America's Outsourcing Machine

A brief history of outsourced American cartoons.

A workstation for The New Adventures of Pinocchio (courtesy of The Enchanted World of Rankin/Bass)

Happy Thursday! In this issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, we explore the murky and complicated history of animation outsourcing.

It’s not typical for American TV animation to be made fully in the United States, and that’s been true for a long, long time. Most often, shows conceptualized here get outsourced to animation studios elsewhere.

This is a huge subject, and we’ve been studying it for a couple of years now. Today, we’re publishing an extra-long issue of our newsletter to bring as many of the strands together as possible — to understand how outsourcing came to be, how it developed and what its consequences are.

For email readers: Gmail may clip today’s story. You can read it uninterrupted by clicking the article header to read it on the website.

Here we go!