AnimationResources.org – Serving the Online Animation Community

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.

ANNUAL MEMBER BONUS ARCHIVE

Available to Student and General Members

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REFPACK032: February / March 2020

PDF E-BOOK / HD Video / Podcast

Chuck Jones Bar Sheets

“How The Grinch Stole Christmas” (1966)

Animation Resources is proud to share with its members our most ambitious project to date— an e-book, video and podcast detailing the timing techniques used to make the Chuck Jones television special “How The Grinch Stole Christmas”. Chuck Jones was a master at controlling the pacing of the action for every single frame of his films. The method of timing cartoons in the golden age of animation is nothing like the way it is done today. We think you will learn a lot from this research, and perhaps discover some techniques to improve the timing of your own projects.

MUSICAL TIMING

One of the biggest mysteries about the way cartoons were made in the classic era is musical timing. The number of frames an action would take to perform was planned along with the music that would accompany the movement. This synergy of timing and music is a big part of why golden age cartoons are so much more rhythmic and synchronized than modern animation. The tool the director used to plan the timing of the action was the bar sheet. Every action was charted to follow a musical beat and structure right alongside the music composed to accompany it. Bar sheets ensured that the pacing was flexible, making it easy to accordion the timing in or out to accommodate specific overall running times. The accents in the animation were designed to fall in line with the musical form of beats, bars and measures. And if the action played a little bit too fast or too slow, it still felt correct when it was viewed because it matched the beat of the music. This allowed for maximum flexibility, and complete control over how the music and action were synchronized. With the advent of television and computers the process of timing animation has changed, and today the generation who knew how to time to a beat have long since retired or passed away. Musical timing has essentially become extinct.

In the mid 1970s, Chuck Jones visited the UCLA film school to speak to the students there. He made a gift of a batch of production material to Dan McLaughlin, the head of the animation department, to use in his curriculum. Included with this collection were the bar sheets for “Grinch”. Dan passed away last year, and his successor at UCLA, Doug Ward was charged with inventorying and finding a home for Dan’s collection of research materials. Doug is a member of Animation Resources, and was familiar with our previous research into musical timing, so he arranged to have the bar sheets donated to us for use in this project.

For the past six months, animator Davey Jarrell and Animation Resources President Stephen Worth have been formatting, breaking down and analyzing Chuck Jones’s bar sheets to reverse engineer the secrets of musical timing. The result of this research is now available for members to download. First of all, we have produced a PDF e-book, with high resolution scans of the bar sheets themselves. Covered with notes by the musical director of “Grinch”, Eugene Poddanny, and action notes by Chuck Jones, this document details the first pass of planning for how the storyboard should be edited to time; and it outlined the basic structure of the featured songs and underscore. Also included is a widescreen video which sets the finished animation right next to a scrolling timeline of the bar sheet notes. You can still frame through the video and count frames and see exactly how the planning formed the foundation for the final film. Lastly, Davey Jarrell and Stephen Worth have recorded an hour long audio podcast, where they explain in detail how the process worked and what we can take from it to inform modern day animation technique.

We understand that the material we are presenting here is quite dense and technical. It may not all sink in on your first perusal. We encourage you to download and save this e-book, video and podcast, and archive it all on your hard drive, so you can absorb it at your leisure. The research is still ongoing and if you discover things in here that we may have missed, please let us know so we can share your discoveries with our members. It would be fantastic if today’s animators could learn from the example set by great directors of the past like Chuck Jones. Building on a solid foundation like that is what is needed to take modern animation to a new level.

Animation Resources would like to thank Doug Ward and the family of Dan McLaughlin for sharing this important set of documents with us.

REFPACK032: Chuck Jones Bar Sheets Podcast

MP3 Audio File / 58:13 / 70 MB Download

REFPACK032: Chuck Jones Bar Sheets E-Book

Adobe PDF File / 74 Pages / 555 MB Download

REFPACK032: Chuck Jones Bar Sheets Video

MP4 Video File / HD Widescreen / 25:55 / 1.19 GB Download

Click to access the…

Annual Member Bonus Archive

Downloads expire after April 2025

Please Note: This is a large download. Please make sure nothing else is downloading in the background when you access it, and allow a little extra time for the download to complete.

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DVD QUALITY VIDEO:

Plaza (Beach)
Edward Sturlis / Poland / 1964

Poland is known for the wide diversity of its animation, from children’s puppet animation to surrealistic nightmares to important social and political commentary to pioneering computer animation. In general, Polish films are less focused on narrative than they are in putting across feelings and states of mind. We will be sharing more of the great work of Polish animators in the near future, but today we have a more straightforward little treat for you… Edward Sturlis’s “Beach”. I’m not going to say too much about it and let you discover its charm for yourself. It’s proof that sometimes the simplest ideas and the simplest execution is the best.

REFPACK032: Beach (1964)

MP4 Video File / SD / 8 minutes / 138 MB Download

Click to access the…

Annual Member Bonus Archive

Downloads expire after April 2025

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…

membership@animationresources.org
…and we will credit your membership with the additional time. These bonus downloads expire after May 1st, 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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https://animationresources.org/membership/levels/

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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.

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People who aren’t members of Animation Resources don’t understand how comprehensive our Reference Packs are. 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!
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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.

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REFPACK062: February-March 2025
SD VIDEO:

The Wolf & The Seven Kids

Pyotr Nosov / Souyzmultfilm / Russia / 1957
Download this article

In the past, Animation Resources has shared a few films by pioneering Russian animator, Pyotr Nosov. In our last RefPack, we featured “New Year Night” (1948), which he co-directed with Olga Khodatayeva. Nosov was born in 1907 and studied cinema at the Kiev Art Institute. His first animation credit was in 1931, alongside Lev Atamanov, (The Snow Queen). From 1934 to 1942, he was a cartoonist and illustrator for the Russian caricature journal, Krokodil as well as various children’s books over the years. He worked at Soyuzmultfilm as an animator and designer before being promoted to the director’s chair in 1943.

The film we are sharing today, “The Wolf And The Seven Kids” was based on a Russian fairy tale designed to teach children to be wary of strangers. The film has a great deal of dialogue, but it can be followed by a non-Russian speaker if you know the basic plot.

Once upon a time, a mother goat needed to leave the house to attend to an important errand. Concerned for the safety of her children while she was gone, she told them not to open the door to anyone but her. She taught them a little song and promised to sing the song to them through the door so they know it’s her. A wicked wolf who was a thief and bully overheard her speaking to her children and after the mother left, he sang the song to them. They recognized that the wolf’s growl was not their mother’s voice and refused to open the door. The wolf asked a blacksmith bear to help him create a thin singing voice. (It isn’t shown exactly how the bear accomplished this in the film, but it involved hammering a part of the wolf’s anatomy on his anvil!)

The wolf used his new voice to trick the little goats into opening the door and chased them through the house shoving them into a burlap sack. One little goat hid in the oven and when his mother returned, he told her what happened. Heartbroken, they searched the forest for the missing children. The forest animals led her to the wolf’s lair, and when the wolf left to fetch water, she snuck in and freed her kids from the sack. They filled the sack with bricks and hid when the wolf returned. The forest animals saw the danger and ran to the bear to tell him what the wolf had done. He became angry and rushed to punish the wolf. The wolf grabbed the bag of bricks and ran, falling into a stream and drowning under the weight of the bricks. The bear, goats and forest animals danced and sang happily.

I think you’ll be impressed at the high quality of the animation and backgrounds in this film. It’s amazing that films like this are virtually unknown in the United States. We will have more great Russian animation in upcoming RefPacks.

REFPACK062: The Wolf Seven Kids 1957

MP4 Video File / 10:22 / 173 MB Download

SD VIDEO:

The Little Checkered Dog

Sophia Oldak / Studio Miniature Filmowych / Poland / 1968

Occasionally, I’m called upon to write about a film that I know very little about. This is one of those cases. This charming film was directed by Sophia Oldak for the Polish animation studio, Studio Miniature Filmowych in 1968. I have been told that this is the first of three films featuring the little checkered dog, but I can’t find the other two films.

The thing that appeals to me about this film is its simplicity. It doesn’t try to be fancy, with complicated animation, elaborate stop motion armatures, and richly detailed backgrounds. It tells a story on a child’s level simply, and with a great deal of appeal.

One of the things that surprised me in this film was when a hand puppet was used in place of the stop motion dog. I would never have thought to do that myself… I would assume that if you are making a stop motion film, it should be all stop motion. But the change in technique works perfectly. It adds a little personality that is easy to accomplish in puppetry, but can be complex to achieve in animation. It reminds me that making a film isn’t about working hard, it’s about putting across a character simply, with a maximum of personality.

REFPACK062: Little Checkered Dog 1968

MP4 Video File / SD / 7:55 / 124 MB Download

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SD VIDEO:

Dog, Cat And… Ep 06

Leszek Komorowski / Studio Miniatur Filmowych, Poland / 1972

In this Reference Pack, we are sharing another short cartoon from a series produced by Studio Miniatur Filmowych, Pies, Kot I… which translates to Dog, Cat And… The episode is titled “Stove”.

This series is a different sort of take on the Tom & Jerry model, with the opponents outsmarting each other instead of just chasing each other out of hate or hunger. There is more to the relationship between the characters than just rivalry. The relationship of the characters makes it easy to see how it relates to slapstick comedy teams like Laurel & Hardy and Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton. The dog and cat are not just generic animals, but individual personalities with a dynamic relationship that is much more engaging than most “cat and mouse” or “dog and cat” cartoons.

These cartoons are almost devoid of dialogue with the focus on loose, funny animation. In fact, the drawings are often hilarious on their own, even removed from their context within the gag sequence. The facial expressions are well observed, and the poses employ clear silhouettes that form funny graphic shapes.

Well, Just You Wait!, and Dog, Cat And… both are very efficient at what they do. They could easily serve as a model for internet animation. The internet encourages repeat viewing more than television does. When you watch a dialogue driven cartoon on TV, once you’ve heard the jokes, you don’t need to watch it again. However, a short cartoon that looks and moves funny is entertaining no matter how many times you watch it. And for the animator who is making the cartoon, it’s a lot more fun to animate simple funny characters than it is to animated a lot of tedious lip-sync.

Dog, Cat And… looks like it was a lot of fun to make. The film makers at Studio Miniatur Filmowych didn’t feel constrained by the ordinary lives of animals. Their characters can drive cars, build their own houses and go to exotic places. That freedom allowed the animators to keep their series fresh, and gave them the opportunity to experiment within a 10 minute format. Simple drawings, funny movement and no rules… these are the kinds of series that would work well as episodic internet cartoons.

We will have more episodes from this series in upcoming Reference Packs.

REFPACK062: Pies Kot I Ep. 07

MP4 Video File / SD / 07:55 / 188 MB Download

SD VIDEO:

Ganso Tensai Bakabon Ep. 01 & 10

Hiroshi Saito / Tokyo Movie / Japan / 1975

Ganso Tensai Bakabon was the second series based on Fuji Akatsuka’s manga, debuting on October 6th, 1975. There were 103 half hour episodes produced by Tokyo Movie.

The characters are pretty typical to anime TV series at this time. Bakabon is a mischievous boy who causes problems for his dim witted father. Many of the stories involve Bakabon’s father coming up with crazy ways to accomplish a simple task, assuring everyone “It’ll be all right.” (It never ends up that way.) Bakabon’s younger brother is a genius, and his mother puts up with all the shenanigans like a good wife and mother. In the neighborhood is a strange neighbor and a hyperbolic cop, known to fire his guns indiscriminately when he’s angry.

The episodes I’ve selected to share involve a pig that is intended to be eaten for dinner, but no one has the heart to butcher him, so he grows to tremendous size… and an episode involving gangsters with lots of gunplay. But the stories really don’t matter. What matters is the drawings.

A lot of people believe the myth that there are 12 principles of animation. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are hundreds of principles, and animators with familiarity with all kinds of animated films know that. One of the principles that is used extensively in early TV anime is the use of exaggerated expressions. The technique involves creating impactful poses by exaggerating the facial expression to an absurd degree, while changing the proportions of the character to enhance the emotion being expressed. When a character expresses fear or surprise, their eyes can become huge and their head enlarges, their body becoming small with stubby legs and arms sticking straight out. A staggered pair of drawings often vibrates back and forth with a shocking sound effect. It’s easier to recognize than it is to describe, but if you’ve seen any early Japanese TV cartoons, you know what I’m talking about.

In “The Illusion of Life” Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston laid down rules that have been accepted as gospel, even though there are thousands of examples proving them wrong. One of the most egregious examples is when they say that a the volume and proportions of a character in a “take” should never exceed the volume and proportion of the character at rest. Tex Avery’s wolf in the Droopy cartoons and Jim Tyer’s Mighty Mouse “shrink take” break this rule on a regular basis, and Japanese extreme expressions violate Frank and Ollie’s commandment with a lot of glee.

In Disney animation, personality was expressed by means of a lot of tight drawings of characters moving in S curves and performing subtle facial expressions with follow through and overlapping action. Sometimes it worked, but sometimes it just made a scene look like a lot of work. Japanese TV animation expresses a great deal of personality in an efficient way that looks like the animators were having a lot of fun. And isn’t that the point of animated cartoons? I hope you’ll consider adapting the use of extreme expressions for your own films, and add a thirteenth fundamental principle of animation to your list!

REFPACK062: Ganso Tensai Bakabon Ep01

MP4 Video File / SD / 25:16 / 362 MB Download

REFPACK062: Ganso Tensai Bakabon Ep10

MP4 Video File / SD / 25:16 / 432 MB Download

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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…

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

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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.

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FREE PODCAST!

We are sharing our latest interview in honor of Members Appreciation Month to encourage you to join our organization so you can access the wealth of information we share with our members.

Christian Roman is a storyboard artist and director with over 30 years of experience in both TV and features. He storyboarded on 55 episodes of The Simpsons and on the Pixar classics Toy Story 3, Toy Story 4, Cars 3, Onward, and Elemental. He also directed on the TV series Fillmore, Mission Hill, and The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat. He’s currently on the faculty at the School of Visual Arts. Listen to Christian talk about his creative process and the nuts and bolts of professional storyboarding in the latest episode of Animated Discussions!

AD017: Christian Roman Interview
MP4 Video File / 1:07:15 / 588 MB Download

One of the least discussed benefits of Animation Resources membership is the podcast initiative overseen by Davey Jarrell. Along with David Eisman, we produce a variety of video and audio podcasts and seminars that are shared on our Members Only Download Page.

In the past, we’ve interviewed people like Joe Murray, Leonard Robinson and Sandro Cleuzo as well as hosting discussions on how to use live action reference, cartoony music and cinematography. We’ve done deep dives into 500 years of both Western cartooning and the roots of Anime, and an in-depth look at Acting for Animation. Ten of our past programs are available to members on our Download Page and our Bonus Archive Page. Join now to get instant access to them.

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…

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

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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.

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