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Project Angels
John Kricfalusi, Mike Van Eaton, Rita Street, Jorge Garrido, Andreas Deja, John Canemaker, Jerry Beck, Leonard Maltin, June Foray, Paul and John Vinci, B. Paul Husband, Nancy Cartwright, Mike Fontanelli, Tom & Jill Kenny, Will Finn, Ralph Bakshi, Sherm Cohen, Marc Deckter, Dan diPaola, Kara Vallow
Project Heroes
Janet Blatter, Keith Lango Animation, Thorsten Bruemmel, David Soto, Paul Dini, Rik Maki, Ray Pointer, James Tucker, Rogelio Toledo, Nicolas Martinez, Joyce Murray Sullivan, David Wilson, David Apatoff, San Jose State Shrunkenheadman Club, Matthew DeCoster, Dino's Pizza, Chappell Ellison, Brian Homan, Barbara Miller, Wes Archer, Kevin Dooley, Caroline Melinger
Project Volunteers
Gemma Ross, Milton Knight, Claudio Riba, Eric Graf, Michael Fallik, Gary Francis, Joseph Baptista, Kelsey Sorge-Toomey, Alexander Camarillo, Alex Vassilev, Ernest Kim, Danny Young, Glenn Han, Sarah Worth, Chris Paluszek, Michael Woodside, Giancarlo Cassia, Ross Kolde, Amy Rogers
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.
FREE SAMPLES! 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.
Every other month, Animation Resources shares a new Reference Pack with its members. They consist of e-books packed with high resolution scans video downloads of rare animated films set up for still frame study, as well as podcasts and documentaries— all designed to help you become a better artist. Make sure you download this Reference Pack before it’s updated. When it’s gone, it’s gone!
The latest Animation Resources Reference Pack has been uploaded to the server. Here’s a quick overview of what you’ll find when you log in to the members only page…
Katsushika Hokusai was arguably the greatest artist Japan ever produced. Best known for his monumental set of woodblock prints titled Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, his career spanned more than 75 years, and in his lifetime he produced more than 30,000 paintings, sketches and woodblock prints. Animation Resources is in the process of painstakingly restoring all of the volumes of Hokusai Manga one by one. This time we feature book two with amazing images of life in Japan, landscapes, plants, animals and fantastic imagery. These books have never looked better. Even if you have a copy of this, you’ll want to collect the whole set of our digital restorations.
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Two Shorts By Ladislas Starevich Les Yeux Du Dragon / Amour Blanc Et Noir (1932)
Ladislas Starevich created the first puppet animation film in 1912 and continued to work in the medium for half a century. "Les Yeux Du Dragon" is an incredible film, packed with beautiful designs and lighting effects. The story, which is supposedly based on a Chinese legend, strays more towards melodrama at times, but the large exotic sets create an enveloping atmosphere for the film.
"Amour Blanc Et Noir" imitates American slapstick comedies, to the point of including puppets based on Snub Pollard and Charlie Chaplin. There are some extremely sophisticated scenes here with characters acting and reacting to each other expressively, and complicated action choreography, complete with motion blur. Starevich makes it all look easy.
Poor Hans! Frank Leberecht / Deutsche Zeichentrickfilme GmbH, Germany / 1943 Download this article
In an earlier Reference Pack, we presented the work of Hans Fischerkoesen who was often referred to as “the Walt Disney of Germany”, but he wasn’t the only animator sponsored by the Nazis during World War II. The Deutsche Zeichentrickfilme GmbH (DZF) was established by Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels in 1941 to build the German animation business up to the point of rivaling American animation studios. No expense was spared. At its peak, the studio had a staff that numbered nearly 100, and artists were paid nearly double the salary of comparable jobs elsewhere. The goal of the studio was ambitious— to create 19 animated shorts by 1947, and an animated feature by 1950, and no expense was spared to achieve that goal. Ultimately though, they only ended up producing one film— "Poor Hans". It’s impressive how much production value the crew was able to accomplish on their very first film. Had the Nazis not lost the War in 1944, DZF might have eventually overtaken Disney’s lead.
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Little Masha’s Concert Mstislav Pashchenko / Soyuzmultfilm, Russia / 1948
While the Germans aspired to create animated propaganda films to rival the quality of theatrical cartoons in the West, Russia is the country that actually achieved that goal. "Little Masha’s Concert" demonstrates how quickly Russian animation progressed after World War II. The animation, color and design of this film are the equal of any Hollywood cartoon.
Mstislav Pashchenko was one of the pioneers of Russian animation. We’ve seen his film "An Unusual Match" in a previous Reference Pack. In particular, you will want to still frame through a scene where a teddy bear does a Russian dance. It is simple and solidly drawn, putting across the dance rhythms perfectly.
An Adventure In Stripes Alina Maliszewska / Studio Miniatur Filmowych / Warsaw, Poland / 1960
Animation Resources members are familiar with Alina Maliszewska for her work on the Polish animated series, The Strange Adventures of Koziolek Matolek. Although the drawing and animation style of this film are simple, the movement is quite expressive, putting across the attitudes of the characters quite clearly. It is a good model to follow for independent animators who would like to create a film all by themselves.
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Well, Just You Wait Ep.06 Vyacheslav Kotyonochkin / Soyuzmultfilm, Russia / 1973
We continue the Russian Wolf and Rabbit cartoons with episode 06, "Countryside". Between 1969 and 2006, Soyuzmultfilm ended up making 22 episodes of Nu, Pogodi!, and 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. Although the series resembles both Tom & Jerry and the Roadrunner and Coyote series, the director, Kotyonochkin claimed not to have ever seen any of these Hollywood cartoons until 1987 when his son got a video tape recorder and Western tapes began to be imported.
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Two Episodes Of Early Anime "Fight Da Pyuta" Ep. 02 / "Space Ace" Ep. 04 Download this article
In a previous Reference Pack, I shared single episodes from two interesting series. This time, I’m sharing another episode of each. Fight da!! Pyuta. was created by Tsunezo Murotani and directed by Tameo Kohanawa in 1968. The year is significant, because it puts the show two years after the debut of Ralph Bakshi’s Mighty Heroes. The debt to Bakshi’s series is obvious. The show features 1960s style sequences that had to have been influenced by the Terry-Toons superhero parody.
The other series we will be featuring this time is called Space Ace. Based on a manga series created in 1964 by Tatsuo Yoshida, the creator of Speed Racer,Space Ace hit the television airwaves very quickly the following year. This particular episode deals with an underground kingdom of space aliens, and it is a great example of a bunch of totally different ideas being mixed together for maximum fun. At the end is a teaser for the next week’s episode which looks even crazier than this one! You really don’t need to speak Japanese to appreciate this show.
What do you think of as the essence of animation? What makes it unique? Drawings? It isn’t drawings because CG and puppet animation don’t involve drawings. Is it fantasy? No, because there are live action fantasies and animated films that deal with very real subjects. We often hear people talking about "the magic of animation", but what is that magic made of? Can live action be animated too? The brilliant Polish born animator answers this question with his unique television special "The Orchestra"
There is an old platitude in draftsmanship that the drawing of hands is exceedingly difficult. It stands to reason, therefore, that articulating hands in animation would be even more challenging. Some may assume that the laborious nature of hand draftsmanship and articulation is due to the minutiae of respective anatomy. However, anatomical-accuracy is by no means the only principle necessary to produce convincing hands in animation. In the “Breakdowns” section of RefPack053, David Eisman discusses the elements that go into good hand animation.
VIDEO PODCAST:
Steve Stanchfield Interview Animated Discussions 012 / Hosted by Davey Jarrell with Steve Stanchfield Download this article
Steve Stanchfield is an award winning character animator, animation director, educator, and animation historian, in addition to serving on the Advisory Board of Animation Resources. He has worked for many of the major animation studios on numerous TV shows, commercials, educational programming, short films, interactive games and feature animation, and currently teaches at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. Listen to Steve talk all about animation history and the art of film restoration in the latest episode of Animated Discussions!
VIDEO: Two Films By Lotte Reiniger: "Papageno" and "10 Minutes Of Mozart"
VIDEO: Three Terry-Toons: "String Bean Jack", "Red Hot Music", "Hansel and Gretel"
ANIMATION RESOURCES ANNUAL MEMBERS: Reference Pack 021 is now being rerun and is now available for download. It includes a PDF e-book of high resolution scans of a never before published collection of cartoons from Esquire magazine, a pair of films by the legendary silhouette animator Lotte Reiniger, and a trio of rarely seen Terry-Toons! These downloads will be available until September 1st and after that, they will be deleted from the server. So download them now!
If you are currently on a quarterly membership plan, consider upgrading to an annual membership to get access to our bonus page with even more downloads. If you still have time on you quarterly membership when you upgrade to an annual membership, email us at…
Whew! That is an amazing collection of treasures! At Animation Resources, our Advisory Board includes great artists and animators like Ralph Bakshi, Will Finn, J.J. Sedelmaier and Sherm Cohen. They’ve let us know the things that they use in their own self study so we can share them with you. That’s experience you just can’t find anywhere else. The most important information isn’t what you already know… It’s the information you should know about, but don’t know yet. We bring that to you every other month.
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Check out this SAMPLE REFERENCE PACK! It will give you a taste of what Animation Resources members get to download every other month!
Animation Resources is a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization dedicated to providing self study material to the worldwide animation community. If you are a creative person working in animation, cartooning or illustration, you owe it to yourself to be a member of Animation Resources.
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!
It’s easy to join Animation Resources. Just click on this link and you can sign up right now online…
Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its projects. Even if you can’t afford to join our group right now, please click the button below to donate whatever you can afford using PayPal.
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.
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:
Two Episodes Of Early Anime "Fight Da Pyuta" Ep. 02 / "Space Ace" Ep. 04 Download this article
Japanese animation blossomed on television in the mid-1960s. Many different kinds of series were produced. Some were serious and were aimed at an older audience, some were goofy to entertain kids, and some pioneered the concept of the animated superhero. In a previous Reference Pack, I shared single episodes from two interesting series. This time, I’m sharing another episode of each.
Fight da!! Pyuta. was created by Tsunezo Murotani and directed by Tameo Kohanawa in 1968. The year is significant, because it puts the show two years after the debut of Ralph Bakshi’s Mighty Heroes. The debt to Bakshi’s series is obvious. The show features 1960s style sequences that had to have been influenced by the Terry-Toons superhero parody.
Fight da!! Pyuta takes a Western approach to animation, employing pop art and imagery from American comic books as well as an underscore that features surf guitar and jazzy latin bongos. The backgrounds are often psychedelic and the sound effects are expressed in bam-balloons with English lettering, like in a superhero comic. In this episode the monkey scheduled to pilot Japan’s first rocket into outer space becomes ill, and a contest is held to create a robot monkey pilot to take over the mission for him. The villain’s robot monkey gets eliminated, leaving the hero’s entry as winner. Before the selected robot can take off, a giant robot gorilla is thrown in as a monkey wrench in the works.
This series is very unique. We haven’t found any other Japanese shows that are remotely similar. In fact, it most closely resembles "wacky" cartoons from the early 90s, like "Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures" and "Animaniacs". There are some wild takes in this show, and the anthropomorphizing of inanimate objects to make them resemble the characters is very clever. I imagine this might have appeared to be a little too "American" for Japanese audiences, but it makes the show very accessible to we Yanks.
REFPACK053: Fight! Da Pyuta Ep02 MP4 Video File / SD / 25:35 / 299 MB Download
The other series we will be featuring this time is called Space Ace. Based on a manga series created in 1964 by Tatsuo Yoshida, the creator of Speed Racer,Space Ace hit the television airwaves very quickly the following year.
Wikipedia describes the show like this… Space Ace is the story of an alien young boy named Space Ace (or Ace for short), given to homesick stargazing with the faces of his loved ones ghosted across the heavens. His tool of preference is the galaxy ring, a flat white hoop he can produce from his fingers to be thrown or ridden upon. The supporting cast includes Dr. Tatsunoko, who is almost a father figure to Ace, and his daughter Asari, Ace’s love interest. Providing the show’s comedy relief is crusading investigative reporter Yadokari, who usually bursts on the scene riding his jet skycycle at the worst possible moment, screaming for Ace to give him interviews and so on. One of the show’s most important characters is "Ebo", Ace’s imagined projection into the night sky depicted as a humanoid robot.
This particular episode deals with an underground kingdom of space aliens, and it is a great example of a bunch of totally different ideas being mixed together for maximum fun. A pair of villains, which I think are intended to represent a Chinese spy and an American gangster threaten the well being of our hero. Things look hopeless until gum is placed in Ace’s mouth like Popeye’s spinach and the candy makes him powerful enough to destroy the villains. There’s wonderful James Bond style music and some truly impressive effects. At the end is a teaser for the next week’s episode which looks even crazier than this one! You really don’t need to speak Japanese to appreciate this show.
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.
REFPACK053: Space Ace Ep04 MP4 Video File / SD / 26:11 / 340 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!
It’s easy to join Animation Resources. Just click on this link and you can sign up right now online…
Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its projects. Even if you can’t afford to join our group right now, please click the button below to donate whatever you can afford using PayPal.
Please Help! Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its services to the worldwide animation community. Please contribute using PayPal.
Please Help! Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its services to the worldwide animation community. Please contribute using PayPal.
Please Help! Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its services to the worldwide animation community. Please contribute using PayPal.
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