There's a lot to praise about The Last Unicorn. A ton of talent went into it -- the same animation studio (and many of the same team) produced Nausicaa shortly after. We've read a story about Miyazaki watching the film back then and being really struck by the final scene where the unicorns come out of the water! It's pretty wild to think about.
The scene where all of the unicorns run out of the water after the death of the Red Bull is incredible. I also thought the background design work in the film was beautifully done.
Sep 2·edited Sep 2Liked by Animation Obsessive Staff
Solid rundown of the possibilities of """limited""" animation (we really need to find a new word for that). Perhaps Trnka deserves a mention, not for his more influential The Gift which you've already covered before and vaguely alluded to here, but instead his still illustration films O zlaté rybce and Jak stařeček měnil, až vyměnil. I believe them to be the first of their kind, insofar as they attempted to purely recreate a storybook in animation and make the drawings narrate/emote solely through the way they're filmed/edited instead of moved (by comparison, films like UPA's Tell-Tale Heart are almost overanimated), paving the way for other approaches like Toshio Hirata's Donguri to Yamaneko or the later Ga-nime movement—ironically produced by Toei.
Thank you! And you have a valid point about the Trnka storybook films -- they are on the continuum of this style. Those are such deep cuts that we rarely come across anyone who knows them, so it's a lot of fun to see them mentioned here. As for that Hirata project and Ga-nime, they weren't on our radar until now. We appreciate the tip!
Sep 2·edited Sep 2Liked by Animation Obsessive Staff
I think they're interesting films as they set the ultimate bar for how little animation has to animate to be considered such; i.e. not at all. Although by adding minimal (background) motion and/or effects in most shots Hirata really perfected this "pure storybook" aesthetic in my opinion, allowing images to linger for longer periods of time instead of resorting to back-and-forth cutting, dynamic zooms, etc to make them interesting, thus truly giving the impression of leisurely flipping through pages. Really glad I could bring it to your attention.
Btw, had to share this tip. I've been exploring Filmio's catalogue since you mentioned its 110th Hungarian animation anniversary event some weeks ago, and I recently noticed that on top constantly making new films available they've now added English subtitles to all of the films that have dialogue! I have to point you to Péter Szoboszlay's ingenious Hide & Seek at very least (https://filmio.hu/film/aki-bujt-bujt-14908269).
Great piece! Speaking of limited animation in Anime, would love to see a detailed look at Angel's egg ahead of its restoration! It does some incredible things with limited frames and moments of complete stillness.
Thanks very much! (We have to thank you as well for showing us that amazing documentary featuring Khitruk some time ago -- it really helped this issue.) We'll add Angel's Egg to the idea list and see what we can find out.
This is a fantastic article - you can really see all the research you've been doing over the last few years coming together in it. It's thoroughly international and draws all sorts of interesting connections and inspirations. It's a wonderful history of animation techniques.
It does also show pretty comprehensively how limited the 'limited'/'full' terminology is! I remember visiting the Museum of Animated Film in Annecy, and one of the first signs was about trying to figure out a definition of animation, eventually settling on a negative definition where animation is pretty much any film besides live action. By the same token, 'limited animation' seems to be any 2D animation besides Disney-style full animation on continuous 1s and 2s. Which is wild - why should this one specific style of animation be the paradigm that all others are compared to?
People have tried to plug this semantic gap in various ways, such as the 'full limited' term sometimes applied to Mitsuo Iso's animation, but we're far from having a really good terminology for these different approaches to animation. That's just art history I guess - any time you try to come up with a definitive taxonomy, someone will come along and invent a paradigm-breaking exception.
It's interesting to consider how contextual the definition is as well. It's become very fashionable to do nonphotorealistic 3D animation which holds poses for more than one frame, but typically this only goes as far as animating on 2s. In traditional animation, animating continuously on 2s (with occasional snatches of 1s) is what we call 'full animation' - but in 3D, fully interpolated 1s are are available, so the measuring scale shifts!
More interesting, though, is that in films like 'Puss in Boots: The Last Wish', the use of reduced framerates is mainly applied to fast action scenes - precisely the times when traditional animation would use 1s! The goal is clarity and 'snappiness', and these action scenes now aim to be more stylised, rather than more realistic. Meanwhile, the quieter acting-focused scenes in the film apparently stick pretty closely to interpolated 1s. Naturally the influence of anime action scenes, which are typically animated on constantly varying 2s and 3s and only rarely 1s, is pretty overt here: we've got used to a different set of stylistic conventions, and now in the right circumstances, reduced framerates feel cool rather than unfinished.
But as you've described in this article, there's so much more to 'limited animation' than simple framerate counts. The UPA style and those it influenced made a point of breaking pretty hard from the strict linear perspective used by Disney, and going for flatter and more graphical drawings, whereas anime 'limited animation' generally heavily emphasises linear perspective in the drawings (though often using sliding layers in the movement, c.f. Lamarre, tho this is less true now that 3DCG camera moves have become much more common) - and as you've written elsewhere on the site, one of the key techniques introduced in anime was complex 3D camerawork using background animation and similar techniques, which was subsequently copied by Western animators. Neither of these is the Disney style but they're two completely different evolutionary branches. It's very interesting looking at the short films of Osamu Tezuka because he tries just about everything: some films are very graphical and flat, others like Jumping (1984) push the use of perspective to an extreme. Some films, like 'Tales from a Street Corner' (1962), combine many styles.
And by the same token, the increased use of 'limited animation' in 3D in terms of frame counts is also accompanied by increased use of rendering styles like painterly textures, screentone dots and 2D graphical elements (to name just a few).
From an animator perspective, it seems best not to take the attitude of strict paradigms (the revolution of the UPA against Disney), but to view all of these ideas and traditions as a toolbox of techniques - to look at how they harmonise, and what emotional effects they give. This article has some great examples, like the more 'serious' feeling given by the reduced motion of 'realist' anime. Cutting out half the frames from an animation intended to be on 1s will rarely make it look better, but an animation designed around a reduced framerate with striking poses can benefit a lot from the increased clarity, and you can reinforce that with a graphical approach to composing frames, and so on.
All in all, great work! (Hopefully I've been able to add something in this comment and not just recap the very comprehensive article...)
First off, we appreciate the kind words. This one was definitely meant to tie together what we've learned so far, bringing it all into one place as a reference and an introduction for anyone who wants to learn about limited animation. It's great to know that that came across.
Second, you've made very good points about the dichotomy between full and limited animation. Defining these terms is tricky. They date back to the days when Disney and Disney-esque animation absolutely ruled the industry -- it was the gold standard. Which creates the problem that "limited animation" really has to be defined negatively, as you put it. You've got the old-school Disney style, and whatever this stuff is. That was the divide back then, and we've inherited the language.
We've been thinking about these problems more since the article went out. In a sense, the original Disney approach could almost be called "baroque animation": complex, extravagant and endlessly detailed. Limited animation was a minimalist response, with fewer bells and whistles. Which seems to fit the creative philosophies of Disney and UPA across the board, not just in the animation but in the graphic design.
Instead of approaching it strictly as "full" (the Disney default) and "limited" (the deviation), we've started to look at styles of movement almost as a sliding scale from hyper-minimalism (late UPA, Dezaki's tome frames) to Rococo (say, The Thief and the Cobbler). Modernism simplified painting and got away from the likes of Bouguereau, and you could say that something similar happened in animation. With all the creative differences, splintering schools and "reactionary" styles (return to classic Disney!) that entailed.
Beyond that, your points about frame rate are fascinating and very true. We hadn't noticed consciously that the old rule has been flipped (i.e. 1s for fast action), but you're dead on. Same with the problem of defining limited animation in 3D, where 1s have been standard almost since the beginning. The Spider-Verse films do get a bit wilder than just 2s, and they often use wide spacing to increase the limited feel, but it's safe to say they'd look less limited if they were in 2D.
Lastly, about the animator's perspective -- absolutely. These ideas are all tools now, the war is over, and most animation sits somewhere in between the extremes of retro Disney and UPA. It's intriguing to look at the movement in WALL-E and see how many tricks Pixar was pulling from limited animation, even though it's done on 1s and has Disney-esque flourishes at times. WALL-E and EVE really don't move that much: it's often clipped and minimal. Even here, in a 3D blockbuster with no expense spared, you find a blended approach to movement. That's very much the case in anime, too.
Anyway, thanks again for this comment! You've definitely added here, and hashing out the points in the article in more technical terms has a lot of value.
That striking visual style and limited animation in the Soviet Union seems associated with the Khrushchev era specifically, and it was indeed a very sharp break with the often-rotoscoped realism of the Stalinist era (which I would say went further in the "realism" direction than Disney ever did, especially the films of Viktor Gromov!). Another famous example of a radically different visual style from around the same time was the Brumberg sisters' "Big Troubles":
Another is "Absent-Minded Giovanni" from the 1969 compilation film "Merry-Go-Round" (in which not only is the main character angular, but MOVES in very original way that's suitable to the way he's drawn... although, he moves so smoothly, that can you even call this "limited animation"?)
I think this sort of thing never stayed as popular in the USSR as it did in the US. Probably because they never had the same budgetary limitations. So they never had the need to produce lots of animation on the cheap for TV series. "Limited animation" of the US variety was just one of many styles they dabbled in, and there was no economic incentive to keep using it as there was for US studios.
About Hrzhanovskiy, it's kind of interesting that his new feature already got government funding a few years ago, and this pitch is for "continued funding". Also, that he and his studio are still working on it, even while he and his wife, due to opposing the war, have lived in Israel since 2022 (out of the frying pan and into the fire, perhaps!). He was even interviewed by Russia's "Culture" channel this April (one of the most popular TV channels), promoting his new film and showing some footage, and they made no mention of their guest's location: https://smotrim.ru/article/3893798
By the way, I spent some weeks last month doing a translation of Hrzhanovskiy's excellent Pushkin trilogy (one of the projects he's best known for in Russia, but not seen before in the West due probably in large part to the enormous difficulties in translating Pushkin, including some of his writings that had never been translated to English previously): https://www.animatsiya.net/series.php?seriesid=49
If anyone's interested and not very familiar with Pushkin's life, I recommend starting with the second film, as it's the most beautiful and approachable (although I did add some notes in the description of the first one to make it a bit easier).
Great points about Soviet limited animation. And we love Absent-Minded Giovanni and Big Troubles -- fantastic films! Still, it's true that Big Troubles is a hard sell in the West. We do have a modified translation that tries to bridge the gap, but it's tricky even so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oul4b3QBRmk
As for Khrzhanovsky, we'd read he was in Israel now but, given this latest pitch, were curious whether things had changed. Fascinating that it's turned out like this. You have to wonder if the Cinema Fund will give his project more money, considering the political context. But maybe his status as a living legend will outweigh that. We'll have to see.
Either way, thank you so much for bringing more of his work into English -- that's excellent news! We've seen way too few of his films besides Glass Harmonica and Kozyavin. It might be time to watch some more soon.
Hope you like it. If you aren't familiar with Pushkin it can be intimidating (as it was for me when I started), so I added some minimal notes in the description that will hopefully help with the worst of it.
And thanks for linking to your attempt at improving the "Big Troubles" translation! I think it's mostly better, but in a few places worse. I decided to have a go at it myself, so I made some more changes.
I'm sure it can still be improved (and probably in some places my version is worse), but at least I managed to find some more English expressions similar to the Russian ones than had been in the prior versions, thus cutting down on the number of footnotes a bit, and I fixed a few mistranslations that made it more confusing than it had to be.
Thanks for writing this! Fascinating to read about. I noticed the different animation styles growing up but had no idea about UPA and different schools of thought.
Really glad you enjoyed it -- we find it endlessly interesting to study the opposing philosophies on this stuff. The more we learn, the more we get out of the films!
This is really fascinating! I really love the kind of different spirit limited animation gives, really refreshing seeing how different people utilize animation style to tell their stories and really push the medium. Always a delight to learn something new from you guys! Though I have two questions, is everything not 24 fps considered limited animation? And what is the threshold for limited? (I know it doesn’t just boil down to fps but, as a reference point of How fluid it has to be). And do you have any recommendations for modern or old animations to watch? I got really amazed by the Gobelin pieces which was showcased, and might have missed something cool as I started reading earlier this year.
Glad you liked it! We love this topic and it's wonderful to share what we've learned.
Regarding your question, animating at 24 frames ("on ones," in industry lingo) can be done in both full animation and limited animation. In fact, a lot of classic Disney animation was done at 12 frames ("on twos") instead, and studios like UPA and Zagreb Film animated on ones in plenty of scenes.
For example, the limited film At the Photographer's (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jja7BYn4KqI) moves almost entirely on ones. Ward Kimball's limited stuff for Disney was often the same way. And you can see a similar trick used in sections of UPA's Flat Hatting (note the characters' legs at 1:22: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbwbfoEs7LI).
That said, even though those films use 24 frame animation, they're still limited because they cut back and stylize the movement in other ways. Often only a single part of the character is moving on ones while the rest is frozen. Or there are long holds mixed in, where no movement happens at all. And so on.
Choppier, jumpier, less smooth animation is limited as well (Tissa David did it a lot), but there's a wide range to the style. The best way we've found to describe limited animation is that it's more about reducing the total number of drawings, and the complexity of those drawings and the movement they create, than anything else.
As for recommendations, we have hundreds! For older stuff, a starting point might be our viewing guides of mid-century work we love. They aren't complete lists of everything great from back then, but they offer an introduction to *some* of the best:
For newer work, it's hard to know where to start. A few of our favorite films of the past decade are The Summit of the Gods, Funny Birds (https://vimeo.com/679177660/f4a726d2f7), The Physics of Sorrow (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5H_KVIy487Q), The Boy and the Heron and The Wolf House. But the list is long, and we don't want to overwhelm you with too many options! Hopefully something in there will grab you.
This looks great! Took a fast peek at Funny Birds (which I always thought was the short Pixar one, but apperently it’s not), and the style is beautiful. So I’ll definitively have to take a look at that. I have also saved the UPA one for later later reading, and I have actually read the Jiri Trnka one! Where I discovered The Hand.
Thanks for the reply and recommendations!! I appreciate it
It's definitely an option -- although it may lead to misunderstandings of its own in the end, since so much animation involves planning! A hard problem, for sure.
I heard the term "limited animation" for the first time the other day in connection with the TV series Archer so this was a timely and excellent piece to read. The classic example of this style is surely "Eastern Europe's favorite cat and mouse team, Worker & Parasite"?
Thanks! Very cool that things lined up this way. And you're definitely right about the Worker & Parasite gag -- that moment was, in fact, a parody of an old Zagreb Film cartoon!
Funny, I thought it was a parody of Estonian cartoons such as Priit Parn's! Or I thought that the creators had seen something and had no idea what it was they were parodying. Because "Worker & Parasite" looks nothing at all like most Soyuzmultfilm productions.
Still frames were also at work in The Last Unicorn (1982). The animation in this film was heavily criticized but I thought it was fantastic.
There's a lot to praise about The Last Unicorn. A ton of talent went into it -- the same animation studio (and many of the same team) produced Nausicaa shortly after. We've read a story about Miyazaki watching the film back then and being really struck by the final scene where the unicorns come out of the water! It's pretty wild to think about.
The scene where all of the unicorns run out of the water after the death of the Red Bull is incredible. I also thought the background design work in the film was beautifully done.
Another great piece!
Thank you!
Solid rundown of the possibilities of """limited""" animation (we really need to find a new word for that). Perhaps Trnka deserves a mention, not for his more influential The Gift which you've already covered before and vaguely alluded to here, but instead his still illustration films O zlaté rybce and Jak stařeček měnil, až vyměnil. I believe them to be the first of their kind, insofar as they attempted to purely recreate a storybook in animation and make the drawings narrate/emote solely through the way they're filmed/edited instead of moved (by comparison, films like UPA's Tell-Tale Heart are almost overanimated), paving the way for other approaches like Toshio Hirata's Donguri to Yamaneko or the later Ga-nime movement—ironically produced by Toei.
Thank you! And you have a valid point about the Trnka storybook films -- they are on the continuum of this style. Those are such deep cuts that we rarely come across anyone who knows them, so it's a lot of fun to see them mentioned here. As for that Hirata project and Ga-nime, they weren't on our radar until now. We appreciate the tip!
I think they're interesting films as they set the ultimate bar for how little animation has to animate to be considered such; i.e. not at all. Although by adding minimal (background) motion and/or effects in most shots Hirata really perfected this "pure storybook" aesthetic in my opinion, allowing images to linger for longer periods of time instead of resorting to back-and-forth cutting, dynamic zooms, etc to make them interesting, thus truly giving the impression of leisurely flipping through pages. Really glad I could bring it to your attention.
Btw, had to share this tip. I've been exploring Filmio's catalogue since you mentioned its 110th Hungarian animation anniversary event some weeks ago, and I recently noticed that on top constantly making new films available they've now added English subtitles to all of the films that have dialogue! I have to point you to Péter Szoboszlay's ingenious Hide & Seek at very least (https://filmio.hu/film/aki-bujt-bujt-14908269).
Wow, this is phenomenal news -- we hadn't noticed this! Thanks so much for this tip.
Great piece! Speaking of limited animation in Anime, would love to see a detailed look at Angel's egg ahead of its restoration! It does some incredible things with limited frames and moments of complete stillness.
Thanks very much! (We have to thank you as well for showing us that amazing documentary featuring Khitruk some time ago -- it really helped this issue.) We'll add Angel's Egg to the idea list and see what we can find out.
Happy to help :))) Thanks for the consistently great work <3
Ooops, I never finished my comment here!
This is a fantastic article - you can really see all the research you've been doing over the last few years coming together in it. It's thoroughly international and draws all sorts of interesting connections and inspirations. It's a wonderful history of animation techniques.
It does also show pretty comprehensively how limited the 'limited'/'full' terminology is! I remember visiting the Museum of Animated Film in Annecy, and one of the first signs was about trying to figure out a definition of animation, eventually settling on a negative definition where animation is pretty much any film besides live action. By the same token, 'limited animation' seems to be any 2D animation besides Disney-style full animation on continuous 1s and 2s. Which is wild - why should this one specific style of animation be the paradigm that all others are compared to?
People have tried to plug this semantic gap in various ways, such as the 'full limited' term sometimes applied to Mitsuo Iso's animation, but we're far from having a really good terminology for these different approaches to animation. That's just art history I guess - any time you try to come up with a definitive taxonomy, someone will come along and invent a paradigm-breaking exception.
It's interesting to consider how contextual the definition is as well. It's become very fashionable to do nonphotorealistic 3D animation which holds poses for more than one frame, but typically this only goes as far as animating on 2s. In traditional animation, animating continuously on 2s (with occasional snatches of 1s) is what we call 'full animation' - but in 3D, fully interpolated 1s are are available, so the measuring scale shifts!
More interesting, though, is that in films like 'Puss in Boots: The Last Wish', the use of reduced framerates is mainly applied to fast action scenes - precisely the times when traditional animation would use 1s! The goal is clarity and 'snappiness', and these action scenes now aim to be more stylised, rather than more realistic. Meanwhile, the quieter acting-focused scenes in the film apparently stick pretty closely to interpolated 1s. Naturally the influence of anime action scenes, which are typically animated on constantly varying 2s and 3s and only rarely 1s, is pretty overt here: we've got used to a different set of stylistic conventions, and now in the right circumstances, reduced framerates feel cool rather than unfinished.
But as you've described in this article, there's so much more to 'limited animation' than simple framerate counts. The UPA style and those it influenced made a point of breaking pretty hard from the strict linear perspective used by Disney, and going for flatter and more graphical drawings, whereas anime 'limited animation' generally heavily emphasises linear perspective in the drawings (though often using sliding layers in the movement, c.f. Lamarre, tho this is less true now that 3DCG camera moves have become much more common) - and as you've written elsewhere on the site, one of the key techniques introduced in anime was complex 3D camerawork using background animation and similar techniques, which was subsequently copied by Western animators. Neither of these is the Disney style but they're two completely different evolutionary branches. It's very interesting looking at the short films of Osamu Tezuka because he tries just about everything: some films are very graphical and flat, others like Jumping (1984) push the use of perspective to an extreme. Some films, like 'Tales from a Street Corner' (1962), combine many styles.
And by the same token, the increased use of 'limited animation' in 3D in terms of frame counts is also accompanied by increased use of rendering styles like painterly textures, screentone dots and 2D graphical elements (to name just a few).
From an animator perspective, it seems best not to take the attitude of strict paradigms (the revolution of the UPA against Disney), but to view all of these ideas and traditions as a toolbox of techniques - to look at how they harmonise, and what emotional effects they give. This article has some great examples, like the more 'serious' feeling given by the reduced motion of 'realist' anime. Cutting out half the frames from an animation intended to be on 1s will rarely make it look better, but an animation designed around a reduced framerate with striking poses can benefit a lot from the increased clarity, and you can reinforce that with a graphical approach to composing frames, and so on.
All in all, great work! (Hopefully I've been able to add something in this comment and not just recap the very comprehensive article...)
Thank you for another super thoughtful comment!
First off, we appreciate the kind words. This one was definitely meant to tie together what we've learned so far, bringing it all into one place as a reference and an introduction for anyone who wants to learn about limited animation. It's great to know that that came across.
Second, you've made very good points about the dichotomy between full and limited animation. Defining these terms is tricky. They date back to the days when Disney and Disney-esque animation absolutely ruled the industry -- it was the gold standard. Which creates the problem that "limited animation" really has to be defined negatively, as you put it. You've got the old-school Disney style, and whatever this stuff is. That was the divide back then, and we've inherited the language.
We've been thinking about these problems more since the article went out. In a sense, the original Disney approach could almost be called "baroque animation": complex, extravagant and endlessly detailed. Limited animation was a minimalist response, with fewer bells and whistles. Which seems to fit the creative philosophies of Disney and UPA across the board, not just in the animation but in the graphic design.
Instead of approaching it strictly as "full" (the Disney default) and "limited" (the deviation), we've started to look at styles of movement almost as a sliding scale from hyper-minimalism (late UPA, Dezaki's tome frames) to Rococo (say, The Thief and the Cobbler). Modernism simplified painting and got away from the likes of Bouguereau, and you could say that something similar happened in animation. With all the creative differences, splintering schools and "reactionary" styles (return to classic Disney!) that entailed.
Beyond that, your points about frame rate are fascinating and very true. We hadn't noticed consciously that the old rule has been flipped (i.e. 1s for fast action), but you're dead on. Same with the problem of defining limited animation in 3D, where 1s have been standard almost since the beginning. The Spider-Verse films do get a bit wilder than just 2s, and they often use wide spacing to increase the limited feel, but it's safe to say they'd look less limited if they were in 2D.
Lastly, about the animator's perspective -- absolutely. These ideas are all tools now, the war is over, and most animation sits somewhere in between the extremes of retro Disney and UPA. It's intriguing to look at the movement in WALL-E and see how many tricks Pixar was pulling from limited animation, even though it's done on 1s and has Disney-esque flourishes at times. WALL-E and EVE really don't move that much: it's often clipped and minimal. Even here, in a 3D blockbuster with no expense spared, you find a blended approach to movement. That's very much the case in anime, too.
Anyway, thanks again for this comment! You've definitely added here, and hashing out the points in the article in more technical terms has a lot of value.
That striking visual style and limited animation in the Soviet Union seems associated with the Khrushchev era specifically, and it was indeed a very sharp break with the often-rotoscoped realism of the Stalinist era (which I would say went further in the "realism" direction than Disney ever did, especially the films of Viktor Gromov!). Another famous example of a radically different visual style from around the same time was the Brumberg sisters' "Big Troubles":
https://www.animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=346 (though it's the sort of film that's almost impossible to translate into English smoothly)
Another is "Absent-Minded Giovanni" from the 1969 compilation film "Merry-Go-Round" (in which not only is the main character angular, but MOVES in very original way that's suitable to the way he's drawn... although, he moves so smoothly, that can you even call this "limited animation"?)
https://www.animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=1078
I think this sort of thing never stayed as popular in the USSR as it did in the US. Probably because they never had the same budgetary limitations. So they never had the need to produce lots of animation on the cheap for TV series. "Limited animation" of the US variety was just one of many styles they dabbled in, and there was no economic incentive to keep using it as there was for US studios.
About Hrzhanovskiy, it's kind of interesting that his new feature already got government funding a few years ago, and this pitch is for "continued funding". Also, that he and his studio are still working on it, even while he and his wife, due to opposing the war, have lived in Israel since 2022 (out of the frying pan and into the fire, perhaps!). He was even interviewed by Russia's "Culture" channel this April (one of the most popular TV channels), promoting his new film and showing some footage, and they made no mention of their guest's location: https://smotrim.ru/article/3893798
By the way, I spent some weeks last month doing a translation of Hrzhanovskiy's excellent Pushkin trilogy (one of the projects he's best known for in Russia, but not seen before in the West due probably in large part to the enormous difficulties in translating Pushkin, including some of his writings that had never been translated to English previously): https://www.animatsiya.net/series.php?seriesid=49
If anyone's interested and not very familiar with Pushkin's life, I recommend starting with the second film, as it's the most beautiful and approachable (although I did add some notes in the description of the first one to make it a bit easier).
Great points about Soviet limited animation. And we love Absent-Minded Giovanni and Big Troubles -- fantastic films! Still, it's true that Big Troubles is a hard sell in the West. We do have a modified translation that tries to bridge the gap, but it's tricky even so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oul4b3QBRmk
As for Khrzhanovsky, we'd read he was in Israel now but, given this latest pitch, were curious whether things had changed. Fascinating that it's turned out like this. You have to wonder if the Cinema Fund will give his project more money, considering the political context. But maybe his status as a living legend will outweigh that. We'll have to see.
Either way, thank you so much for bringing more of his work into English -- that's excellent news! We've seen way too few of his films besides Glass Harmonica and Kozyavin. It might be time to watch some more soon.
Hope you like it. If you aren't familiar with Pushkin it can be intimidating (as it was for me when I started), so I added some minimal notes in the description that will hopefully help with the worst of it.
And thanks for linking to your attempt at improving the "Big Troubles" translation! I think it's mostly better, but in a few places worse. I decided to have a go at it myself, so I made some more changes.
Comparison with your version:
https://www.animatsiya.net/subtitle.php?subtitleid=224&compare=Compare&right=8948&left=8947
Comparison with the 2015 subs:
https://www.animatsiya.net/subtitle.php?subtitleid=224&compare=Compare&right=8948&left=3219
It can be watched here:
https://www.animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=346
I'm sure it can still be improved (and probably in some places my version is worse), but at least I managed to find some more English expressions similar to the Russian ones than had been in the prior versions, thus cutting down on the number of footnotes a bit, and I fixed a few mistranslations that made it more confusing than it had to be.
Huge improvement on the subtitles! Great to see this -- thank you!
Thanks for writing this! Fascinating to read about. I noticed the different animation styles growing up but had no idea about UPA and different schools of thought.
Really glad you enjoyed it -- we find it endlessly interesting to study the opposing philosophies on this stuff. The more we learn, the more we get out of the films!
I really feel Khitruk’s “struggle to escape inveterate realism”, in the context of my own artwork
Thank you, very interesting. And thank you for the illustrations that accompany the article.
Thank you! That’s very kind — glad you liked it.
This is really fascinating! I really love the kind of different spirit limited animation gives, really refreshing seeing how different people utilize animation style to tell their stories and really push the medium. Always a delight to learn something new from you guys! Though I have two questions, is everything not 24 fps considered limited animation? And what is the threshold for limited? (I know it doesn’t just boil down to fps but, as a reference point of How fluid it has to be). And do you have any recommendations for modern or old animations to watch? I got really amazed by the Gobelin pieces which was showcased, and might have missed something cool as I started reading earlier this year.
Glad you liked it! We love this topic and it's wonderful to share what we've learned.
Regarding your question, animating at 24 frames ("on ones," in industry lingo) can be done in both full animation and limited animation. In fact, a lot of classic Disney animation was done at 12 frames ("on twos") instead, and studios like UPA and Zagreb Film animated on ones in plenty of scenes.
For example, the limited film At the Photographer's (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jja7BYn4KqI) moves almost entirely on ones. Ward Kimball's limited stuff for Disney was often the same way. And you can see a similar trick used in sections of UPA's Flat Hatting (note the characters' legs at 1:22: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbwbfoEs7LI).
That said, even though those films use 24 frame animation, they're still limited because they cut back and stylize the movement in other ways. Often only a single part of the character is moving on ones while the rest is frozen. Or there are long holds mixed in, where no movement happens at all. And so on.
Choppier, jumpier, less smooth animation is limited as well (Tissa David did it a lot), but there's a wide range to the style. The best way we've found to describe limited animation is that it's more about reducing the total number of drawings, and the complexity of those drawings and the movement they create, than anything else.
As for recommendations, we have hundreds! For older stuff, a starting point might be our viewing guides of mid-century work we love. They aren't complete lists of everything great from back then, but they offer an introduction to *some* of the best:
UPA: https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/an-introduction-to-upa
Zagreb Film: https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-years-most-exciting-trove-of
Stop-motion master Jiří Trnka: https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-grandmaster-of-stop-motion
For newer work, it's hard to know where to start. A few of our favorite films of the past decade are The Summit of the Gods, Funny Birds (https://vimeo.com/679177660/f4a726d2f7), The Physics of Sorrow (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5H_KVIy487Q), The Boy and the Heron and The Wolf House. But the list is long, and we don't want to overwhelm you with too many options! Hopefully something in there will grab you.
This looks great! Took a fast peek at Funny Birds (which I always thought was the short Pixar one, but apperently it’s not), and the style is beautiful. So I’ll definitively have to take a look at that. I have also saved the UPA one for later later reading, and I have actually read the Jiri Trnka one! Where I discovered The Hand.
Thanks for the reply and recommendations!! I appreciate it
You probably saw it, but one of last year's Gobelins films was in that UPA style! "The Name", it's short but great.
Good catch -- you're right! It's a kind of anime/UPA hybrid. There's a lot of potential in mixing different schools that way.
Hanna-Barbera knew limited animation as "planned animation". How does this term grab you? Thank you in advance for answering.
It's definitely an option -- although it may lead to misunderstandings of its own in the end, since so much animation involves planning! A hard problem, for sure.
This was so great and amazing as always.
Thank you! Very kind.
I heard the term "limited animation" for the first time the other day in connection with the TV series Archer so this was a timely and excellent piece to read. The classic example of this style is surely "Eastern Europe's favorite cat and mouse team, Worker & Parasite"?
Thanks! Very cool that things lined up this way. And you're definitely right about the Worker & Parasite gag -- that moment was, in fact, a parody of an old Zagreb Film cartoon!
Funny, I thought it was a parody of Estonian cartoons such as Priit Parn's! Or I thought that the creators had seen something and had no idea what it was they were parodying. Because "Worker & Parasite" looks nothing at all like most Soyuzmultfilm productions.
It really doesn't! But yeah, the creator of that Simpsons joke posted on Twitter a few years ago that Ersatz was the origin for the whole thing: https://x.com/tubatron/status/1357066219182936070
Fascinating!
Happy you liked it! Thanks for the kind comment.