As a special thank you to our annual General and Student members, we have created a special page where we will archive past Reference Packs. There will be a new rerun of a complete RefPack between the new ones.
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PDF E-BOOK:
Eulenspiegel Volume One
July 1st to November 2nd, 1963
After the Second World War, satirical caricature magazines experienced a rapid decline. The general public in the post-war years wasn’t as receptive to radical politics and muckraking as they were before the war. One by one, satirical magazines around the world were replaced by illustrated current events magazines like Life, Look, The Illustrated London News and L’Illustration (see our previous e-book on the L’Illustration Christmas annuals for information on the rise of photo magazines.) Political cartooning migrated to the editorial page in the newspaper, and humor cartooning in magazines focused on social subjects in single panel gag cartoons. Harvey Kurtzman created Mad as a comic book, but soon the comic shifted to the satirical magazine format. Instead of lampooning political figures and Kings like the satirical magazines of the past, Mad Magazine made fun of TV stars and suburban lifestyles.
However, behind the Iron Curtain, satirical magazines didn’t disappear after World War II, in fact, they flourished for a time. Chief among these magazines was Krokodil. It was launched a few years after the Russian Revolution. Political satire in the Soviet Union was a dangerous thing, but Krokodil was given a wide berth to lampoon the inefficiency and lack of initiative of mid level bureaucrats and the sloppiness of labor workers.
Frischer Wind (Fresh Breeze) was one of the last satirical caricature magazines to be established, beginning in 1946. It was the only humor magazine in East Germany, and it was retitled after the legendary prankster Eulenspiegel in 1954. Only three East German magazines survived after the Berlin Wall fell, and Eulenspiegel was one of them. It continues to be published to this day. Punch ceased publication in 1991 after more than a century and a half in print, Krokodil closed its doors in 2008, Mad Magazine recently announced that they were ending their print magazine. It may well be that Eulenspiegel is the last of the classic satirical humor magazines still in circulation.
We know very little about the artists who drew for Eulenspiegel. If you have any information on them, please let us know so we can add it to our database. Animation Resources was fortunate to Find a batch of these rarely seen magazines in a bookshop in Hungary and had them shipped to us in the United States for digitization. We hope you find them useful.
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DVD QUALITY VIDEO:
The Tale of the White Serpent
Toei / Taiji Yabushita & Kazuhiko Okabe / 1958
When Toei Animation undertook to create the first full color animated feature, they pushed their resources to their absolute limit. With a staff of nearly 1,400 people working on the film, and an extremely tight schedule of just eight months to complete it, they succeeded in making a wonderful film that is now considered the first Anime feature.
In an act of reconciliation with the Chinese for Japan’s mistreatment of them during WWII, the president of Toei selected a Chinese folktale, "The Tale of the White Serpent" as the subject of the feature. He may have been inspired by a live action adaptation released just two years earlier in Japan. In 1961, "The Tale of the White Serpent" was released in the United States under the title "Panda and the Magic Serpent".
The copy of the film that we are are sharing with our members here is in Japanese with no subtitles, but dialogue is sparse and the story is easy to follow without words. The basic story is about a young prince named Xu-Xian who has a pet snake, but his parents force him to give it up. Years pass and the prince grows up. One night, during a storm, the snake transforms into a beautiful princess named Bai-Niang and a fish transforms into her assistant Xiaoqing. Using magic, she arranges with her servant Xiaoqing to meet with the prince and his pets at the broken bridge. They fall instantly in love, but they are separated by the monk Fa-Hai who believes that Bad-Niang is an evil spirit. Xu-Xian also becomes separated from his pets Panda and Mimi, and they form a gang of animals along with a pig and weasel to try to find the prince. The monk Fa-Hai does battle with princess Bai-Niang and forces her to return to her serpentine form. Bewitched and confused, Xu Xian follows her ghostly human form off a cliff and is killed. Bai-Niang gives up her magical powers to prove her love in exchange for a magic orchid with the power to bring the prince back to life. The princess and Xiaoqing embark on a perilous journey to bring the orchid to him. After a dramatic action sequence at sea, the monk realizes his mistake in keeping the lovers apart. The animal gang help get the orchid to the prince, and he is revived. Bai-Niang rescues Xu-Xian and the prince and princess live happily ever after.
In particular, pay attention to the excellent color and effects animation, as well as the use of humorous caricature in the crowd shots. There is a great deal to be learned from this film. We hope you find it useful in your studies.
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Downloads expire after February 2025
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Whew! That is an amazing collection of treasures! 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.
THIS IS JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG!
Animation Resources has been sharing treasures from the Animation Archive with its members for over a decade. Every other month, our members get access to a downloadable Reference Pack, full of information, inspiration and animation. The RefPacks consist of e-books jam packed with high resolution scans of great art, still framable animated films from around the world, documentaries, podcasts, seminars and MORE! The best part is that all of this material has been selected and curated by our Board of professionals to aid you in your self study. Our goal is to help you be a greater artist. Why wouldn’t you want to be a member of a group like that?
Membership comes in three levels. General Members get access to a bi-monthly Reference Pack as well as a Bonus RefPack from past offerings in the in-between months. We offer a discounted Student Membership for full time students and educators. And if you want to try out being a member, there is a Quarterly Membership that runs for three months.
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