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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
Malu Mirones is a Panamanian writer and illustrator with a passion for visual storytelling, folklore and fairy tales. She studied Media, Culture and Communication at NYU, where she was also a writer and editor at CommClub, and most recently she attended IDEA Academy in Rome to study visual development. If you’d like to collaborate or just chat about the many wonders of storytelling, reach out at malumirones@gmail.com
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!
