Two Years of the Animation Obsessive Newsletter

How far we've come, and where we're going.

Hello! Jules and John here — the co-runners of Animation Obsessive. As of today, we’ve officially been writing this newsletter for two years.

It’s tough to explain how much has changed since that first issue on February 14, 2021.

Our newsletter started as an outgrowth of our Twitter account, where we share animation tidbits. The question was: can we write about this stuff at greater length, in a more ambitious and permanent way? Will anyone care? We kept our expectations realistic. If we were lucky, we thought, maybe we could reach 100 signups in a month.

And yet folks were there for it. Signups hit 100 in two days, which started a pattern. In the time since, this newsletter and its readers have continued to defy our expectations.

When we began, we figured that the newsletter’s pie-in-the-sky maximum was around 2,000 people. Today, our mailing list stands at well over 10,000 — not counting the traffic from Twitter and the wider internet. And, thanks to our community of paying subscribers, what started as an experiment has become a job.

We still struggle to process these numbers. The thing is, we see our newsletter as niche. We cover animation from around the world and across time, with a focus on hidden stories. But people took an interest. We try to honor that interest by digging ever deeper — ordering rare books from shops in Croatia, tracking down out-of-print Japanese DVDs, wiring money to the Czech Film Archive for a collection of magazine articles.

We’ve kept digging, and readers have kept responding. The past four months brought us the largest growth spike in our newsletter’s history. When we translated Hayao Miyazaki’s guide to painting this month, it became our fastest-growing issue to date. It’s on track to become our biggest.

We didn’t foresee these things in February 2021. We have no idea where the ceiling is for the Animation Obsessive newsletter anymore. All we can say is that we’re going to keep reaching higher this year — and trying to bring you more.

As we rev up for the rest of 2023, we’ve decided to offer a discount in honor of our two-year anniversary. It’s the largest we’ve given in the past 12 months:

We’re proud of the work we’ve done this year already, like our first-of-its-kind piece on The Bath and (for members) our deep dive into The Hand by Jiří Trnka. But it’s only the start: we’re planning to get even more ambitious. We’ve been expanding our research library, working with new collaborators, prepping for topics we’ve never covered before. As we get ready for our next phase of research, we hope you’ll join us.

This discount gives you 50% off monthly or annual membership — $5 per month or $50 per year. If you redeem it before it expires, your price will never go up. You’ll keep that rate until you choose to cancel your subscription.

These last two years have been, in many ways, life-changing for us. We never thought that something like this was possible — and we’re dedicated to carrying the Animation Obsessive newsletter forward into the future. Whether you’ve been with us since February 2021, or you’ve just signed up in February 2023, thank you.

We hope you’ll enjoy what we’ve got in store.

All the best,
—Jules & John