go!

1. Its own graphic universe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As he said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Worldwide animation news

2.1: Uncovering early CG animation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can find Inside the Works below:

2.2: Newsbits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until next time!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We were very dissatisfied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 2. Animation newsbits.

Now, let’s go!

1. Reinventing Pooh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I called to the animators: look, draw.

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

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

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

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

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

2. Newsbits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until next time!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 2. Newsbits in animation.

With that, let’s go!

1. What Chen-Yi Chang did

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As he said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Newsbits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until next time!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 2. Animation newsbits.

Now, let’s go!

1. Reiniger on her creation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

or

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Newsbits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until next time!

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

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

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

In 1986, Time argued that this short:

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

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

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

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

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

• 1. What Dreaming Machine was supposed to be.

• 2. Newsbits from the animation world.

Now, let’s go!

1. Machines with dreams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Newsbits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until next time!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 1. Notes on process.

• 2. Newsbits from the animation world.

With that, let’s go!

1. Figuring it out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over time, scenes grew. Like she said:

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

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

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

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

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

2. Newsbits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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