More Than We Ever Thought

Closing out a big year.

Happy Thursday! Welcome to another issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — a bookend to 2023.

We’re getting ready for the holidays and a little relaxation time. It’s a good feeling after a busy, exciting 12 months. This has been the year that everything changed for the newsletter.

When 2023 began, the mailing list counted around 9,400 readers. That number has since doubled, and then some, to more than 19,000. We can’t get over it.

In 2023, the articles reached more readers — and more readers chose to become paying subscribers. Which has transformed Animation Obsessive, officially, into a career. It’s beyond what we could’ve foreseen, and we’re so grateful.

Our main theme of 2023 (especially of the past six months) has been dream story ideas becoming realities. The newsletter’s growth let us invest in more research material, which in turn let us realize ideas written down long ago. We added the idea for Sunday’s issue on The Snowman to the list in late 2022, and the one about Hayao Miyazaki’s use of space and time even earlier.

To close out 2023, we’re looking back on a few highlights — in particular from the last six months. It’s a moment to reflect, regroup and celebrate as the holidays near.

Personal picks

Some subjects are harder to crack. One is Japanese animation, which calls for tough-to-access books and magazines. Getting the chance to do a story about it that really goes into detail is a thrill.

Which is probably why two of our favorite issues lately (and ever) deal with Japan.

The first is The Strongest Girl in the World, about the canceled Pippi Longstocking series by Miyazaki, Isao Takahata and Yoichi Kotabe. The second is an issue for members: A Haze of Alcohol and Confusion, on the making of Roujin Z (1991).

One thing leads to another when you explore animation: you study something and find clues about something else. The Pippi story grew out of several years of covering Miyazaki and Toei. The one about Roujin Z, a project involving Katsuhiro Otomo and Satoshi Kon, is an extension of our articles on Magnetic Rose, Run, Melos! and Millennium Actress.

These were dream projects for us. The Pippi and Roujin Z pieces both took long hours and relied on imports — including a booklet that came with a vinyl record — but the response was wonderful.

An even bigger challenge (with an even bigger response) was The Unofficial Art of Coraline. There isn’t much left to say about this PDF — we’ve told the story of why and how it came to be. But we’re happy that it exists, and that so many people have gotten something out of it. In 2023, it was absolutely one of our favorites.

Coraline concept art by Jon Klassen (top row) and Tadahiro Uesugi (bottom row)

The Pippi, Coraline and Roujin Z issues did well — but not every personal favorite hits. It’s part of the process. We do go niche here, and some stories resonate more widely than others.

Among this niche work, we want to single out The Phantom Legacy of Errol Le Cain and The Soviets, the Architect and Walt Disney.

The Le Cain article happened because Daniel Aguirre Hansell, an outside researcher, contacted us with the idea in early 2023. It was an ambitious project that didn’t release until late July. We wrote it based on Daniel’s painstaking research — it’s thanks to him that the story got told. The people who’ve liked this issue have really liked it, and it’s one we love.

The other is a piece for members about Tsar Durandai (1934), the early Soviet cartoon that enchanted Frank Lloyd Wright and the upstart UPA artists. It was a wild, early experiment by the Brumberg sisters and Ivan Ivanov-Vano. Our story is, as far as we know, the most complete account of it in English.

For a limited time over Christmas, we’ve removed the paywalls on the Durandai and Roujin Z issues, opening them up to anyone curious. We hope you’ll enjoy them.

Illustrations by Errol Le Cain for Sir Orfeo (left) and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp (right)

The popular rankings

Moving away from the niche stories, we’ve got the hits. These six were our biggest of 2023, ordered by view count:

1. How to Paint Like Hayao Miyazaki (February)

2. Hayao Miyazaki on Running (March)

3. The Unofficial Art of Coraline (November)

4. The Avant-Garde Origins of Gumby (September)

5. The Secrets of Magnetic Rose (July)

6. Time and Space the Miyazaki Way (December)

A few themes jump out: three are about Miyazaki and four about Japanese animation. But another, more unexpected trend is hiding in there. Both the Gumby piece and the one on Miyazaki’s use of time and space are technical filmmaking breakdowns. By all accounts, they should be niche — but they surprised us.

What’s doubly interesting is that they cover opposing views of filmmaking.

Some of Miyazaki’s image boards for Horus: Prince of the Sun, the origin of his and Takahata’s concrete style of time and space. Courtesy of the Horus Roman Album.

Gumby was built on the theories of Slavko Vorkapich — an avant-garde master of montage. Miyazaki hates that style: he favors what Takahata once called “temporal and spatial continuity.” One reader noticed links between the Miyazaki-Takahata approach and a classic essay, Montage Prohibited (1956), by the critic André Bazin. Which led us down a fascinating rabbit hole (see the notes¹).

In a different comment about the time and space issue, the brushmaker and fellow Substacker Kyle T. Webster wrote these incredibly kind words:

Fascinating. As usual, this team delivers the best researched and best written animation essays that even a non-animation geek will find enlightening and inspiring.

One of our main influences with Animation Obsessive is Every Frame a Painting. The way it made film theory understandable and entertaining is, for us, the gold standard. This newsletter isn’t there yet — but the reaction to the Gumby and Miyazaki articles feels like a reassurance that we’re on the right track.

Wrapping up

Once again, it’s been an exciting and very busy six months. We didn’t even mention the other issues that made us happy — like the ones about The House of Small Cubes, collage animation, in-betweening and beyond.

Looking ahead to 2024, the newsletter’s scale and scope are only set to expand. Our collection of research material is outgrowing the shelving unit we built to store it — and a lot of this stuff is for issues that haven’t even released yet. With Christmas almost here, it feels like a good time to rest and get ready. So, starting today, we’ll be on our regular end-of-year break until January 14.

As usual, this break doubles as a chance to research and prepare more freely, without hard deadlines. What we do over the next few weeks will help us navigate the next few months.

There are major articles due in 2024 (which we won’t spoil here). We can’t wait to see how they turn out.

Finally, a huge thank-you to everyone who’s read us in 2023 — whether you only follow our Sunday issues, or you pay to subscribe, or you check in with us every month or two. The Animation Obsessive newsletter continues to grow into something more than we ever thought it could be. Here’s to more in 2024.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

1. This tweet inspired us to look further into the ties between Takahata and Bazin. They turned out to be major. He was a Bazin fan, as Toshio Suzuki wrote in Mixing Work with Pleasure:

One book that Takahata often mentioned was André Bazin’s Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (What Is Cinema?), a Japanese translation of which was published by Bijutsu Shuppansha in four boxed volumes.

It just so happens that the essay Montage Prohibited was collected in What Is Cinema? — linking Takahata’s theories directly to Bazin’s work on the same topic.