The Year's End
Closing out 2024.
Happy Sunday! We’re back with a new edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. It’s our last of 2024, as we head into the holidays.
This has been a year of dualities in the animation world. America’s industry put out megahits — amid mass unemployment. Japan’s industry, while buckling due to overproduction, is still on the rise. Students are worried for their futures in animation, but the indie scene is booming and a lone animator can make a feature film in Blender.
There’s plenty of uncertainty — but, as we wrote in November, we still believe in the power of art. Artists who want to reach people through animation have that chance.
Just take The Glassworker, the amazing Pakistani feature we covered in a recent issue. It’s one of the many stories we were proud to publish this year — the kind of story that our newsletter exists to publish.
The aim of this publication is to be a bright spot: a celebration of good work, and a source of ideas, tools and inspiration for any reader, whether they animate or not. That’s been true since we began in 2021. So, for our final issue of 2024, it feels appropriate to revisit some of the encouraging stories we got to tell this year — especially in the past six months.
Themes and favorites
Animation is hard fought. People struggle; projects don’t go as intended. But good work is good work, and it matters. That theme showed up in some of our favorite issues this year, including the one about Tissa David’s animation for Raggedy Ann.
The film — Raggedy Ann & Andy (1977) — was a flop. Many on its team disliked it, and David felt that her drawings had gone “to waste.” Yet she gave us an all-time performance that, almost 50 years later, hasn’t faded at all. We didn’t expect a lot of people to be interested in the story, but it got a wonderful response. A highlight.
Or take The Real Lupin, about the original Lupin the 3rd show. The project was in trouble when Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata took it over in 1971, and it fell apart on their watch. But they tried — and the result was vastly influential. Only a handful of our articles have taken as much research as this one did, and it’s special to us.
Another that carried the theme: When a Film Doesn’t Look Like Its Concept Art, our most popular piece of the last six months. It digs into the relationship between Mary Blair’s lovely paintings and Disney’s movies, which never quite captured her style. It was a frustration in the ‘40s that’s ongoing now — but Blair’s art shines nonetheless.
One other important trend, during the year’s second half, wasn’t in the issues themselves but in the way they came together. Several were handled by outside writers and translators.
For example, Andrew Osmond (Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist) and Jonathan Clements (Anime: A History) gave us Pyrotechnics and Play, on the animator Atsuko Fukushima. Scholar Claire Knight wrote that gem of a story on The Glassworker. Translator Toadette shared a rich interview with My Neighbor Totoro’s main background painter.
Then there was the behemoth: Who Killed Fraidy Cat? by David Mahler. It’s the definitive history of a canceled Disney movie. The piece was in the works for more than a year, and we’re very happy that David chose our newsletter as its home.
Publishing these has been a ride, and two or three more are due in the coming months. Further commissions are on pause for now — but we’ll likely start again at some point in 2025. (As a note: the Atsuko Fukushima article was originally paywalled, but we’ve unlocked it for the holidays.)
The big issues
Our newsletter had roughly 90 issues in 2024. Of those, the largest hits have all (save one) come out since August. Here are the top six:
It’s a diverse group of articles, and most of them got more attention than we foresaw. One is a deep dive into limited animation — from UPA cartoons to anime and beyond. Another profiles AC-bu, the gods of the bad-on-purpose. That Ghost in the Shell piece is less about the film than about the money and marketing behind it.
Watching a left-field story resonate is forever inspiring to us. It reminds us how lucky we are to be doing this.
Other highlights
To round things out, here are six more of our favorite stories from the past six months, in no particular order. All deal with the quest to make good work, however difficult, odd, messy or even quixotic that quest may be:
Paintings That Live — our viewing guide and intro to the films of Alexander Petrov.
“Only the Most Refined Things Can Leave a Deep Impression” — on Three Monks (1980), a Chinese cartoon we love.
Composing A Charlie Brown Christmas — the story behind the music.
The Simplest Form of Entertainment — when Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart crafted one of the great abstract films.
Being Unrealistic — how a team of amateurs in Mexico built Revoltoso (2016), a gorgeous stop-motion short praised by Guillermo del Toro.
Norstein and Japan — a look into the links between Yuri Norstein and Japanese painting, literature and animation.
The final two were first released as paid issues, but we’re dropping the paywalls on them during the holidays, just like we’ve done with the Fukushima piece. If you haven’t had a chance to read them before, we hope you’ll enjoy.
Wrapping up
As always, we’re so grateful that we get to run our newsletter. This year, for all its challenges, has been our biggest. We’ve never reached more people around the world — and we’re telling stories that we quite simply couldn’t have told before. Thank you all for being here with us.
Going into our holiday break, we’re excited not just to relax, but to get ready for next year. We’ve got so many topics to cover in 2025, and having time to prepare makes all the difference. Our next issue is set for January 16 — but you can find us on Twitter, Bluesky and Notes in the meantime.
Thank you once again for reading the Animation Obsessive newsletter! Hope you have a great rest of your year.
Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays!
Thank you for filling my email with the most beautiful animation I've ever seen.
This newsletter was my favorite discovery of this year, thank you for your brilliant work.