What Didn't Get In

Mary Blair paintings, a complete Otomo storyboard and more.

A storyboard panel by Katsuhiro Otomo for Robot Carnival (1987), courtesy of the Robot Carnival artbook

Happy Thursday! Thanks for joining us. Today’s issue of Animation Obsessive is slightly out of the norm: we’re taking an extra look at three subjects from recent months.

Not everything makes it into every article. Sometimes, for the sake of length or focus, we need to cut tangents that we want to keep. Other times, the research for a story turns up obscure books that we order later — and so we learn more about a topic after we publish.

This issue collects a few tidbits along those lines. First, following up on our piece about Katsuhiro Otomo’s filmmaking, we share his complete storyboard for Robot Carnival (1987). Second, revisiting our top article of 2024, we’ve got little-seen Mary Blair artwork for a certain Disney sequence. Third, there’s more from our two-part interview with animator Tony White, one of our favorite projects this year.

Here we go!

1 – A trove of Otomo sketches

Katsuhiro Otomo is a distinguished storyboarder. If you’ve gone through his boards for Akira or Steamboy, both widely available, you’re familiar with his fixation on detail and cinematic staging.

But his early storyboards aren’t quite as easy to see. The ones for The Order to Stop Construction (1987) haven’t, to our knowledge, been released in full. Right after that film, he storyboarded the intro and outro to the anime anthology Robot Carnival — and only a handful of those pages have been posted online.

As it turns out, though, the rest aren’t hidden away in some archive. All of them appeared in the long-out-of-print Robot Carnival artbook from the ‘80s. Now, you can go through them yourself via Imgur:

View pages

Pages three and four of Otomo’s storyboards for the Robot Carnival intro, courtesy of the film’s artbook. You can see the complete film on YouTube.

Pages 13 and 14 of the intro storyboards, courtesy of the Robot Carnival artbook