Animation Gift Ideas for 2025

Plus: news.

Mary Blair concept art for It’s a Small World, courtesy of The Colors of Mary Blair

Welcome! Hope you’re doing well. It’s a new Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the plan:

• 1) Our 2025 gift guide.

• 2) About a film from Berlin.

• 3) On the success of Mexico’s animated underdog of the year.

• 4) Newsbits.

With that, let’s go!

1 – Gifts for the animation inclined

Christmas is almost here again. A lot of folks are already shopping for presents. And, since 2021, it’s been our tradition to publish an annual guide to animation-related gifts. We’re back with the fifth installment today.

Picking out gifts in 2025 is more complicated than it was last year. Money’s tighter for many — and, in America, the end of the de minimis exemption on small-dollar imports makes it harder to order stuff from abroad. We’ve kept these things in mind while assembling today’s list.

There’s also the availability question. Around 60% of our readers live outside the States, where we’re based. So, when possible, we’ve included purchase options for all countries where our readership exceeds 1,000 people.¹ Although most of these are Amazon links, it’s our policy never to accept sponsorship or affiliate deals — we have no ties to Amazon. If you’re like us and prefer to buy from other sites, we encourage it.

Our goal with this guide is to offer enough ideas to fit many budgets and most interests. We hope it’s a help as the holidays near!

Art books

• Studio Ghibli Storyboard Collection: Kiki’s Delivery Service (AU, BR, CA, DE, FR, IT, MX, UK, US)
  — Hayao Miyazaki’s complete storyboards for Kiki’s Delivery Service, which are as good as you might imagine.

• The Illusion of Life (AU, BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IN, IT, MX, UK, US)
  — Still one of the great books about the craft of animation, and definitely the best about the Disney style.

• Art of the Breadwinner (Global)
  — For our money, The Breadwinner is Cartoon Saloon’s finest film. This new book collects the artwork that built it.

• Painting the Worlds of Studio Ghibli (AU, BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IN, IT, MX, UK, US)
  — It’s pricey, but this 568-page doorstop includes gorgeous, well-printed background paintings from more than two dozen movies.

• Animation for the People: An Illustrated History of the National Film Board of Canada (AU, BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IN, IT, MX, UK, US)
  — The first book-length exploration of NFB animation, and one of the coolest things released this year. Most European editions are due in December.

• The Lost Notebook: Herman Schultheis and the Secrets of Walt Disney’s Movie Magic (Global)
  — A real trove of information about the effects and film trickery that made the early Disney classics possible.

• The Art of the Boy and the Heron (BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IN, IT, MX, UK, US)
  — A must for anyone who enjoyed this film, and anyone seeking insights into the latter-day Miyazaki.

• E-SAKUGA Mary and the Witch’s Flower (AU, BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IT, MX, US)
  — It’s tough to go wrong with this publisher’s digital books. Here, you’ll find a painstakingly detailed breakdown of the animation in Studio Ponoc’s hit film.

• The Noble Approach: Maurice Noble and the Zen of Animation Design (AU, BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IN, IT, MX, UK, US)
  — An ebook that uncovers the design secrets of the artist who defined the looks of What’s Opera, Doc? and many other Warner cartoons.

• The Art and Flair of Mary Blair (AU, BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IN, IT, MX, UK, US)
  — Anyone who enjoys Blair’s art will love John Canemaker’s book.

• The Art of Angel’s Egg: Revised and Expanded Edition (JP)
  — Finally back in print after years of outrageous second-hand prices, this import isn’t one to miss for Angel’s Egg fans.

• Sourcebook of Sherlock Hound (JP)
  — If you’ve ever wanted to own 300-plus pages of concept and production art from Sherlock Hound, this new import is the book for you.

For reading

• Starting Point 1979–1996 (AU, BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IN, IT, MX, UK, US)
  — A lot’s been written about Hayao Miyazaki, but Starting Point reveals him in his own words. It remains irreplaceable.

• Turning Point 1997–2008 (AU, BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IN, IT, MX, UK, US)
  — The sequel to Starting Point, and similarly precious.

• When Magoo Flew: The Rise and Fall of Animation Studio UPA (AU, BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IT, MX, UK, US)
  — No one’s written a better chronicle of UPA’s history, process and ethos. Essential reading for those interested.

• Lotte Reiniger: Pioneer of Film Animation (AU, BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IN, IT, MX, UK, US)
  — The best book on Reiniger in English. If you want to start learning about her, this is the place.

• Somewhere Out There: My Animated Life (AU, BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IN, IT, MX, UK, US)
  — Don Bluth’s autobiography reveals much about his films and thinking.

• After Disney (AU, BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IN, IT, MX, UK, US)
  — A new book about the Disney studio’s struggles in the years after Walt Disney’s death. Thanks to Nancy Beiman for putting it on our radar.

For viewing

• Treasures of Soviet Animation Vol. 1 (CA, MX, US)
  — Classic sci-fi animation from the USSR in restored quality, including The Mystery of the Third Planet.²

• Treasures of Soviet Animation Vol. 2 (CA, Global, MX, US)
  — Another beautifully restored collection of Soviet films: The Snow Queen, The Scarlet Flower and The Key.

• The Short Films of Yuri Norstein (CA, Global, US)
  — A Blu-ray collection due sometime in December, and maybe even after Christmas, but one too exciting not to include here.

• Flow (BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IT, MX, UK, US)
  — One of the major breakouts of our time, now on Blu-ray.

• The Adventures of Prince Achmed (BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IT, MX, UK, US)
  — A stop-motion masterpiece by Lotte Reiniger. It’s the oldest surviving animated feature and still among the greatest.

• Three Fantastic Journeys by Karel Zeman (BR, CA, ES, FR, IT, MX, UK, US)

  — An excellent Criterion release of features and shorts by the Czech legend.

• Fleischer Classics Featuring Gulliver’s Travels (Global)
  — Thunderbean does some of the highest-quality scanning and restoration work on early animation, and Gulliver is one of its major releases.

• Peanuts: Ultimate TV Specials Collection (BR, CA, MX, US)
  — Forty Peanuts specials on five Blu-ray discs.

• The Last Unicorn 4K Steelbook (BR, CA, DE, MX, US)
  — Released late last year, this is a freshly restored scan of the cult film from the ‘80s.

• Essential Polish Animation (Global)
  — For those curious about Polish animation, or Eastern European animation as a whole, there’s much to love about this region-free Blu-ray.

2 – Animation news worldwide

2.1 – My Brother, My Brother on the longlist

A still from My Brother, My Brother (2025)

The march to the Oscar shortlist continues, and competition this year is extreme. Well over a hundred animated shorts made the longlist — including gems like Retirement Plan and The Night Boots.

Another intriguing film in the running is My Brother, My Brother. It’s drawn serious attention at festivals, and for good reason. But it isn’t easy to describe. Director Abdelrahman Dnewar made something very, very personal about his life, and his late mother and brother. It can feel like stepping into someone else’s dream, full of associations that are intense and real, but not your own.

He began the film in 2019 with his twin, Saad Dnewar.³ “Losing our mother first pushed us to look back and examine how we became who we are,” he tells us by email. Saad passed away himself in 2022. For a while, the project fell apart.

“I didn’t have the courage to finish the film until my older brother, and my close friends Karim and Hesham, joined,” writes Abdelrahman. The loss of Saad “completely” reshaped the project. As he explains:

We always believed that twins are not only made in the womb, but also made by each other if they remain present in each other’s lives. When one of us discovered a function of our body, the other took it on. That is how Saad and I grew up. We learned by watching one another, becoming who we are through each other. I remember the first time Saad fought back in school when a classmate attacked him. It was the first time I understood what my own body was capable of, through him.

In every challenge later, I summoned that image from outside myself. We kept doing that for each other, building strength by observing how the other responded. So, when he died, I did not know how to grieve him, because I could not see how he would grieve me. We played each other all our lives. I would play him to avoid someone I didn’t want to meet, and he would play me in exams I couldn’t pass. I wanted to keep playing with him even after he died, and that is what compelled me to finish the film.

My Brother, My Brother is fictional, but it recreates incidents like these. It’s a film about memory and the way memory changes. At the start, Abdelrahman and Saad discussed their childhoods and found that they recalled events differently — and yet memories were all they had. Almost no pictures or videos of their early years existed.

“There was a single photo from a zoo visit showing us with our backs to the camera, looking into an enclosure,” Abdelrahman writes. “For years we believed we were looking at monkeys. When we revisited the zoo, we discovered it had actually been the hippo cage.”

As he puts it:

That shift became central to the film. We wanted the audience to experience the instability of memory by revisiting locations or images twice, just as we had. Once something enters memory, it begins transforming endlessly. The same approach shaped the form: live action blending into animation, my voice blending with Saad’s, our identities overlapping. We embraced the beauty in that confusion and allowed it to guide our choices.

A still from the film

My Brother, My Brother became a capsule of things they remembered, linked and arranged more by “emotional weight” than “consequence or chronology.”

One scene depicts a real event in which “one of us accidentally poured Zamzam water into the car’s water tank,” Abdelrahman notes. The film is vague about which brother does it, reflecting life. They themselves sometimes couldn’t recall “which of us said or did what or who was accountable.” Meanwhile, the film returns often to medical imagery. The brothers grew up seeing these things as “portals into the hidden interior, scientific but almost spiritual,” because their parents were both doctors and religious.

Abdelrahman lives in Berlin today, where he’s a student at the DFFB film school. But My Brother, My Brother is set in Egypt, his place of origin, and the reality of it comes through. “In Egypt, audiences said the film felt deeply real, authentic, and Egyptian, which meant a great deal to me,” he writes.

Those who knew Saad also feel the reality of this film. Asked about the experience of watching the completed version of My Brother, My Brother, Abdelrahman replies:

It was deeply heartwarming. The process of making the film felt like summoning Saad in fragments, trying to get close to an impression of him alongside the people who loved him.

To narrate his part, I listened closely to his voice notes, paying attention to the texture of his voice and the way he formed sentences. I also met with his best friend, to understand those small differences between us. Even though we were identical twins, that process revealed so many little distinctions — the differences that made him who he was, not just my identical twin. And Sondos Shabayek, a great acting coach, helped also extract the two voices better out of me.

What touched me most was when Sondos watched the film at the premiere and told me she could hear Saad in it, even though I was voicing his part. Later I heard the same from other friends who could always tell us apart, and from my siblings. It made me feel that, in some moments, I could still be the mutual facade for both of our existences.

You can find the trailer for My Brother, My Brother on Vimeo, where the film is available via Miyu.

2.2 – Frankelda’s success in summary

A still from I Am Frankelda (2025)

In October, I Am Frankelda appeared in Mexican theaters. Its scrappy creators at Mexico City’s Cinema Fantasma made history, with a little assistance from Guillermo del Toro. This is their country’s first stop-motion feature.

Its theatrical run is winding down now — in under two weeks, Frankelda should be streaming in Latin America. More than 820,000 people went to see it in Mexico, bringing in 50 million pesos (around $2.73 million). Among Mexican movies, Frankelda is in the top three of the year, including live action.

Many people doubted this film. When it came out, there were social media rumors in Mexico about empty screenings — and about the people choosing to catch the Chainsaw Man movie instead. Ultimately, Frankelda beat Chainsaw Man in the country, despite the latter’s huge popularity around the world.

Another bit of social media chatter relates to I Am Frankelda’s profitability. It’s earned lots of money — but how much did it cost? Back in June, co-director Arturo Ambriz told us that its budget is a secret because of Warner’s involvement, but he said that Frankelda “might be one of the cheapest stop-motion features of all history.” Based on figures we’ve heard, he wasn’t exaggerating, and it’s safe to call the film a hit.

Mexico’s mainstream press is treating it like one. This week, a headline in El Universal argued that Frankelda “opens the path for stop motion in Mexico.”

“People in the industry told us that we couldn’t make these types of films, that they had no audience, that there was no budget [for them], that it shouldn’t be done,” Arturo told the paper. “And I think, from here, no one can repeat that horrible and dangerous message anymore.”

Where does Frankelda go next? Cinema Fantasma hopes that its success in Mexico will open doors for releases elsewhere. As co-director Roy Ambriz told El Universal:

Right now, it has only launched in Mexico, and distribution for the rest of the world remains to be found. ... Guillermo del Toro always told us that it was very important to begin locally and strongly to generate noise. [We] hope that [it will find distribution abroad] thanks to the great response at specialized international festivals and from the public.

2.3 – Newsbits

• Crocodile Dance, the Nigerian and South African co-production, is around 63% funded with 12 days remaining on Kickstarter. It’s counting on a final rally to make it over the finish line.

• On the topic of Angel’s Egg, it ran in American theaters for a couple of days this month — and did pretty well. Given that this film’s failure in the ‘80s nearly killed Mamoru Oshii’s career, it’s an impressive comeback.

• Ukraine’s government is preparing a new cash rebate and “cultural fund” to support filmmaking in the country.

• In America, director Joey Clift worked with “a largely Indigenous team and … an all-Native voice cast” to create his film Pow. It’s now on YouTube.

• A new law in Australia forces streamers like Netflix “to spend a portion of their local earnings on original Australian” projects, reports Deadline.

• Cartoon Brew has a new article about animated witches throughout history. It includes a clip from a Czech film called A Little Witch (1984) that’s a must-see.

• In China, Zootopia 2 had a $272 million opening — significantly more than it earned in North America over the same period. And Chinese viewers seem to like it. On Douban, it has a user score of 8.5, strong by that site’s standards.

• In India, director Suresh Eriyat (Desi Oon) penned a fiery essay that calls on “young animators across Asia” to draw more deeply from local culture, instead of “chas[ing] the aesthetics of Europe or America.”

• Russia’s government is working on new plans to fully subsidize the making of animation in the country. It’s another move that feels like a callback to the USSR.

• Last of all: we took a brief tour of the animation produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

Until next time!

1. The one exception, unfortunately, is Argentina, where Amazon doesn’t operate a specialized store. Apologies to anyone left out today — we’re still trying to find the ideal way to make these guides accessible.

2. Full disclosure: we’ve worked with the distributor of the Treasures anthology, Deaf Crocodile, on several projects this year. That includes the second volume of Treasures and The Short Films of Yuri Norstein.

3. The film began under the title Traitors of the Eyes, and won a script pitch award in 2019.