Storyboarding Around the World, Vol. 2

Internationally, across time.

Funny Birds (2021)

Happy Thursday! In this issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, we’re exploring the art of storyboarding as it’s appeared across the globe.

Most animated projects take shape at the storyboard stage. With these little drawings, a handful of artists — even just a single artist — can plan a whole feature film. Rarely do animators go without this step. As director Boris Kolar of Zagreb Film said back in the 1960s:

Once it is finished, a storyboard becomes a model and guide for making the film itself. But it is also something more: the artist, transferring his idea into storyboard form, expresses it in visual terms rather than verbal and is therefore also forced to think primarily in terms of pictures, which is of fundamental importance in the animated film medium. The animated film “story” is most often not written out in words, it is the “story” first. It emerges as the result of making a storyboard and cannot be separated from it.¹

Today, we’re looking at how animation artists from Japan, China, the Soviet Union and beyond have approached the art of storyboarding.

This is the second volume in this series. Earlier in the year, we looked at storyboards from Animal Farm to Jiří Trnka to Ernest & Celestine. We’ve brought a very different batch for the sequel, and we’re excited to share it.

Here we go!