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Monday, October 14th, 2024

STUDENT MEMBERSHIP: Free Samples!

Right now, it’s Back To School time at Animation Resources, and for the next two weeks we will be sharing reasons why students and educators should be a member of our important project. There is 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…

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

Animation Resources is a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational organization dedicated to serving the self study needs of animators, cartoonists and illustrators. If you are a creative person with an interest in the field, we hope you will choose to become a member of Animation Resources. Every other month, members are given access to a high resolution e-book and several DVD quality animated films, curated by the Board of Animation Resources.

This sample Reference Pack is designed to give you an idea of what Animation Resources has to offer its members. By the end of the year, our members will have been able to access downloads of SIX E-BOOKS totaling over a thousand pages of incredible high resolution scans, and over FIVE HOURS of rare cartoons. Membership rates are just $85 annually for General Membership, and $70 a year for full time students and educators. It’s the greatest bargain in animation. You’ll be inspired and learn too!

REFPACK 001: Sample RefPack

Below are the links to the sample Reference Pack. To download the files, RIGHT CLICK on the link (Mac users OPTION CLICK) and select SAVE TO DISK. We are delivering high resolution files to you. When you click, it might take several minutes to finish the download, so please be patient. If the link doesn’t work, refresh this page and try again. It’s best to download the files one at a time, rather than all at once. This will avoid timeouts.

PLEASE NOTE: This material may be protected by copyright and is provided to supporters of Animation Resources under Fair Use provisions for critical analysis, educational and reference purposes only. Permission to copy and print is granted for personal use only and these files are not to be distributed or shared with others. All rights reserved. After the period of availability, these files will be deleted from the server and may never be offered again. Downloading of this material constitutes agreement to these terms.

Over the past decade, Animation Resources has shared over 50 Reference Packs with our members. We have assembled two e-books and two video podcasts highlighting a few of the treasures our members have been able to download. During Back To School Days, we will be sharing these e-books and podcasts with the general public. We hope they inspire you to join us and be a part of building the foundation for the future of animation.

PDF E-BOOKS:
Best of 25

Best of The E-Books

A Sampler of the First 10 Years of RefPack E-Books

The creative world of animation has its roots in the art of cartooning, and the history of cartooning extends back centuries. Over the past decade, Animation Resources’ e-books have included thousands of pages of classic cartooning, illustration and art instruction, ranging from 16th century woodblocks to newspaper comics from the 1920s, to powerful political cartoons from around the world, to complete courses teaching the fundamentals of cartooning and caricature… all designed to broaden the horizons of both professional and student artists.

This pair of e-books gather together some of the highlights from the first 50 members only e-books. It is provided to the general public to give prospective members an idea of what they will receive when they join. Members and volunteers are the lifeblood of our organization and we appreciate everything that the hundreds of people who have contrinuted to our efforts have accomplished. These e-books are dedicated to them.

Best of RefPack 26-50 E-Book

Adobe PDF File / 187 Pages / 530 MB Download

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

VIDEO PODCAST:
Best of 25

Best of Videos 1 to 50
Sampler Reels of the First 10 Years of RefPack Animation Videos

Some people are under the mistaken impression that animation is a genre, best suited for children’s cartoons. They think that specific established styles and techniques are the only way cartoons should look. It’s easy even for animators to fall into the trap of making cartoons that look just like all the other cartoons on TV and in theaters. But Animation Resources encourages film makers to think of animation as a medium, capable of breaking new ground by doing innovative and great things. We encourage our members to think outside the box by sharing unique examples of powerful animated film making that exploit the best aspects of the medium.

In the past decade of Reference Packs, Animation Resources members have had an opportunity to see rarely seen films of all types, from century old silent shorts, to stop motion puppet films, animation from China, Poland, Japan and Russia; animated commercials from the early 1950s; classic theatrical cartoons; experimental animation and rare industrial training films… Our intent is not to bring back a “golden age” of animation. We encourage artists to build on the past as a foundation for surpassing it.

This pair of reels gather together some clips of the highlights from the first 50 members only Reference Packs. They are provided to the general public to give prospective members an idea of what they will receive when they join.

Best of 1-25 Video Reel

M4V Video File / SD / 48:06 / 456 MB Download

PLEASE NOTE: These video files are large. Please download them one at a time to avoid timeouts.

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

With every Reference Pack, we’ll be including a bonus video or e-book from one of our past Reference Packs. This time we are sharing a book and two rare wartime training films!

PDF E-BOOK:

Jack Cole’s

Plastic Man

Issues Nos. 1, 2 & 3 (1943)

Jack Cole’s “Plastic Man” debuted in Police Comics in 1941 and was an immediate hit. Cole’s offbeat humor and Plastic Man’s ability to take any shape gave the cartoonist the opportunities to experiment with text and graphics in groundbreaking manner, helping to define the medium’s vocabulary, and making the idiosyncratic character one of the few enduring classics from the Golden Age to modern times. Plastic Man gained his own title in 1943.

This PDF e-book contains the first three issues of Plastic Man comics and includes a biography of Jack Cole. It is optimized for display on the iPad or printing two up with a cover on 8 1/2 by 11 inch paper.

REFPACK001: Plastic Man

Adobe PDF File / 183 Pages / 245.5 MB Download

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

DVD QUALITY VIDEO:

Private Snafu Gas

REFPACK001: Private Snafu in Gas

Army/Navy Screen Magazine (1944)

The Private Snafu training cartoons were produced by Warner Bros for the War Department during WWII. “Gas”, which deals with the importance of having an operating gas mask handy, was directed by Chuck Jones and written by Ted “Dr Seuss” Geisel. The voices were by Mel Blanc and Billy Bletcher.

REFPACK001: Private Snafu in Gas

M4V Video File / 4:43 / 77.5 MB Download

This DVD quality MP4 file is provided courtesy of Thunderbean Animation and is included in HD on Private Snafu Golden Classics.

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

DVD QUALITY VIDEO:

Van Beuren Circus Capers

Aesop’s Fables: Circus Capers

Van Beuren Studios (1930)

Disney admitted that in the 1920s, his goal was to produce cartoons as good as the Aesops Fables series. However after the Fables introduced a boy and girl mouse that bore a strong resemblance to Mickey and Minnie, Disney filed suit and had the cartoons pulled from theaters. This cartoon is one of the most blatant Mickey ripoffs, and one of the funniest.

REFPACK001: Circus Capers

M4V Video File / 9:13 / 230.5 MB Download

This DVD quality MP4 file is provided courtesy of Thunderbean Animation and is included on Uncensored Animation from Van Beuren.

Tell your friends to join Animation Resources!

More members mean we can bring you more special downloads.

CLICK TO JOIN TODAY!

Problems or questions? Email…
membership@animationresources.org

Posted in member appreciation month, membership, student | Comments Off on STUDENT MEMBERSHIP: Free Samples!

Wednesday, March 13th, 2024

Theory: Retro Cartoons Are A Dead End

Last night at our Animation Resources screening, some of the students from Laguna College of Art and Design asked me what I thought of “retro cartoons”. Everyone assumes that because I know a lot about old cartoons, I must think that old fashioned cartoons are the way to go today. I surprised them by saying that I think retro cartoons are a complete dead end.

Irish cops, candlestick telephones and hobos with all their belongings wrapped in a hankerchief on a stick may have been relevant to audiences sometime in the distant past, but today, they are just empty archetypes- symbols that have no real world connection any more. I love Fleischer’s “Minnie the Moocher” and “Snow White”, but that music has absolutely no relevance to contemporary young people, and the primary reason these cartoons are so much fun today is because the passage of time has obliterated the topical contexts of the gags and just left behind puzzling, surreal non-sequiturs. The Queen’s face turns into frying pans and skeletons sing about 20 dollar gold pieces on their watch chains… These things seem weird and otherworldly to us because people today don’t say phrases like “She was so mad her eyes looked like fried eggs” and we don’t know that if your dead body has a 20 dollar gold piece on the watch chain it means you didn’t leave behind any debts for your heirs. What’s the point of doing a WWII A card gas rationing gag today, or using character designs based on caricatures of celebrities that died half a century ago? References like that just serve to distance the audience from the characters and draw them out of the story being told.

Making retro cartoons is like dressing up in your grandfather’s suit and pretending to be him. You may superficially resemble him, but your grandmother isn’t going to be fooled. But the biggest obstacle by far is competing with golden age artists on a quality level- that is VERY hard, and competing with them on their own playing field is absolutely impossible. The best you can hope to achieve through imitation is “almost as good as the original”.

Characters like Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse were fantastic in their day. Audiences connected with them and the artists creating them were expressing aspects of their own personalities. But “reboots” of NEW Bugs Bunny and NEW Mickey Mouse cartoons don’t connect with contemporary audiences the same way, and the artists making them struggle to psychically channel a character that represented their great-grandfather’s time, not their own. I produced a retro cartoon myself, and I am proud of it, but the things I admire most about it are the NEW ideas the director brought to the classic characters. The elements we were able to recreate from the original cartoons are the least successful things about the cartoons. In retrospect, I think we would have been better off doing an original story using new characters.

Nostalgia for the past isn’t just a problem for fans of classic cartoons from the 30s and 40s. Many students at animation schools think like fans, not like film makers. If you ask a fan what kind of cartoon he or she would make if they could make any film they want, they describe styles that they have seen before… 90s Disney, Anime, the “wacky” TV cartoons they grew up with… But if you ask a film maker what kind of cartoon he or she would like to make, they speak in terms of ideas. Nostalgia is a very strong pull on young artists. The cartoons they grew up with were probably the inspiration for wanting to become an animator in the first place, but the first thing they must do to become a film maker is to leave those things in the past and move forward serving their own creative muse.

Too many animation students come out of college unable to make the leap from thinking like a fan to thinking like an artist. They cling to nostalgia for their childhood favorites and are unable to function in a workplace that isn’t working in that style any more. Racking up $100,000 in student loans to gain an education in how to draw Sonic the Hedgehog or Animaniacs, or to design characters in the style of Fox & the Hound is a good way to go straight from cap and gown to Starbucks apron. Sadly the vast majority of animation school graduates never realize this until they are out of school and discover that they are unemployable. Schools are producing scores of professional animation fans, and very few professional animators. The fault for this lies not just with the schools, but also with the students who won’t let go of style and study fundamentals.

There is a LOT to be learned from old cartoons, but all of the value embedded in old cartoons to today’s animators lies in the TECHNIQUE, not the content. Whenever someone does a retro cartoon, they always end up getting that totally backwards. They emulate gags, situations and characters from the old cartoons and animate them using the same cheap current animation shortcuts. Instead, they should be using totally new and relevant gags, situations and characters and animating them using the techniques and fundamentals of classic animation. If someone finally figures that out and makes a cartoon using that theory, they stand a chance of creating a film that is BETTER than classic cartoons, not just “almost as good”.

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.

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

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! That’s 560 pages of great high resolution images and nearly an hour of rare animation available to everyone to download for FREE! https://animationresources.org/join-us-sample-reference-pack/

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.

Posted in student, theory | Comments Off on Theory: Retro Cartoons Are A Dead End

Wednesday, March 6th, 2024

Advice: Business of Art

I see a lot of people starting out in animation focusing on the business aspects… creating lots of “product”, pitching show ideas to studios, worrying about people who might ask them to work for free on a personal project, posting ads to groups like this to try to get viewers… I’ve seen people who do all these sorts of things for almost a decade, and still aren’t any further along to success as an animated filmmaker than the day they started.

You don’t become successful in animation by having the “right package”. You become successful because you have the “right stuff”. You can sit down and really animate, do layout, design backgrounds… you have skills in constructive drawing, compositional principles, perspective, anatomy and life drawing, color theory, painting techniques…

Specialization aimed at a specific job title is the absolute WORST thing you can do in school. I went to design school to study graphic design. They taught me type speccing, paste up, how to use a linotype machine… A couple of years later the Macintosh came out and everything I learned was obsolete. The only classes that I still use today are the basic ones… Design 101, Color 101, Drawing 101. Going to a trade school to learn art or filmmaking is a good way to be replaced by outsourcing.

If you want to be an artist, LEARN TO BE AN ARTIST FIRST. With a solid foundation in the fundamentals, you can learn any trade quickly on your own time or on the job. You don’t have to pay a school thousands of dollars to make you an unemployable specialist in a field that is now being done in India or China.

Instead of putting sweat equity into a business opportunity, it’s a lot better to put that effort into investing into yourself and your skills. But that takes hard work, humility, experimentation, and a solid plan for self education. Make personal films, but CHALLENGE YOURSELF. Don’t just fill time quotas. That’s the hard way to become successful for sure, but it’s a sure road for advancement. “Playing the game” and “doing business” can go in circles forever and get you nowhere.

For the past decade, Animation Resources has been serving artists working in the fields of animation, cartooning and illustration. Our volunteers and members have pulled together to raise the bar for our art form, and it’s time to celebrate… It’s Members Appreciation time again!

During the month of February, Animation Resources expresses our appreciation for to members with a very special Reference Pack, and we invite you to become a member too. For the next 30 days, we will be sharing reasons why you should join us. Our benefits of membership far exceed the cost of our annual dues.

This year, we are trying something new to encourage new memberships. You can join for a one week trial membership for only A DOLLAR! Yes, you get access to everything our annual members get for seven days for only a buck. (Click here for the details on our Dollar Days.) What are you waiting for?

You can find out what our members get at the Member Appreciation Page. It’s easy to join. Just click on this link and you can sign up right now online…

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