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PDF E-BOOK:
As I See

As I See

by Boris Artzybasheff

Boris Artzybasheff was a well known book illustrator, but today he is best known for his magazine covers and advertisements. His illustrations appeared in Life, Fortune and Time magazine. From 1942 to 1966, he painted over 200 covers for Time, creating interpretive portraits of the most important people of the day. During this period, Artzybasheff also illustrated advertisements employing anthropomorphism to give life and personality to the products of such sponsors as Xerox, Alcoa Steamships, Parker Pens, Shell Oil and the Wickwire Steel Company. His interest in psychology led him to serve as an expert advisor on psychological warfare to the U.S. State Department.

In 1954, Boris Artzybasheff produced his most famous book, As I See where he organized his personal art and illustration work by thematic content… psychology, machines, warfare and fantasy. Like Salvador Dali, Artzybasheff employed surrealism in the Neurotica section to explore the depths of the subconscious. In the Machinalia chapter, he used his incredible draftsmanship to imbue inanimate objects with personality- anthropomorphism- a technique that Walt Disney also was well known for. In Diablerie Artzybasheff merged dysfunctional psychology with anthropomorphic machines of modern warfare to create a devastating comment on the futility of war. The last section, titled Escapades took a more lighthearted approach to fantastic subjects. Artzybasheff’s influence on Wally Wood and Basil Wolverton is undeniable, and the sinuous lines of his graphic work suggests a kinship with Al Hirschfeld.

As I See has been out of print for many years, and fetches high prices at rare book stores. Animation Resources was fortunate enough to obtain a first edition in excellent shape to digitize. This PDF e-book is optimized for display on the iPad or printing two sided with a cover on 8 1/2 by 11 inch paper.

REFPACK024: As I See

Adobe PDF File / 114 Pages / 299 MB Download

DVD QUALITY VIDEO:
Cherubashka

Cheburashka
Roman Kachanov / Soyuzmultfilm / 1971

The film we are sharing with members this time features the children’s character, Cheburashka. Created for a children’s story by Eduard Uspensky, the character is best known from a series of films produced by the Soyuzmultfilm studio, directed by Roman Kachanov. Four films featuring the character were released between 1969 and 1984. Cheburashka is the second in the series, released in 1971.

The animation in this film is brilliant, and it’s well worth still framing through to study how the various personalities are put across through the walk cycles and gestures. The puppets limit the flexibility of facial expressions, but the animators more than make up for it through the way the characters move. The principles behind stop motion, hand drawn animation and CGI are all the same. We hope this film is useful to you. If you would like to see more of these films, let us know.

REFPACK024: Cheburashka

M4V Video File / 19:39 / 135 MB Download

DVD QUALITY VIDEO:

Dental Hygiene Dilemma
From “200 Motels” / Chuck Swenson / 1971

In 1971, director Tony Palmer and Frank Zappa teamed up to create a film based on the music of Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. The film starred Ringo Starr and Theodore Bikel, and it utilized revolutionary editing techniques and avant-garde video effects- solarization, multiple exposures, layering, keying out colors, and speed manipulation. 200 Motels inspired many films that followed, most notably The Monkees’ Head and it is now acknowledged as being one of the primary forefathers of the rock video.

The film is a montage of impressions of a rock band’s life on the road. It consists of brief surreal skits depicting members of the band interacting with the citizens of Centerville, Ohio, “A nice place to bring your kids up”. Before the film began shooting, Zappa fired his bass player Jeff Simmons for insubordination and replaced him in the film by Ringo Starr’s chauffeur. Zappa hired animator Chuck Swenson to make a cartoon version of Simmons being led by his devil conscience to “quit the comedy band and become a rock star”. The cartoon starts out pretending to be an educational film on dental hygiene, but it quickly becomes a case study in the psychological pressures and clashes of ego commonly experienced by touring rock bands.

We present this film as an example of “bang for the buck”. The budget of 200 Motels was quite modest and the schedule was tight. Swenson, obviously inspired by the work of Terry Gilliam for Monty Python and the short animated sequences from Sesame Street, uses a variety of highly efficient techniques to build up to a chaotic ending. If you break down the animation, you’ll see how he uses key drawings with little or no inbetweening to great effect by following the rhythms in the voices and music. It isn’t the number of drawings or complexity of draftsmanship in animation that makes it good. It’s the way the drawings are used to describe the motion, and even more importantly, how they are timed.

REFPACK024: Dental Hygiene Dilemma

M4V Video File / 06:18 / 305 MB Download

Animation Resources is one of the best kept secrets in the world of cartooning. Every month, we sponsor a program of interest to artists, and every other month, we share a book and up to an hour of rare animation with our members. If you are a creative person interested in the fields of animation, cartooning or illustration, you should be a member of Animation Resources!

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Posted in refpack | Comments Off on Bonus 008: Artzybaseff, Cheburashka and Dental Hygiene

Wednesday, December 6th, 2023

LAST CHANCE! REFPACK054: A Peek At The Early Anime Downloads

People who aren’t members of Animation Resources don’t understand how comprehensive our Reference Packs are. Over a couple of weeks, we are posting what each section of our current RefPack looks like. Today we are sharing the Early Anime section. If you are a member of Animation Resources, click on this post to go to the Members Only page. If you aren’t a member yet, today is the perfect time to join! Our current Reference Pack is one of our best yet, and General and Student Members get access to a special Bonus Archive with even more material from past Reference Packs.

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Lately, Animation Resources board member JoJo Baptista has been researching the early history of Japanese animation. He has searched out video copies of 1960s anime to add to our Animation Archive. Over the past year, he has accumulated hundreds of hours of rare television programs. We will be will be sharing some of them with you in our Reference Packs. Our members have asked us to share complete films and publications with them, not excerpts, so we will be sharing complete half hour episodes with you. We don’t claim that everything here is great. But there are great bits. You can sift through them and discover the gems for yourself.

SD VIDEO:

Tiger Mask

Episodes 21 & 32 / 1969
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Tiger Mask was produced by Toei Animation running from October 2nd, 1969 to September 30th, 1971. The anime was based on the manga of the same name which began a year prior to the anime. It may be one of the first wrestling anime, preceded possibly by Animal 1, which was released the year before. Naoto Date, Tiger Mask’s true identity, is a mystery to Kenta, an orphan boy who religiously watches each of Tiger Mask’s bouts in the ring. He is seen in practically every episode cheering Tiger Mask on. However, it was because of Kenta that Naoto had a change of heart. Tiger Mask was once regarded as a ferocious heel in the ring, so much so, that he was regarded as a villain. Kenta wanted to idolize this behavior, but upon Naoto’s realization of this, he began to portray himself in a more positive light.

The series’ style is what makes it particularly unique. Its angular designs complemented by the jaggedness of the xerox copy technique transferred to cels lends itself the dynamism of the show. That’s particularly thanks to Keiichirou Kimura, who served as an animation director and character designer. I believe we presented some of his work when we featured Sabu and Ichi’s Detective Tales. His style is particularly unique to the rest of the series. He contributed a lot of animation this series as well, and it’s presumed this is some of his work during the slow motion at 21:12 in episode 21. The limited animation can be particularly strong when a combination of strong poses and timing are used. But admittedly, some of the timing can feel quite clunky in this show at times.

One aspect that keeps the show visually interesting is the variety of forced perspective shots. There are upshots and down shots, characters can be away from the camera or in the extreme foreground. Along with quick cutting, this keeps the momentum up and provides visual interest. You don’t notice that there is very little animation. Also, the posing is designed to convey complex action in a bare minimum number of frames. All of the drawings are keys. There are no in-betweens.

A great cheat that is constantly utilized is portraying the wrestling ring as its own reality. The gradient backgrounds, painted with saturated colors are often used to avoid crowd shots. Also, it’s great for not having to avoid the change perspective of the environment when characters are jumping up high or landing. It helps draw attention to the action, and furthermore provides clarity without having to render out masses of crowds cheering behind the ring. At most you’ll get some "finger paint" type blurs or abstract art in the backgrounds to imply the heads of characters in the crowd. When crowds are shown however, they are separate with little to no animation at times.

One fun bit is the brief animatic section in episode 22 at 15:56. It’s obviously inspired by the 1960s Batman TV series. It even has the pop art bam shapes, wild 60s coloring and the signature "walking bass line" in the music.

In the 1970s, the crush of production necessitated a more "assembly line" approach to production and design. Instead of every show having its own style, the designs began to consolidate— character design, background design and effects animation became standardized. This made it easier for artists to move from show to show, because they didn’t have to learn a new style for every job they worked on. Formulas of how facial features, hair or proportions should be rendered saved time and streamlined the whole Japanese animation industry. While this allowed for the production of many more hours of animation to feed the demand, it took away some of the spontaneity and originality that had flourished in earlier years. Anime from the 80s and 90s is well known in the United States and it has been widely available here for many years, but the early shows from the 60s are very hard to find. These are the ones we will be focusing on in our Reference Packs.

REFPACK054: Tiger Mask Ep21

MP4 Video File / SD / 23:51 / 261 MB Download

REFPACK054: Tiger Mask Ep32

MP4 Video File / SD / 24:00 / 223 MB Download

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Fall is time to save when you join Animation Resources as a student member. For the next couple of weeks our Student Membership will be discounted to only $60/year! Best of all, you will continue to get that savings every year you renew as a student for up to three years. Yes, this applies to full time educators too. Why should you join? Each day we’ll be highlighting more reasons why you should be a member of Animation Resources. Bookmark us and check back every day.

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Not Convinced Yet? Check out this SAMPLE REFERENCE PACK! It will give you a taste of what Animation Resources members get to download every other month!

There’s no better way to feed your creativity than to be a member of Animation Resources. Every other month, we share a Reference Pack that is chock full of downloadable e-books and still framable videos designed to expand your horizons and blow your mind. It’s easy to join. Just click on this link and you can sign up right now online.

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Posted in anime, refpack | Comments Off on LAST CHANCE! REFPACK054: A Peek At The Early Anime Downloads

Tuesday, December 5th, 2023

LAST CHANCE! RefPack054: A Peek At The International Downloads

People who aren’t members of Animation Resources don’t understand how comprehensive our Reference Packs are. Over the next couple of weeks, we will be posting what each section of our current RefPack looks like. If you are a member of Animation Resources, click on this post to go to the Members Only page. If you aren’t a member yet, today is the perfect time to join! Our current Reference Pack is one of our best yet, and General and Student Members get access to a special Bonus Archive with even more material from past Reference Packs.

What are you waiting for?

JOIN TODAY!
https://animationresources.org/membership/levels/

The world of animation is much bigger than it might appear to us at first glance. We are all familiar with the films we grew up with, but Hollywood wasn’t the only place that produced great cartoons… Poland, Japan, Russia, China and Europe all have their own traditions and a rich history of animated film making. Animation Resources’ archive contains many foreign films that are rarely seen in the United States. We feature a sampling of interesting animation from around the world in each Reference Pack.

SD VIDEO:

Princess Iron Fan

The Wan Brothers / Shanghai, China / 1941
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The Wan Brothers (Wan Laiming, Vancomyein Toad, Wan Chaochen and Wan Dihuan) were born in Nanjing, on the banks of the Yangzi River. Their father, a businessman, expected them to learn a trade from books, so they could make a lot of money when they grew up. But their mother encouraged them to cut paper into the shapes of people and birds, and the sons enjoyed art more than book-learning. When they were young, they performed puppet shows with their paper-cut characters, based on a story from the four classic novels titled Journey to the West, the books that document the legendary Monkey King epic.

In 1916, the family moved to Shanghai. Wan Laiming took a job working for the Shanghai Commercial Press, and held positions in the Department of Fine Arts and the Department of Activities Movie Service starting in 1919. Inspired by American cartoons, China’s shadow puppet plays, and cinematic techniques he saw in live action films, Wan Laiming began making his own animated films.

The Wan Brothers were greatly impressed by the cartoons from America. In 1940, they began work on their own 8,000 foot, 80 minute long sound cartoon film, Tieshangongzhu (aka Princess Iron Fan). Produced in a single large room over the span of one year by 70 artists working in two shifts a day, this film lay a solid foundation for the Wan Brothers’ career in animation production. Twenty years later, they released a feature film based on another part of the Monkey King saga, Hue And Cry Over The Sky, and followed that up in 1964 with a third segment titled Big Trouble. The last two films were later screened together with an intermission and titled Havoc In Heaven.

The story line of Princess Iron Fan isn’t easy to translate, since it was so deeply rooted in Chinese folklore. But the basic story involves a beautiful demoness who is married to the Bull Demon King. Sun Wukong the Monkey King, is traveling and encounters The Flaming Mountains where he does battle with a fire demon and loses. He joins up with two pilgrims, a pig and a warrior, and they set out to borrow a magic banana leaf from the Princess. This banana leaf has the ability to summon huge winds, capable of extinguishing the flames. The Princess refuses to give the Monkey King the banana leaf fan, so he changes into a bug and hides in her drink. She swallows him and he proceeds to kick her in the guts until she agrees to give him the fan. She gives him a fake one that only fans the fire in the Flaming Mountains higher. The Monkey King barely survives and returns to Princess Iron Fan disguised as her husband, the Bull Demon. He tricks her into giving him the real fan. The real Bull Demon returns home, discovers the deception and does battle with the Monkey King. The Bull Demon is vanquished, the Flaming Mountains are put out, and the Monkey King forgives the Princess and returns the fan to her.

Now that you’ve read that story, try to imagine it animated in a combination of rotoscope and the surreal metamorphosis animation of the wildest Fleischer cartoons. This film is like no other you’ve ever seen. Our copy of it isn’t the best quality, but it may be all that remains of the pioneering animated feature.

REFPACK054: Princess Iron Fan 1941

MP4 Video File / SD / 01:12:46 / 1,87 GB Download

PLEASE NOTE: This is a large file. Please download this video without any other files downloading in the background. Downloading too many at once might result in an error. If you encounter a time out error, hold down the shift key and reload the page.

SD VIDEO:

Mr. Rossi Buys A Car

Bruno Bozzetto / Italy / 1967

Bruno Bozzetto is an Italian animator known for his parody of Fantasia titled Allegro Non Troppo. His other feature films include a superhero parody called VIP My Brother Superman and a spaghetti western parody titled West And Soda. Bozzetto’s work is often satirical and political in nature, championing the common man and lampooning government inefficiency and oppression.

Bozzetto’s most famous character is Signor Rossi, an everyman figure he featured in many animated shorts and three feature films, Mr. Rossi Looks For Happiness, Mr. Rossi’s Dreams, and Mr. Rossi’s Vacation. In the short film we are sharing today, Mr. Rossi buys a car which changes his entire demeanor from a normal calm individual to a speed demon burning with road rage.

Bozzetto’s work is not as well known in the United States as it should be, but it is recognized and appreciated across Europe. Recently, Animation Resources has been working to acquire more of his films for the Animation Archive, and we hope to share them with you in future Reference Packs. We think you’ll find a lot to inspire you in Bozzetto’s work.

REFPACK054: Mr Rossi Buys A Car 1967

MP4 Video File / SD / 6:39 / 175 MB Download

SD VIDEO:

Happy Merry-Go-Round Ep. 01

Galina Barinova, Leonid Nosyrev, Anatoly Petrov, Gennady Sokolsky / Soyuzmultfilm / 1969

Happy Merry Go Round was a long-running series of films produced by Soyuzmultfilm. The intent was to provide a format for the directors there to create experimental films. There were ten episodes released theatrically between 1969 and 1978, and after that releases were sporadic. It transitioned to television and ran for 33 seasons up to 2001. In 2012, Happy Merry-Go-Round was revived.

The episode we are sharing today is the first in the series. It includes four short films: "Mosaic" a film with animals designed in the form of mosaics, "Antoshka" a song about a lazy boy who refuses to dig potatoes, "Distracted Giovanni" a cartoon in the style of Ferdinand Lèger about a boy who loses his body parts, and "Well, Just You Wait!" the story of a wolf chasing a rabbit.

The premise of "Nu, Pogodi!" (which translates into English as "Well, Just You Wait!") was pitched by a writing team of satirical humorists to many directors at Soyuzmultfilm, but was rejected every time. Finally in 1969, Gennady Sokolsky agreed to direct a 2 1/2 minute pilot for this episode of Happy Merry Go Round. The general consensus at the studio was that the cartoon was "low class" and beneath the dignity of Soyuzmultfilm, but director Vyacheslav Kotyonochkin strongly believed in the concept, so the studio decided to take a chance and allow him to direct a few episodes… and then a few more… and then more. Kotyonochkin was proven correct. The cartoons were a huge success. Between 1969 and 2006, Soyuzmultfilm ended up making 22 episodes. In a 2014 poll of audiences all over Russia, "Well, Just You Wait!" was voted the most popular cartoon series of all time by a landslide.

The Russian State Committee for Cinematography criticized Happy Merry-Go-Round for "using children’s cinema as a proving ground for abstract art", but critics praised it for its creative freedom and diversity of styles. A lot of young animators received their first opportunity to direct on the series, allowing them to develop a personal style before moving on to create their own series.

REFPACK054: Happy Merry-Go-Round Ep. 01

MP4 Video File / SD / 9:51 / 233 MB Download

SD VIDEO:

Professor Balthazar in “The Inventor Of Shoes”

Zlatko Grgic / Zagreb Films, Croatia / 1967

In a previous Reference Pack we featured several Maxi-Cat mini-cartoons by Zlatko Grgic, a Croatian animator who later emigrated to Canada to join the Canadian Film Board.

Grgic is best known for his series of cartoons featuring the character Professor Balthazar, an old man who solves problems for his friends by creating inventions with a magical machine. Produced between 1967 and 1973, the series ran all over the world. Its silent pantomime with voice over narration made it easy to translate to other countries. It aired everywhere from New Zealand to Romania to Zimbabwe. In the United States it was featured on Chuck Jones’ television program, Curiosity Shop.

Altogether there were 59 episodes of Professor Balthazar produced between 1969 and 1978. We will be sharing more with you in upcoming Reference Packs.

REFPACK051: Professor Balthazar Ep. 03

MP4 Video File / SD / 9:02 / 83 MB Download

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