After Three Years, What's Left?

A note for an anniversary.

Hello! This is Jules and John — the co-runners of Animation Obsessive. We’re writing to you because today, February 14, marks three years since this newsletter’s first issue.

Getting through our initial year was wild. When our second anniversary arrived in 2023, wrapping our heads around it was hard. But reaching our third is another thing altogether. We’re not sure how to describe it.

Today, more than 20,000 people subscribe to the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Hundreds of you generously pay to support it, something we’re always grateful for and never take for granted. Reader support has recently turned all of this into a full-fledged career. This newsletter is beginning, in some small way, to look established.

But that’s what feels strange to us — because the core of it hasn’t changed.

The Animation Obsessive newsletter remains the tiny operation it’s been since February 2021: one lead writer, one art director and news researcher, one reviewer and sounding board. We’ve never run ads or done sponsorships with companies, despite the offers. We have no corporate structure, no office space, no business partners.

And we don’t view ourselves as experts. We’re confronted every week by what we don’t know, which is what makes this project a thrill for us. We’re always learning and (thanks to your support) always bringing in research material from around the world. Last month, it was the rare art collection Works from Films (1993) by Nizo Yamamoto of Ghibli fame. Yesterday, it was the Chinese book We Animators (身为动画人).

After three years, this newsletter still boils down to the exact same thing: we write about what interests us, and we hope that it will interest you, too.

We study animation — and then we try to offer small windows into that world through accessible stories. Sometimes we deliver a story that resonates. Sometimes we don’t, and we reevaluate. Our lives are organized around that twice-weekly process. What we can tell you for certain is that we’re going to keep trying in 2024.

Already this year, we’ve gotten to dive into films we love (Funny Birds, Chie the Brat), and into the careers of artists we admire. Several 2024 issues so far were in the planning for at least 12 months. We’re preparing lots more from here — about animation from the ‘20s until today, from China to Germany to Brazil. Even Disney, which we don’t often write about, is set to appear in the next few months.

Three years in, what stands out to us the most is how much there still is to discover. We’re incredibly thankful to everyone who’s come along to read what we publish, to everyone who sends us such thoughtful emails and comments. To everyone who supports what we do.

We never thought that the Animation Obsessive newsletter would reach this size — or that readers would allow us to research as much as we can now. But the end result is that we get to do more and more of the thing we love to do. The thing that this newsletter was created to do.

Thank you. As 2024 continues, we’ll keep doing our best.

See you again soon!