Welcome! Thanks for joining us. Here’s the slate for the latest edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter:

• 1) On The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926).

• 2) Animation newsbits.

A quick note. In June, we’re going to France for the Annecy Festival — the world’s leading animation event. We’ll be covering it on the ground for the first time, and there’s a lot we’re excited to see.

Now, here we go!

1 – The forever film

A post surprised us last month. Ryan Gaur, the animation journalist, drew attention to a clip from the film The Adventures of Prince Achmed. “Look at what humans can do,” he wrote.

That message — and the video — went viral.

Prince Achmed turned 99 earlier this month. Next year will be its centennial. Yet it still looks like magic to people, much as it did in 1926, when it debuted. There’s still a sense that human hands couldn’t possibly have created this film.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said its director, Lotte Reiniger, about the response to Prince Achmed’s Berlin premiere. “They clapped at every effect, after every scene.”1

Reiniger was a member of the artist community in Weimar Germany. She and her team had advertised the premiere with postcards, sent “to everyone [they] knew.” Her old boss Fritz Lang (pre-Metropolis) was in the front row.2 Because Reiniger was out of touch with the press, her friend “Bert” helped by selecting journalists to contact. “Bert” was Bertolt Brecht, the playwright.

In many ways, the screening was a debacle. The projector lens broke before it began, and they were forced to stall as Reiniger’s husband, Carl Koch, ran to buy a replacement. The theater was over capacity, and so a police officer arrived to shut them down (and failed). And then, toward the end, smoke rose from the stage.

Reiniger wrote later:

As I knew full well that we had not shot any smoke in that sequence, my heart stood still. Something must be burning on stage. I ran there very frightened, for in that period film was still very flammable, and if the audience would get the faintest inkling what that smoke meant, panic would be the result. … But the reason was harmless enough: the stagehands, who wanted to see the film, had placed some wet sacks on the central heating and forgotten to take them away, and they had started smoldering just in front of the projector. The audience, however, had taken the clouds as an artistically intended effect!

The show was a hit — the first of many. Prince Achmed only had a limited run in Berlin, but it went everywhere, including six months of screenings in France. “For fantastic charm and marvelous artistry,” noted an American journalist in 1930, “it is doubtful if any motion picture has yet been produced to compare with The Adventures of Prince Achmed.”3

Prince Achmed is the oldest animated feature film that exists. A few predated it — but none of them survive today. In all those years, though, Reiniger’s craft has barely aged.

She didn’t think or work in the American style. Reiniger was a stop-motion artist who used cutout silhouettes to stage fairy tales. Her films are full of whimsy and flights of fancy — and they’re separate from the vaudeville tradition on which American cartoons were built.

“Mickey Mouse represents an extract of American music in tempo and abundance of wit,” Reiniger once argued.4 Her work operates in a different mode, at a different speed. In 1927, a British critic wrote the following about Prince Achmed:

No attempt has been made to emulate the smooth, continuous movements of the figures in the ordinary cartoon films. On the contrary, the figures in The Adventures of Prince Achmed have been endowed ... with a certain spasmodic jerkiness which, strangely enough, seems to add to rather than detract from the dramatic effect.5

That was the jittery liveliness Reiniger brought to her films, as she adjusted her characters frame by frame under the camera. “She was born with fairy hands,” said director Jean Renoir, another of her artist friends. He compared her to Mozart.6

Reiniger made her first animated short in 1919, a few years before Prince Achmed began. She was around 20, and already in Berlin’s bohemian scene — the artists and filmmakers and theater people. (“I was a hippie!” she recalled much later.)

From the start, Reiniger animated with cutout silhouettes. They were a German folk craft she’d loved since childhood — and, by the ‘20s, they were quite passé.7 But her films were special. She remembered that Marc Chagall, the painter, really enjoyed her Cinderella (1922). “I was very proud,” she said.

It was this special quality that led to Prince Achmed. In her early career, Reiniger worked at an institute with other filmmakers — and, around 1923, the banker Louis Hagen stopped by to see a project by Carl Koch (who’d recently married Reiniger). “So he then saw my films and the way I worked and suggested I make a feature film, something that had never been done before,” Reiniger remembered.

That banker became their benefactor. He set them up in Potsdam, in the attic of his garage. Hagen was Jewish and would one day flee Nazi Germany, but few could’ve imagined it then.8 Berlin was diverse, and many of the bohemians were against the old prejudices. Reiniger chose Hagen as the model for Prince Achmed himself.

From there, a small team assembled in Hagen’s garage.

Reiniger took the lead, while Koch juggled technical and administrative jobs — she called him “a real gardener” of the project. Joining them were two assistants (Alexander Kardan and Walter Türck) and two avant-garde film artists: Walter Ruttmann and Berthold Bartosch. There was also Hagen’s young son, who often showed up to observe.

The team was crammed together on a multiplane camera setup. It was a radical invention, but the studio was tiny and ad hoc: Reiniger wrote that she “had to kneel on the seat of an old dismantled motorcar” while she worked. It was in this space that they struggled with their movie — their “garage epic,” as she called it.9

Reiniger’s basis for Prince Achmed was the One Thousand and One Nights. “The action had to show events which could not be performed by any other means,” she noted. “So from all the 1,001 stories we sorted out all the events which fell into that category.”

She jotted down her ideas and characters as sketches. Then it was time to create everything by hand. Like she explained at the time:

My Prince had to be invented bodily, he had to be designed, cut out, wired, illuminated, moved and photographed.

At first I drew a picture of Prince Achmed, and after we were all convinced that he must look just so, I silhouetted him. And then I “built” him — out of cardboard, wire and thin sheet-lead, so that he might fulfill all his functions in the shadow-play in a natural and convincing manner. I articulated him, gave him a movable head, neck, shoulders, chest, abdomen, hips, legs, upper and lower arm, knees, hands and feet, fastened these together with hinges and pivots and then hammered and rolled him until he became a real, living figure for a shadow film.

We then bought quantities of tracing paper and from parchment we constructed the magic world in which he and his friend Aladdin were to perform their great deeds. Decoration followed upon decoration, cities with domes, towers and minarets, castles, clouds, starry heavens, lakes, woods and oceans, landscapes and magic caverns grew up around him. In order to fit him into these various surroundings in his true proportions I was forced to make his Royal Highness in 20 different sizes.10

Like Reiniger’s taste for papercrafts, her love of fairy tales wasn’t strictly up to date. She was attracted to stories about types, fantasies and imagination. The ‘20s were modern: a time of wildly new technology and art. Prince Achmed was technically avant-garde — but its appeal was popular and, in many ways, old.

Walter Ruttmann raised doubts about the project for that reason. Once, famously, he asked Reiniger what Prince Achmed had “to do with the year 1923.” She answered, “Nothing but that I am alive now, and I want to do it as I have the chance.”

Back then, Ruttmann was possibly the most renowned animator in Germany. He made abstract films set to music, inspiring people like Oskar Fischinger to follow him. His work was something explosive from the bohemian scene. And he intimidated Reiniger at first.

“It was quite rare to see such entirely different temperaments working together, since Ruttmann was a lot older than I and was considered a great artist whereas I was only a novice,” Reiniger said. “I was very scared of him but he seemed quite at ease doing the movements for the backgrounds whilst I worked on the characters’ movements.”

Ruttmann animated many of the special effects — using things like “soap and sand and paint,” not to mention wax.11 She was very happy with the scenes they created as a team. Berthold Bartosch also handled effects: in particular, the stormy sea that leaves Aladdin shipwrecked. It’s brilliant. Much later, Reiniger explained the process:

These waves were cut out of transparent paper, a different wave for each shot. Carefully numbered, they were replaced according to those numbers, frame by frame, on different glass plates. The first wave was laid on a glass plate on top, then the black ship on a clear glass plate, then the second wave underneath and the third one on still another glass plate. ... It was rather a cumbersome job, but the result was very convincing.12

There was little precedent for what they were doing — “animation was still walking in its infant shoes,” Reiniger said.13 They figured it out on the way. Prince Achmed took them three years, and the final film includes (in rough numbers) just 100,000 of the 250,000 frames they shot.

Reiniger often spoke about the stress of their blind work. Before processing, they could only guess at how things might look through a projector. They tried ambitious ideas anyway.

One was to sync the animation to music. Prince Achmed originally had no soundtrack — it’s a silent film. But it’s designed to mesh with a live score that develops with the story and lands on time with the action. This audiovisual trick had been done in Berlin animation before, but not at this length.14

The composer Wolfgang Zeller joined at an early stage. “When for instance a procession was wanted he composed a march, we measured with stop watches and tried to move the figures according to its beat,” Reiniger wrote.

Then there was the color. Every moment of Prince Achmed was tinted with special processing to express tone and location and time of day. “We shot it in black and white and on the negative indicated the colors we wanted for each scene: it was very time consuming,” Reiniger said.

Even the story pushed boundaries. Reiniger injected it with her personal beliefs, as the scholar William Moritz once noted — including the heroic portrayal of the sorceress character, and the nods to liberation movements of the day. One of those nods was censored and released later as a standalone film, but elements remain in Prince Achmed. As Reiniger wrote:

… I knew lots of homosexual men and women from the film and theater world in Berlin, and saw how they suffered stigmatization. By contrast I was fascinated by how natural love between members of the same sex was depicted in the Arabian Nights, so I thought, let’s be casual and honest and truthful about it.15

The team knew that Prince Achmed was something unusual — in part because businesspeople were afraid of it. There’s comedy in the movie, but it isn’t a gag cartoon. It’s animated, but it runs for over an hour, like a live-action film.

Theaters’ hesitance left Louis Hagen “exhausted” and “furious,” Reiniger said. He couldn’t sell the film he’d funded. That inspired them to hold a premiere on their own — the memorable, wonderful, disastrous premiere with the lens and the smoke and the police.

Berlin’s art scene had been aware of Prince Achmed even beforehand. People like Bertolt Brecht and László Moholy-Nagy (of the Bauhaus) dropped by the attic during production, among many others.16 But the premiere cemented the movie and Reiniger’s reputation. As it traveled, Prince Achmed made the world’s papers for years to come.

What was shakier was bohemian Berlin — the film’s point of origin.

When the Nazis rose in the early ‘30s, Reiniger was appalled by what she called the whole “Hitler event.” Her husband Carl Koch, a firm socialist, could barely control his anger. She remembered him and Brecht cursing a large Nazi procession from the sidelines soon after Hitler took power.17

Reiniger and Koch spent much of the Nazi era in exile, and at times in hiding. Many of their bohemian friends fled. Meanwhile, others changed sides. Walter Ruttmann was rumored to be a communist, and he was a pioneer of abstract film in the ‘20s — what the Nazis came to call degenerate art. But he turned into “a bohemian Mitläufer,” a follower, and worked on Nazi propaganda films in the ‘30s.18

The scene that created Prince Achmed came apart. Louis Hagen’s son Budi, the boy who’d watched the project unfold, spent four months in a concentration camp during 1934. In the following years, he and his entire family escaped Germany.

At the end of World War II, the original Prince Achmed negative was destroyed during the Battle of Berlin. The same happened to many of Reiniger’s other films. More pressing to her and Koch, though, was the end of Nazism. “And yet the joy is great / we are finally rid of Adolf!” she wrote in May 1945.

In the late ‘40s, the two of them moved to England and began a new leg of their career. And, as it happened, a copy of Prince Achmed had been saved in a British archive.

Work was already underway to preserve it — and to re-release the film. “When I went to London for the first time I met the person who’d been working on the film,” Reiniger said. “It was the son of that banker from Potsdam who’d financed the film. … He saw it as a kind of family affair.”

The younger Hagen had moved to England as well. His effort helped to keep Prince Achmed alive. Soon, he went into business with Reiniger in London, producing her new films.19

Across the rest of Reiniger’s life, her old feature continued to get people with its wonder and its popular appeal. It was a classic, but it never felt like work to watch. The critic Cecile Starr once called it “an acclaimed masterpiece … [that] is also amusing, surprising, frightening, passionate and entertaining, which means that it can easily hold its own against non-masterpieces as well.”

Today, 99 years after its premiere, it’s still making people pause in their feeds. They stop to look at what humans can do.

Prince Achmed’s era is distant: the silent movie period, the art scene of Weimar Berlin, the hyperinflation that was underway when production started. The complexities of that time have faded into the past. What remains is the work, which is for all times. Reiniger’s magic survived the war — and it’s here for good.

2 – Newsbits

• We lost Steve Pepoon (68), co-creator of The Wild Thornberrys.

• The Glassworker from Pakistan is set for a theatrical release stateside. A great piece of news.

• The Girl with the Occupied Eyes, an eye-popping Portuguese short from last year, is on track to become a series.

• In America, almost half-a-million dollars were raised through the AnimAID auction — designed to support animation workers affected by the fires this year.

• Starting this month in Czechia, there’s a retrospective on the art, films and life of Jiří Trnka. This is reportedly Prague’s “first comprehensive exhibition” of the artist since the early ‘90s.

• Animator Natalia Mirzoyan spoke at length about immigrating to Estonia from Russia, after getting fired for displaying a Ukrainian flag on social media.

• Since our last update, Jumbo’s success in Indonesia has continued. As Reuters reported this week, it’s “been watched by more than 9.6 million people locally and earned more than $20 million.”

• In Cuba, animation workers are talking about the challenges they face in the country — a lack of personnel, equipment and more. Things are in a desperate state compared to the industry’s rich days of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

• In Russia, the government announced a heavy investment in animation — on the recommendation of Soyuzmultfilm’s head, Yuliana Slashcheva.

• Last of all: we wrote about the golden age of animation preservation that’s currently underway.

Until next time!

Welcome! We’re back with another issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s the plan:

• 1) Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, Toei Doga and Paul Grimault.

• 2) Newsbits.

As a note, this is our last Sunday edition before we leave for the Annecy Festival (opening June 8). It’s the main event in the animation world each year, and we’re covering it in person for the first time. Our publishing schedule will change for a couple of weeks — issues will drop on different days, as stories emerge.

With that, let’s go!

1 – A film at the root

In the early 1950s, animation changed for good through an accident of history.

The film wasn’t meant to come out — but it did. In 1952, The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep appeared at the Venice Film Festival. It was a French animated feature by Paul Grimault, who later set out to destroy many copies of it, and to lock away the rest.1

It was his magnum opus. When The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep got started in the ‘40s, it was “expected to be the European answer to American-made animated feature films,” according to historian Giannalberto Bendazzi.2 It’s a surreal tale about a tyrant king and two paintings (a shepherdess, a chimney sweep) that come to life and try to escape his vast, vertical kingdom. Dazzling and hyper-technical animation brings it together.

But, after a few years of production, the project’s scope outstripped its budget. Grimault ran out of money. It was quickly assembled and released anyway.

“[D]espite Grimault’s opposition, his partner André Sarrut decided to exploit the film before its completion (one-fifth was yet to be filmed),” Bendazzi wrote. “Lawsuits, criticism from the press and intellectuals’ indignation could not prevent the film from being shown in an incomplete version.”

That version toured the world. There was an English dub — now reportedly in the public domain, and free on the Internet Archive. More impactful was the Japanese release of 1955. Its title was Yabunirami no Bokun (“The Cross-Eyed Tyrant”), and it took root.

Japan’s press and intelligentsia raved about Grimault’s film. Its incompleteness barely registered. Here was a movie beyond Disney, they argued — something with a deep political meaning, ties to modern art and its own approach to animated characters. “It is not a children’s cartoon (manga), but a sort of experimental film,” noted the Asahi Shimbun.3

It did well in theaters. And, in the years ahead, it grew into a near-universal reference point for Japan’s animation industry.4 Among its fans were the young Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, and their colleagues at the studio Toei Doga in Tokyo.

“If I had not seen this film,” Takahata later wrote, “I would have never imagined entering the world of animation.”

When Takahata first watched Grimault’s film in the 1950s, he was attending university. It “made a vivid impression on me,” he said.5 This thing went “way beyond established ideas at the time.”

“There was no home video in those days,” Takahata told the Yomiuri Shimbun, “so I would go to movie theaters and draw diagrams of the rooms in the dark, and I borrowed the script from the distribution company and copied it all.”

He watched the film again and again. Some 50 years later, he still remembered how its script looked — the words “typed on airmail paper as thin as tracing paper.”

The animation and design in The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep grabbed him. He said that “the way each thing is drawn is concrete, direct and clear, but it has a sense of wonder and beauty, like a waking dream.”6 Plus, the story is a strong but nuanced critique of power, of oppressive structures. The political element lit up Takahata’s imagination:

When I watched The Cross-Eyed Tyrant, I felt the possibility that animation could talk about society and these kinds of ideas. If I hadn’t seen this, I don’t think I would have taken the entrance exam for Toei Doga.

Miyazaki and Takahata didn’t meet until the ‘60s — but, by then, Grimault’s film had caught their attention individually. It appealed to Miyazaki even though he hadn’t really watched it. As he explained:

I first saw The Cross-Eyed Tyrant in manga form. At that time, manga versions of movies were being created and circulated without paying for the license. Osamu Tezuka also created manga based on Disney’s Pinocchio. That was the era. I thought the manga version was interesting.7

An artist named Yasuo Otsuka, soon to be their co-worker (and a legendary animator), likewise came upon the film in the ‘50s. He wasn’t sure how to take it at first. But it eventually became a core influence — after he watched it again at Toei Doga.8

Otsuka was among the first people at Toei’s animation branch when it opened in the ‘50s. Takahata arrived later, in 1959. By 1963, the year Miyazaki joined, a kind of Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep mania had taken hold. According to Otsuka, Toei Doga screened it so often that everyone at the studio got to see it at least once.

“I guess there was an atmosphere of, ‘I want to create something like that,’ ” he remembered.

Back then, Toei Doga was the center of Japanese animation. Its movies, like The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon (1963), were impressive. Otsuka and Takahata were crucial to that project and others. And they were closely studying Grimault’s film.

Takahata recalled an early studio screening of a borrowed copy of The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep. There was a long night afterward, as the team combed over the film frame by frame.9 Takahata “took extensive notes,” Otsuka said. Meanwhile, Otsuka drew a “pose collection” based on what they saw.

At one point, the Toei Doga crew even taped the soundtrack to play in the studio. By the time Miyazaki arrived, screenings of the film were used for training. He was around 23 or 24 when he finally saw it for himself. As he said:

Until then, I had heard the legends from Paku-san (Isao Takahata) and Otsuka-san. They would borrow the film and study it one frame at a time using a viewer. Apparently, they watched it so much that the film tore vertically.

I don’t know if the copy I saw was the same one, but it was in a pretty terrible state. Rain was pouring down on the film [because it was scratched], and it was falling to pieces. However, I thought that the sense of space was very interesting.

What people got out of The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep varied. Takahata, Miyazaki and Otsuka all idolized it, but not always for the same reasons. With Miyazaki, it had a lot to do with the world.

Staffers at Toei Doga described the structure of their films as “skewered dumplings” (kushi-dango). In other words: loosely connected adventures and locations jammed together, one after the next. Grimault’s film had another structure, which the team called “closed room” (misshitsu).

“Closed room is the type where you create a bit more of a detailed world and complete [the story] within that world,” Miyazaki said.

At the time, Miyazaki and many of his colleagues saw the worlds in Toei’s “skewered dumplings” films as tossed-off and vague. Grimault’s work had a different approach: a world that’s “more close-knit and has a sense of presence,” with clearly defined places and a greater use of vertical space. For Miyazaki, it shattered the flat, horizontal staging he knew from other movies — even live-action ones. When a vertical dimension was added, it increased “the presence of the world.”

Takahata obsessed over Grimault’s depiction of class, power and revolutionary struggle. Miyazaki, less so. He preferred the story and themes of the Soviet film The Snow Queen (1957) and even Toei Doga’s own Panda and the Magic Serpent (1958) to those of Grimault’s piece. And, at first, Otsuka completely missed the political angle.

For Otsuka, it was the tyrant’s acting that stole the show: “I was surprised by his gestures and every move, and I thought, ‘Is there really a way to draw something like this?’ ”

The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep is full of complex movements that feel three-dimensional, with strong volumes and a degree of resistance to Disney’s squash-and-stretch method. It’s more solid, more tangible. That includes the tyrant. But the flow of the tyrant’s movement gets broken for effect. He sometimes freezes in place, or his motions get clipped down, jumping from pose to pose.

“There’s timing all over the place that is completely different from Disney,” Otsuka said. It mixes elements of “full” and “limited” animation. There are long, slow, fully rendered motions interspersed with the type of hard, flat hold that Walt Disney hated.10 Otsuka criticized Disney’s films for moving too much to allow for real tension — but he felt Grimault solved the problem.

These are just a few of the lessons that Toei Doga picked up from The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep. They went over every facet of it — meticulously. It was one of the many foreign animated films that the team screened and analyzed, alongside work by Jiří Trnka, Zagreb Film, Soyuzmultfilm and more.11

The trouble was implementing what they were learning. In retrospect, Takahata said that work like The Snow Queen and The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep was “towering” over the team. Miyazaki felt that their heights might be unreachable:

… I thought they were far above, in terms of what they tried to do, and what they accomplished. We were, in short, at the level of “Toei kids’ stuff.” The gap between our level and the works we were inspired by was too big. We thought how could we climb up there, or even if we couldn’t, let’s remove the stones around us. So, there were many things we had to do.

According to one Toei animator, early hints of Grimault’s influence appeared in The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon.12 Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon (1965) openly swiped from Grimault, including the robot’s violent rampage toward the end.

And then there was Takahata’s Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968), the Toei film probably most affected by The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep.

Takahata credited the social and political themes of Horus to the impact of Grimault’s film. More than that, Horus aimed to show a believable, tangible animated world in the same way that Grimault had done. Horus was the project that made Takahata’s colleague Yoichi Kotabe realize, “With animation, you can create a world you can grasp with your hands.”13

Miyazaki and the team took from The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep to portray the central village in Horus. They wanted to create a believable space, a village that could actually exist. The effort to capture “presence” went deeper than that, though. It’s in the filmmaking: Takahata wrote that the shots in Horus were designed to create “a sense of reality and presence by giving the action temporal and spatial continuity.”14 Notably, Grimault had done the same.

Later, in summary, Takahata wrote the following about Miyazaki’s career and his own:

When it comes down to it, I think the largest influence we received from Grimault ... [was to] give a feeling of presence to characters and space, and to create works that are not just “kids’ stuff” but have interior and social dimensions.

Post-Horus, and even post-Toei, Miyazaki and Takahata kept doing these things. Takahata’s failed Pippi Longstocking series, for example, hinged on a sense of reality and space. Similar ideas were behind Panda! Go, Panda! (1972) and so many more.

Miyazaki’s borrowings from Grimault are especially clear in the vertically inclined Castle of Cagliostro (1979). Yet Takahata and Yasuo Otsuka, the latter of whom animated on the film, felt that Miyazaki wasn’t just copying. He’d long since internalized The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep, they argued, alongside influences like Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941). They came out in his work unconsciously.15

This deep influence from Grimault would carry over into Miyazaki’s films, and Takahata’s, in the decades ahead.

Years after The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep had its effect, Paul Grimault went back to it. He reworked the film into The King and the Mockingbird (1980) — a heavily changed and expanded edition of the movie that Takahata and Miyazaki had known.

The two of them saw it eventually, and both were put off. The film’s stylistic wholeness is gone: new animation clashes with old. Miyazaki likened it to a monastery that was half-finished by stonemasons and then completed with concrete blocks. Even in 2006, he believed that Grimault should’ve accepted the original film for what it was and moved on.

For years, Takahata felt similarly — like many in Japan did. Even when he met Grimault in the early ‘90s, he couldn’t bring himself to tell his idol that the remake was good.

Still, Miyazaki and Takahata continued to have The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep in their bank of reference points. And Takahata did, ultimately, take another look at the “completed” version. As he said, “[I]f we deny The King and the Mockingbird, we deny Grimault as a whole.”

Takahata didn’t lose his attachment to the original, but he came to appreciate what Grimault had done with it — particularly the new, more melancholy ending. There, he said, even the revolution against the tyrant gets thrown into question. Takahata called it “an ideological step forward” from the old ending. When Studio Ghibli oversaw the release of The King and the Mockingbird in Japan in the mid-2000s, he was at the forefront of its promo campaign. It became a hit.16

That isn’t to discount the power of the original, though. The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep remains a mesmerizing, almost otherworldly watch. And it was the version that changed animation history. The broken version, which wasn’t supposed to exist.

Seeing it now, it’s hard not to feel a certain familiarity. Like you’ve watched parts of it somewhere — maybe a lot of times, in a lot of animation done in the years after 1952.

• We lost Co Hoedeman (84) — one of the world’s true animation legends — and the longtime Simpsons composer Alf Clausen (84).

• The Art of The Boy and the Heron is out in America.

• The Irish film Retirement Plan is picking up awards. Its director posted a funny, bittersweet short about his experience on the festival circuit — well worth a look.

• In Brazil, the government is preparing a “$23 million incentives package” that includes support for animation.

• The grandmaster Andrei Khrzhanovsky (Glass Harmonica) spoke about his views on Russia — the political situation, his sense of “terrible shame” about the war and the cutting of support for School-Studio Shar, which he co-founded.

• In France, a book and DVD will cover The Idea (1934) by Berthold Bartosch — who animated on The Adventures of Prince Achmed.

• Russia’s courts have, unfortunately, thrown out Francheska Yarbusova’s lawsuit. She went after the government’s co-opting of her character from Hedgehog in the Fog.

• Another Russian story (which we missed last year) was recently brought to our attention. This one digs into the wild process behind Halloo, a film animated via slide projector. It’s three minutes long and took three years to make.

• In Indonesia, Jumbo hit 10 million attendees. It will soon be the country’s biggest local film ever, animated or live-action. (Including foreign films, it’ll be second.)

• Wow Lisa is a kids’ show from Chile that’s been getting international praise. Its directors recently talked to Radix about the project. (Episodes are on YouTube.)

• Last of all: we wrote about the art of syncing music and sound, and the disputes over “Mickey Mousing.”

Until next time!

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