Welcome! Thanks for joining us. This is a new Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s the plan:

• 1. Robert Cannon’s influence on early Cartoon Network.

• 2. An independent project from Ukraine.

• 3. Animation newsbits.

• 4. The last word.

With that, here we go!

1. Invented motion

Cartoon Network shows in the ‘90s shared a certain reference point. It’s no secret.

As Genndy Tartakovsky said a few years ago, “UPA was a huge deal for us.” You saw its influence in Dexter’s Lab, Powerpuff Girls and more. UPA had been the studio to beat during the ‘50s: its flat, modern style swept mid-century animation. That style returned on Cartoon Network. One exec called the look “UPA revival.”1

But UPA’s design was only one element borrowed by these later shows. Just as critical was the animation — that is, the way this stuff moved. And one particular UPA animator had an outsize impact on Cartoon Network.

His name was Robert Cannon. Although he didn’t live to see the UPA revival projects, his ideas were all over them. “One of my favorite animators,” Tartakovsky called him. Here’s the former Cartoon Network exec Linda Simensky:

... Tartakovsky noted that most people would associate Dexter’s art direction with UPA, but to him, timing was most important, and the director Robert “Bobe” Cannon in his UPA period was most influential. Cannon, he noted, developed funny, interesting movement and timing for each character, so that every character moves in its own unique way. Tartakovsky noted that he tried to do the same with Dexter and Dee Dee and that each character moved with his or her own stylized movement. Dee Dee was developed as a girl who likes to dance; one can see she is the animated heir to Cannon’s 1954 UPA short Ballet-Oop, with its dancers’ long legs and similar dance style.2

Cannon left a colossal imprint on animation. But he remains “little-known and barely investigated,” in the words of one historian. Breaking away from the Disney playbook, he perfected a type of limited animation (he proposed the word “simplified” instead) that was copied around the world.3

It was new movement that suited UPA’s modern design. Because the studio’s characters were graphics, they needed to move graphically rather than realistically. Cannon once used the term “design in motion” to describe his work. A UPA co-founder praised him as “the first animator who developed a style that organically grew out of the new kind of characters we were designing.”4

Here’s Iwao Takamoto, a Disney artist who got to know Cannon:

His emphasis lay in the nuances of movement, and he was completely fascinated with movement for its own sake, a fascination that spread into an abstract type of movement, rather than anything that leaned toward the realistic, which was the exact opposite of the way that Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston at Disney’s viewed their work. Bobe used to say that if he saw one more animated character drop his shoulder and lead with his elbow in anticipation of a turn, he was going to scream.5

Cannon was always hunting for fresh motion. He was a ballet fan and, in the words of his colleague Jules Engel, would “invent appropriate movements to suit the context, the way dancers invent new movements that people don’t do in everyday life.”6 He put free expression above smooth realism.

All physical laws were broken in service of timing, which Cannon handled like a choreographer. Even when he delegated drawing to others, he had a tendency to plan out the action and timing in advance, in detail.7 In his films, he’d stop a fast movement on a dime, freeze a drawing on screen, pop from pose to pose, animate just one part of a character’s body, reduce frames to a minimum and more.

You find the same techniques in Dexter’s Lab, from its pilot onward. “I looked for [Cannon’s] stuff for animation because the way he animated was very appealing to me,” Tartakovsky has said. There’s no smooth realism in Dexter, but it pulls a ton of humor out of timing and the funny solutions invented for each action.

Tartakovsky wasn’t the only Cartoon Network artist open about Cannon’s influence. Another was Van Partible, of the UPA revival show Johnny Bravo.

Partible has mentioned his debt to Cannon’s limited animation for The Dover Boys (1942), a Warner film that informed UPA’s later work. He pointed to the villain’s monologue scene in a pool hall, where Cannon used “a sort of smear technique, you go pose to pose, doing three in-betweens on ones.”

Partible continued, “You’ve got to do really strong clean poses that are held for a long time.”8

Partible first learned the method as an animation student. Like he wrote on his blog:

… I had to try and figure out how to animate my five-minute project, by myself, in a few months, while keeping up with the rest of my schoolwork. My animation professor Dan McLaughlin suggested that I watch The Dover Boys and freeze-frame the in-betweens to study Bobo Cannon’s usage of blur animation. …

I was completely enthralled. I saw things moving that only had three in-betweens between them. “I could do that!” I thought to myself. Watching the cartoon, I knew that all I had to do was move the shapes of the characters and stretch the masses from one pose to another.

Footage survives of Partible’s early tries (watch). He and his team polished the trick in the Johnny Bravo pilot and series. It became Johnny’s signature: he moves by dissolving into a blur and zipping from one tight pose to the next.

“I think that it may have had a lot to do with the selling of the show,” Partible wrote. “It made it stand out from the rest of the other projects being pitched by creating a character trait based on the way the character was animated.”

Robert Cannon was a shy, gentle artist with little self-confidence. People described him as a “sweet soft man” with “quiet and soulful” eyes, who hated conflict and struggled to put his feelings into words. Jules Engel recalled a time when reporters came to interview Cannon, but he vanished. “I go outside … and I look down this one street … [and] there is Bobo, he’s running, he’s running away,” Engel said.9

No detailed interviews with Cannon are widely available, and few were done at all. He was fame-resistant; others, like Chuck Jones, happily filled that void.10 Even so, it was Cannon’s work (at UPA and before) that really changed how animation could move. Engel again:

The great animator at UPA, whom I also think was the greatest in the business, is Robert Cannon. ... He was the one who really added that refinement to enact a performance of this gesture. Because there is nothing more minimal. You watch Laurence Olivier on stage, and it’s absolutely magic. The gestures are minimal. And this is what Bobo Cannon was able to do on film.11

The same kind of movement got into Dexter’s Lab and Johnny Bravo. Later Cartoon Network projects like Powerpuff and Samurai Jack followed suit.

These shows were shaped by the environment of the time. UPA’s films were “normal inspirations back when we were in school,” said Tartakovsky. That much was obvious in their retro design style. But design, again, was only one part of the UPA revival era. The shows wouldn’t have worked without Cannon’s example, and that brilliant, abstract, mid-century minimalism he pioneered in motion.

2. Animation news

2.1: An indie animator’s storybook sanctuary

The internet is full of animation that most never see. For every Monkey Wrench, the YouTube series just picked up by Netflix, there are thousands of high-effort projects whose biggest fans are their own creators.

For Anastasia Kazhuk, who goes by Surzik25 online, fame wasn’t the point. She began what she calls “the project of my entire conscious life” when she was 14 years old. Around seven years later, it’s still a refuge for her.

“This project … was 200% worth it,” she said last year. “It will not become one iota less worth it even when only we know about it.”

What Kazhuk built is an interactive story site covered in her animation and writing. This format has been rising among young artists online; Kazhuk’s glitchy, maximalist visual style is tied to that scene as well. Her creation’s name is Different Light, and it’s the most ambitious of these story sites we’ve come across (see it here).

“I call it a ‘videobook’ because it sits somewhere between an animated film, a comic book, a visual novel, an illustrated website and even a bit of some cozy little game,” she tells us by email. Kazhuk made it as she taught herself a wide range of skills — including animation, which she’d always dreamed of doing.

The project’s origin point was Kazhuk’s life in Ukraine, still her home today. She explains:

Back when I was 14, my family was moving from a city apartment to a little cottage in the middle of nowhere. We couldn’t legalize this newly built cottage for a long, long time, and producing all the necessary documents for it was really time-consuming. Without documents it was impossible to get permission to connect electricity. Therefore, the whole time we moved there, our eyes had to get used to the constant evening darkness, saving mobile phone charge, and the light of flashlights.

One day my brother and I randomly thought it was a cool idea to build a world where flashlights and wood stoves could walk and talk like people. I wished I was an animator who could bring them to life. All I had at that time was a small cheap tablet and the Pics Art Animator app, but that was more than enough.

We wanted to make an animated series about them. A cute, silly little thing. Two days, we thought. Just a fun little experiment.

No one predicted how far it would go. Those flashlights — I started calling them Diodes — grew into a whole world. They spoke in stories, pushed me to learn animation, and just... stayed with me, even through a massive creative burnout in 2022.

That was the year Kazhuk’s graduation from high school roughly coincided with Russia’s invasion of her country. She couldn’t bring herself to leave home and pursue a career (or even, for a while, to continue Different Light) with the war on.

“In such unstable moments, when any day could take the ground from under your feet, you don’t want to think about success or prestige,” she tells us. “All you want is to pull the blanket over your head and find yourself somewhere far away in your microscopic imaginary world.”

At one point, she considered joining the military. “However, I realized that I just couldn’t leave everything as it was. Both my family and my Diodes, about whom absolutely no one could worry while I was gone,” she writes.

Eventually, Kazhuk went back to her idea. She wrote and drew her Diodes’ stories and assembled the pieces into a document, like an illustrated novel. Then she wondered, “Wait — am I an animator or what? What if I don’t just put still images in here, but tiny looping GIFs?” That led to the next step, and the next one, and finally to the “decorated diary-like world” of the site.

To teach herself animation, Kazhuk used The Animator’s Survival Kit. “There I studied the theory of how movements are formed, and what principles make cartoons so alive! It was thanks to this book that I began to think like a real animator,” she notes. Guides by YouTubers Fabio Gioffre and ZeBirdBrain helped her pick up Toon Boom Harmony. To code the site, she learned HTML and CSS in part from video tutorials by SuperSimpleDev.

Kazhuk didn’t really publicize what she was doing until the first version of Different Light came online last year. More recently, she’s translated the site into English and (this July) added sound and music. But, even now, only a few know about the refuge and passion project to which she’s devoted so much of her life.

In the world she’s created, her Diodes live on the border of the Abyss: “an entity that is always behind you, but with whose quiet eerie presence you have already come to terms.” Kazhuk compares it to death. With her story, told in fragments, she wants to “sow a spark of hope” in people and “show that every being — both in our world and in the Diode world — is not left to fend for themselves.”

As the war continues in her country, Kazhuk is still expanding Different Light. She writes:

There are times when, having made a backup of my current scene the day before, I wake up to air raid sirens or jarring explosions at four in the morning. Strange as it may sound, it is easier for each of us at such moments to worry not about ourselves, but about the objects we care about. For me, this is, of course, my computer with all my work. … I have a strange stubborn certainty that as long as I am alive, I will worry about whether all my work is still with me.

You can check out the English edition of Different Light right here.

2.2: Newsbits

• UFO (Unrelenting Flower Obtainer) is a hypnotic new loop by Australia’s Felix Colgrave. Well worth watching.

• The American animator Jonni Peppers is premiering her series Field Notes from the Orphanage on August 20. Having previewed the first episode, it’s funny and full of creative animation by one of the best in the country. Don’t miss it on YouTube when it drops.

• Despite bad reviews and zero marketing, an indie film called Niu Lai surged at the box office in China. It’s earned over $1.5 million, according to Maoyan, and is still rising. The Paper looked into how it reached theaters.

• Malta’s government invested €50,000 into a local animated series based on Gawdenz Bilocca, a lawyer character popular in the country. The show is written in the Maltese language.

• Ludo Studio of Australia released a teaser for its Bluey feature.

• An English article from Meduza analyzes the success of Restlessness, now the biggest hit in Russian adult animation. “Fantastical as it is,” the writer argues, “Nepokoy conveys the present condition of many of its viewers more precisely than a social media feed does.”

• Also in Russia, Yuri Norstein mentioned his goal of donating his possessions to the Ghibli Museum after his death.

• The British and American newsletter re:frame, one of our favorites, celebrated its one-year anniversary.

• Finally: we dove into the story of The Bremen Town Musicians, a famous and (at one time) controversial cartoon from the USSR.

3. Last word

That’s a wrap for this issue! To close out, a few personal comments from the two of us:

Jules: Lately, I’ve been doing master studies in acrylic with a local group at my library. We painted The Scream recently, and Munch’s inspiration for it was discussed (that he “sensed an infinite scream passing through nature” while watching a sunset). As I was copying his brushstrokes, I suddenly realized there’s a flow of warbling lines that moves from the clouds through the mountains, into the river and finally surrounds the screaming figure, which takes on the same curving shape. The screaming figure is the only element on the “human side” of the painting that warbles with nature — the rest, like the bridge and the other human figures, are straight lines. I’m not sure why I never realized the painting was structured to show that the titular scream was passing from nature into the figure! Discovering the thought and intentions behind art (like I get to do for this newsletter!) is always such a joy.

John: We recently got notified of our Twitter birthday. On August 14, the year before the pandemic, I created an account there to post about animation I enjoyed. For a name: “Animation Obsessive,” because “Animation Obsessed” was taken. For the first post: a few stills of Zima Blue, the beautiful Robert Valley film. That got a handful of likes, which I didn’t expect. So, teaming up with Jules, we posted more stuff. My editing job had fizzled not long before; I threw myself into the account just to see. That decision seven years ago, during a difficult summer, led to this career that I’m incredibly lucky to have. The birthday notification was a good reminder. As always, thanks to everyone for reading.

Until next time!

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
As he walks away she begins frantically calling out symbols in the hope that one will reach him.

Welcome! It’s another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the slate:

• 1. Helpful things for artists.

• 2. On Electro Andes from Argentina.

• 3. Animation newsbits.

• 4. The last word.

With that, let’s go!

1. Five more resources

We’ve said it before: quite a few artists read this newsletter. That includes animators, but also illustrators, comic-makers and many more. It’s always a joy when we hear from folks who’ve been creatively inspired by our stories here.

For that reason, every once in a while, we put together a collection of free resources for artists specifically. It’s stuff we come across while running the newsletter — guides, caches of rare artwork, behind-the-scenes footage — that seems particularly useful.

Today brings our sixth batch. We’d still recommend the materials in our past five volumes (see here), ranging from the Temple of the Seven Golden Camels to the Samurai Jack painting tutorials. But the ones this time are all new.

Below, you’ll find precious information on drawing, design, animating with sand and paper cutouts and beyond. There should be something for beginners, experienced artists and everyone in between. We hope you’ll enjoy!

1.1: Jazno Francoeur’s Disney archive

Not enough people know what’s happening on Jazno Francoeur’s LinkedIn account. He’s a former Disney artist from the ‘90s and ‘00s — and, for a while now, he’s shared rare art from the studio.

A lot of what he posts is the really good stuff. Detailed animation notes from James Baxter, Glen Keane, Don Graham, Alex Kupershmidt. Tips from Lilo & Stitch on effects, walk cycles and cleanup, and from Mulan on character construction, and from The Little Mermaid on drawing the protagonist. Francoeur’s uploaded a whole folder of style guides.

Those sit alongside the model sheets, the concept art and all the rest. Francoeur’s account hosts great things, and he’s doing us all a service by putting them online.

1.2: The Sabotage paper process

A few months ago, the animator Corduroy Frames posted his stop-motion, paper-cutout recreation of the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage video (watch). It’s a lot of fun, and it did the rounds online for good reason.

Less publicized is that Corduroy Frames documented the making of this video, step by step, in a 79-episode series on YouTube. As he explains in the first entry:

… I wanted to start doing stop motion, but I’d only done a few little things and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I figured by recreating something, that would teach me a lot about how things moved, how to have things interact, how to learn different effects. And so I decided to do Sabotage by Beastie Boys. Because A, Beastie Boys are my favorite band ever, and B, Sabotage is kind of like a cartoon anyway. So, I decided to start at shot 1 and go all the way through to shot 129. The goal is to see improvement of the stop motion from the first shot to the last shot.

You watch it happen. During shot 60, he talks about his realization that human hips sway while walking, which he began incorporating from there. For shot 76, he needed a character’s hand to disappear inside a jacket, and so he discovered a way to create that illusion by using “smaller and smaller pieces” of paper.

Corduroy Frames was learning during this process, but watching it play out is inspiring and educational in itself. Taking the project one step at a time, with a few mundane and often homebrew tools (like a plexiglass sheet placed atop Lego-brick columns for shot 17), he built something compelling. With his Sabotage remake and the 79 videos that preceded it, he showed what’s possible.

1.3: Caroline Leaf’s workshops

You might know the films of Caroline Leaf — and you’re definitely familiar with films she inspired. Most festival-circuit animation today owes techniques and tics to Leaf’s work from the late 20th century, done in sand and paint and more. (See her Kafka sand film, for example).

Over the years, Leaf has passed down her knowledge. And, back in the ‘90s, some of her workshops were captured in a documentary called Hand-Crafted Cinema (1998), which is freely available online.

Leaf always had a knack for sand, and that’s the first method demonstrated. We watch her shape sand on a light box and explain how, in this kind of animation, you “always redraw an image before you erase it.” Both her descriptions and her hand movements casually reveal things that took her years to learn.

Then she shifts to paint-on-glass animation, and cutouts, and the scratching of drawings onto blank film stock. These, too, she’d used in her films. In 35 minutes, Hand-Crafted Cinema offers a master class from one of the most influential living animators, focused on all of her specialties. It’s extremely valuable.

1.4: Aaron Blaise’s animal drawing

The look of animated animals in the ‘90s and early ‘00s was defined, in no small part, by Aaron Blaise. He’s an ex-Disney artist whose contributions to films like Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast are recognizable at a glance. These days, his main focus is teaching.

Blaise’s YouTube channel has existed for close to 14 years and has a large following, but it’s worth mentioning again how helpful it is. He’s drawn animals since childhood — it’s his love. “When I went to art school, I wanted to be an illustrator. I wanted to work for National Geographic. My big dream was nature- and natural-history-type illustration,” he told us last year.

Everything he’s learned across the decades, he discusses on YouTube.

Take Blaise’s videos on working with shapes, creating animal characters or Disney-style design. Or look at his archived livestreams on animal gestures and anatomy, or animating animals (as seen here and here). It’s a goldmine for anyone who wants to understand this tradition of stylized animal drawing.

1.5: The Nick bumper breakdowns

It’s rare for animation to cross over like Vaibhav Studios’ bumpers for Nickelodeon India do. In fact, one of them appeared in our biggest tweet of all time. The reason is pretty obvious: these things are charming, funny and really, really ingenious.

Years ago, the studio’s Vaibhav Kumaresh told us that the pitch for these was “something entirely handmade, crude and non-digital.” Nickelodeon India went for it, and the bumpers that followed were undeniable. If you’ve seen the cutout wonders of Mom and Brat, or the rap battle between Indian street foods, or the rock band composed of actual rocks, you get the appeal.

And, crucially, Vaibhav Studios showed the making of these bumpers (and others) in a playlist of YouTube videos.

Each making-of video is short, and what’s happening isn’t explained in depth. Look carefully, though, and the details are present. You can see the exact stop-motion cutout tricks behind Mom and Brat, and how the studio’s food characters are often live puppets overlaid with animation. There’s the creation of Egg Opera, with its custom stage and its plaster-of-Paris-filled eggshells — and so on.

It’s more animation done with minimal means. A lot of people have access to the stuff used in these videos. That, in fact, is partly why the bumpers are magnetic. Couple their relatable homemade-ness with the endless imagination and humor of the Vaibhav team, and it’s magic. Through these videos, anyone can watch how the artists did it, and learn.

Those are our five resources today! Hope you’ll find them interesting. As mentioned, you can look through the previous volumes of this series, stretching back to 2022, right here.

2. Animation news

2.1: Electro Andes gains traction

We commissioned this news feature from writer-illustrator Malu Mirones. After catching the first episode of a rising Argentinian series, she interviewed one of its directors for us and put together the following report. Huge thanks to her for the great work.

In June, talents from across the animation world attended the Annecy Festival. Among them were Nacho Malter and Damian Fernandez from Argentinian studio Bellolandia, who brought along the first episode of their cyberpunk series Electro Andes.

It wasn’t the team’s Annecy debut. In 2023, they took their show’s concept teaser to the festival. Three years later, they were back to screen the full, half-hour pilot at MIFA and the Les Nemours Theater. The audience’s response was overwhelmingly positive, according to Nacho Malter, and there was a lot of traction on social media (YouTube, TikTok). Over a call, he describes the difference in experiences between 2023 and now:

Well, we noticed a different kind of attention from the industry. There’s a certain level of respect. It’s not the same to say you have a project you want to develop and to actually have it developed, to have the pilot done. There’s a phrase along those lines, about how you have to become inevitable, and in this case it felt like we had accomplished that, like we weren’t making promises anymore. We had something to show.

The Electro Andes pilot follows brothers Cal and Pietro, orphans in a futuristic Andean mining town, desperately searching for their grandfather. Their world is colored by an oppressive mining company, an underground revolutionary movement and creatures from Andean mythology.

Every scene in the pilot fleshes out the characters and the world, and, most importantly, makes viewers care. A football sequence, for example, establishes the brothers’ dynamic, the world’s sci-fi tech and the story’s Latin American DNA. Malter and Fernandez noted during their Annecy panel that people behind the scenes repeatedly told them to cut this moment, but that they insisted on its importance.

It’s tied to a major reference point for Electro Andes: the real-world mining town of La Rinconada in Peru. Malter describes it as a harsh and unforgiving place, with one exception: “in the middle of that environment, there’s a little football field, which is like this final space of intention this town has.”

Bellolandia aimed to balance the horror and tragedy of Electro Andes’ story with the characters’ humanity and resilience to make people root for Cal and Pietro. This message of resistance is relevant to both cyberpunk as a genre and the Latin American roots of the show. Malter sees a natural connection between the two:

Cyberpunk and the realities of Latin America have a lot of dystopian points in common, where a lot of times the abuse of power from corporate and governmental institutions is very present in day-to-day life, and these are key themes in the genre that connect with reality. So, from that point, it was a very organic fusion.

The result is refreshing and captivating. It occasionally feels like audiences “expect” a certain type of art from underrepresented communities, who are sometimes judged as cultural ambassadors under an unforgiving lens. Electro Andes’ creators took great care to tell a story that felt right and real to them, knowing that there is no such thing as “perfect” representation.

The show takes inspiration from both reality and mythology, while also remaining flexible for the sake of the project’s purpose: to tell Cal and Pietro’s story.

“When you’re developing a world, there’s an infinite number of directions you can take,” Malter notes, “and characters end up being the way to find your focus.”

Making an original series is often a luxury only mainstream studios can afford. Doing it independently hasn’t been easy, especially in the underfunded Latin American industry, but Bellolandia has written its own playbook. Electro Andes began with a remote crew spread across multiple Latin American countries; eventually, the team opened a physical studio in Buenos Aires.

They converted a residential home into a workspace, so production occurred quite literally “in-house.” Malter feels that in-person interaction in a set location was extremely valuable, despite mainstream industry trends leaning towards remote work. As he says:

I think it has huge benefits. I don’t think so, I lived it; I experienced them all over again building this space. ... For me, there’s a cost in [remote work], a loss in human synergy, in shared spaces, in the opinions on shots that are being worked on live, in the collaboration of, “Oh, you’re doing that shot? I have these assets from another one.” You lose a lot of richness working remotely.

Based on the season trailer for Electro Andes, much more of the story remains to be seen. Since Annecy, the team has been searching for VOD distributors to finance the remaining episodes and give the series a platform. In the meantime, the pilot is set to premiere on YouTube in September.

One thing made clear at Annecy this year was the importance of indie projects, and the public’s desire for them. Electro Andes is exactly the kind of show audiences want, and hopefully it will get the support it needs (either from major investors or through the upcoming Kickstarter campaign for the second episode) for Cal and Pietro’s story to fully unfold. MM

2.2: Newsbits

• Six early Mexican cartoons were restored in 4K and will screen at the Foro Internacional de Cine soon. All were created at AVA Studios in Mexico City during the 1930s. See a trailer here.

• In America, researcher Jacob Pruitt has preserved and shared a huge cache of archival material from the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, one of the birthplaces of computer animation. Check it out on the Internet Archive.

• In Russia, Leonid Shmelkov’s Restlessness had an opening of 12.5 million rubles at the box office — strong for an arthouse film with an adult rating. (Its budget was reportedly 116 million rubles.)

• Animator Alisa Shadrina, based in Georgia, released another of her strange, unique and hypnotic animations on YouTube.

• Meanwhile: another really clever and funny sponsored film by India’s Eeksaurus, this time for Adobe. Check it out on YouTube.

• In Japan, director Sunao Katabuchi argues that the massive growth of the anime industry has been bad for its health, and points to the collapsing infrastructure behind the scenes.

• One more from America. If you saw Cage Claypool’s bizarre new animated video for Primus, you might be intrigued by the one-of-a-kind Blender process behind it.

• This past week brought the day (August 4, 2026) when Ray Bradbury’s post-apocalyptic story There Will Come Soft Rains takes place. That’s a good excuse to watch the classic Uzbek animation based on it — available on YouTube.

• The pilot for Wolik, animated in Russia during the first half of the ‘90s, surfaced on YouTube in high quality. Artist Harald Siepermann contributed character designs and more to the project.

• With box-office revenues above $211 million, All Wishes Come True is now one of the 10-biggest animated films of all time in China, domestic or foreign.

• Finally: a rare look inside the stop-motion Wind in the Willows from the 1980s.

3. Last word

Thanks for reading today’s issue! As usual, we’re wrapping up with personal comments from the two of us:

John: Puppet animation is a love of mine. And, over the past few years, I’ve grown fascinated by the thoughtful philosophies that some puppet animators have about their work. So it was a special joy to get insights from Barry Purves, one of the living masters in the field, for a recent issue. He’s really eloquent about what he does (just look at this YouTube interview), and I feel like any puppet animator could benefit from studying his thinking and performances (like in Tchaikovsky, An Elegy). I’ve been learning a lot.

Jules: On the topic of Aaron Blaise’s videos, I’ve been watching them myself these last few weeks. I really enjoy exploring different logical frameworks for drawing in my own work, but one that I’ve never felt like I fully grasped was the Disney (or Looney Tunes) approach to drawing cartoon animals. Seeing the way Blaise tackled drawing Beast from Beauty and the Beast helped drive home that the purpose of this system isn’t just to design a character and then reverse-engineer it into basic shapes. It’s to create a repeatable formula of progressing through a drawing using a combination of guidelines, basic shapes and anchor points (like noses) — and to design characters whose features can be placed with such a formula — while keeping in mind the three-dimensional relationships of all these elements. It was a huge help!

Until next time!

And more dinosaurs.