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You have one more week to download REFPACK057. In the beginning of June, a new RefPack will be uploaded and the current one will be deleted. JOIN TODAY To Access All The Members Only Content

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.

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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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SD VIDEO:

Two Films By Hans Held

The Troublemaker 1940 / Baron Munchausen 1944
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In previous Reference Packs, we’ve featured films by the German animator Hans Fischerkoesen. Drafted by Joseph Goebbels to produce animated films for the Nazi regime and charged with building a studio to rival Walt Disney, Fischerkoesen succeeded in making some remarkable cartoons that largely avoided straying over the line into being outright propaganda. Today we feature one of Fischerkoesen’s peers, Hans Held, who wasn’t quite as lucky or successful.

Held was born in Bavaria in 1910 and worked at the Brandenberger Theater as a designer when the Nazis rose to power. He was drafted by Goebbels to work at UFA as a design and color consultant and assistant director for live action films. Because of Goebbels’ and Hitler’s interest in animation, Held established an animation studio in Bavaria. He produced several films, but none were as execrable in their propaganda content as “The Troublemaker”.

The story is simple and blunt in its purpose. A magpie spots a fox lurking in the forest and notifies the police and her rabbit neighbors. A group of hedgehog soldiers alerts a squadron of wasps and war erupts. The fox threatens a rabbit girl, but is eventually killed by a catapult. The animals of the forest rejoice at the fox’s death. Held rams home the analogy to the Nazi militarism of the time, by making characters run in a goose-step and by using the sound of contemporary fighter aircraft for the wasps. I don’t need to point out what group of people the fox is meant to represent.

Held’s experience in the theater is a limiting factor here. The entire film is constructed of medium long shots that are stagey and devoid of any cinematic interest. The backgrounds are painted like theatrical backdrops, and the character movement is blocked without expressing any personality. Goebbels learned from his mistake. After this first attempt, he instructed the animators he supervised to focus on core cultural virtues, rather than direct propaganda. The films that followed, specifically those by Fischerkoesen were much more successful.

In 1943, the UFA studio released a large scale color live action film, designed to compete with MGM’s lavish musicals and adventure films like Alexander Korda’s “The Thief of Bagdad”. No expense as spared to make this film the biggest and most elaborate film Germany had ever produced. Because of his relationship with UFA, Goebbels called on Hans Held to make an animated short featuring the character with an eye to perhaps create a series of animated Munchausen adventures. The result was an abject failure. The war effort had drained the resources of Held’s studio and the Nazi regime was beginning to crack. Held had learned very little since “The Troublemaker”, and “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” succeeded in being even more stiff and devoid of personality than its predecessor.

Sometimes we can learn as much from bad examples as good ones. Hans Held is an example of an artist who was skilled in the medium of live theater and live action movies, but was wrongly cast as an animator by Goebbels. These films also show that as persuasive as animation can be, there needs to be a certain core of humanity if one wants the audience to embrace the idea. The Nazis were ill suited to compete with Walt Disney, who had his finger on the pulse of middle America and strove to serve his audience, not force his audience to serve his ideology.

REFPACK057: The Troublemaker 1940

MP4 Video File / SD / 12:06 / 402 MB Download

REFPACK057: Baron Munchausen 1944

MP4 Video File / SD / 07:11 / 98 MB Download

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Well, Just You Wait Ep.07

Vyacheslav Kotyonochkin / Soyuzmultfilm, Russia / 1973

We continue the Russian Wolf and Rabbit cartoons with episode 07, “Cruise Ship At Sea”.

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 the series in an omnibus film called “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, 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.

In these Russian cartoons, there’s almost no dialogue, and the action almost always occurs on screen. Static tableaux are rare, as are detailed backgrounds and “on model” drawings. These cartoons focus on expressive poses and movement, and save time and expense by avoiding the careful cleanup required for character model details and overlapping action. The theory here is, if it moves funny, it’s funny… and they are right about that.

Shamus Culhane once lamented that television animation consisted of mostly lip-sync animation. He would have preferred to do away with lip-sync entirely and just have simple drawings that really move. Well, Just You Wait proves that he was correct.

We will have more Wolf and Rabbit cartoons in upcoming Reference Packs.

REFPACK057: Well Just You Wait Ep. 07

MP4 Video File / SD / 09:32 / 116 MB Download

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Dog, Cat And… Ep 06

Jaroslaw Jakubiec & Jan Siupik / 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 "Vacuum Cleaner".

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.

REFPACK057: Dog Cat And… Ep06

MP4 Video File / SD / 09:16 / 212 MB Download

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Goku no Daiboken Ep. 1 & 11

Giasaburo Sugii / Japan / 1967

Goku no Daiboken (aka Adventures Of The Monkey King) was an animated series released in 1967 made by Mushi Productions. It was supervised by Giasaburo Sugii, and directed by several artists including Osamu Dezaki, Hideaki Kitao and Sad Tsukioka, among others. The 39 episodes were loosely based on the 16th century Chinese epic tale, Journey to the West. Ostensibly, Osamu Tezuka was the creator of the series, but he had very little to do with the production of the series, since he was completing the final episodes of Mighty Atom (Astro Boy) while Goku no Daiboken was in production at Sugii’s studio. Tezuka had published a manga comic based on Journey To The West, but this animated version is quite different in tone.

Sugii’s take on the characters was more “rough and tumble”. The focus was on the animation, with extreme takes and reflexive gags. Pay attention to the design as well. There are some very attractive layouts and color schemes. One scene even references Hanna Barbera’s The Flintstones!

The main character, Goku wasn’t portrayed as the eager student like in the manga; instead he was an obnoxious brat. In fact, the show received so many complaints from teachers, the character had to be toned down in later episodes. Along with Goku, the cartoons star his girlfriend Tatsuko, Hakkai the pig and Sha Gojo, the monk. The series debuted as a replacement for Astro Boy which had just completed its final season.

In the first episode, Goku is born at Mt. Kaka. He becomes a bratty pest and decides to take over the local castle just for fun. In episode 11, the characters visit a town where an election is taking place. Two political parties are facing off, the votes of Goku and his friends look like they will decide the election, but the campaigning gets out of hand.

We will bring you more early anime in upcoming Reference Packs.

REFPACK057: Monkey King Ep. 1

MP4 Video File / SD / 26:59 / 374 MB Download

REFPACK057: Monkey King Ep. 11

MP4 Video File / SD / 26:04 / 329 MB Download

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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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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. Over the next couple of weeks, we will be posting what each section of our current RefPack looks like, starting today with the Featured 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.

What are you waiting for?

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

Every other month, Animation Resources shares a new Reference Pack with its members. They consist of an e-book packed with high resolution scans and video downloads set up for still frame study. Make sure you download the Reference Pack before it’s updated. When it’s gone, it’s gone!

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REFPACK057: April – May 2024
PDF E-BOOK:

Hokusai Manga Volume 3

Katsushika Hokusai / 1814
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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. Japan was closed to the Western world while Hokusai was living and working, but it didn’t take long after Japan’s borders were opened to the world for his fame spread to the West. He is now regarded as one of the greatest artists in the entire history of art.

Hokusai was born in 1760, the son of a mirror maker. At the age of six he joined his father painting decorations around mirror frames. When he was twelve, his father sent him to work at a bookseller, where he was surrounded by books full of beautiful woodblock prints. This inspired him to apprentice with a woodblock carver, which eventually led him to joining the studio of Katsukawa Shunsho, a prominent artist who designed woodblock prints. He worked in Shunsho’s studio and studied under him for over a decade.

Today we think of woodblock prints as fine art. That’s a logical expectation, since the style derived from Chinese fine art painting. But at this time in the history of Japan, woodblock prints were considered to be disposable pop culture. Known as “ukiyo-e”, which translates to "floating world", the prints depicted popular courtesans and kabuki actors, who were much like the movie stars and pop idols of our time. One series of prints even featured the prettiest waitresses at Edo restaurants. The customers for these prints were citizens of the merchant class, low ranking shopkeepers and dealers who had begun to accumulate wealth and were eager to spend it on “wine, women and song”. The term ukiyo-e started off as a joke. The phrase itself sounded like a Buddhist term meaning “the world of sorrow and grief”. But the “floating world” was actually a nickname for Edo’s red-light district, which was surrounded by canals that made it appear to be floating on water.

Ukiyo-e prints were mass produced in much the same manner… A publisher would commission an artist to create a painting. Then a skilled carver would translate that painting into hand carved printing blocks. A printer would ink the blocks and transfer the image to paper using pressure. There were specialists in each area. Usually the artist had no contact with the people carving and printing his images. However, Hokusai’s experience as a woodcarver’s apprentice gave him an edge; and throughout his career, he kept close tabs on how the prints he designed were being printed.

Hokusai’s master, Shunsho died in 1793. This prompted Hokusai to began searching for a style of his own. He ran across some Dutch and French copper engravings and began to experiment applying Western techniques and perspective to the principles he had learned from Shunsho. At this time, he also took studies at the Kano school, which was a rival to the one he belonged to. This enraged Shunsho’s main follower Shunko, who expelled Hokusai from the group of artists at the studio. Instead of discouraging Hokusai, this gave him added energy. He said of the event, "What really motivated the development of my artistic style was the embarrassment I suffered at Shunko’s hands."

Hokusai’s subjects began to expand beyond portraits of kabuki actors and geisha. He created illustrated humor books, fantasy novels, erotic art and scenes of everyday life. With Famous Sights Of The Eastern Capital and Eight Views of Edo he explored landscape painting. Hokusai’s draftsmanship was well respected, and his fame grew exponentially over the next few years… but it didn’t go to his head. He always maintained a sense of humor about himself. At a festival he painted a huge portrait of a Buddhist monk named Daruma with brooms and buckets of paint. And at another, he painted a blue curve on a piece of paper, dipped a chicken’s feet in red paint, and had it run across the picture. He then presented the image to the presiding shogun as a landscape of the Tatsua river with red maple leaves floating in it. The unusual painting won first prize in the competition.

Hokusai’s fame attracted talented young artists, eager to study under him. He took on 50 pupils over the years. In 1812, he found himself in need of some quick money, and decided to publish an art manual called Quick Lessons In Simplified Drawing. The book was surprisingly successful, so the following year, he published the first volume of a series of sketchbooks known as Hokusai Manga. At that time, the word “manga” meant “random drawings” and that is exactly what his first volume consisted of… scenes of everyday life, animals, plants, landscapes, rendering experiments… the book contained very little text, just lots and lots of amazing drawings.

In our internet age, it might not be obvious what the purpose of this kind of book would be. If we want reference for what an ox looks like, or how to group leaves on a bush naturally, we just type a search term into Google and we are presented with dozens of options. But in the early 19th century, reference like this was not as easy to come by. Hokusai would go out into the world and draw everything he saw in his sketchbook. He would study the way people interact and move, the anatomy of a goose, how forms overlap on hills and mountains, and the groupings of buildings in a village. These studies would be arranged into books he would refer to when designing a woodblock print that required these sorts of elements. The sketchbooks would then be shared with students as a “copy book” so they could duplicate his sketches to learn from the master by recreating the way he constructed his drawings. The first volume of Hokusai Manga, titled "Brush Gone Wild" was published in 1814 to great success. In subsequent years, he published 13 volumes in total, with his students adding two more to the set after his death.

The importance of these little sketch books can’t be overestimated. In 1831, lithographs made from the pages of Hokusai Manga were published in Germany, and in 1854 when Commodore Matthew Perry opened communication with Japan to the West, importers struggled to fill the demand for the books in European capitals. Even though there were huge cultural differences, and Japan remained a mystery to Westerners, Hokusai’s artistic importance was immediately recognized for its vitality, innovative compositions, naturalism and draftsmanship.

The volunteers of Animation Resources have taken great pains to insure that Hokusai’s genius is not undermined by poor reproduction. Hundreds of hours of careful digital restoration has gone into this e-book to create the ultimate version of Hokusai’s masterwork. If you would like us to share more volumes from this set with you, let us know.

REFPACK057: Hokusai Manga Vol. 3

PDF / 74 Pages / 190 MB Download

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Three Transitional MGM Cartoons

“The Bookworm Turns” 1940 / “The Alley Cat” 1941 / “The Stork’s Holiday” 1943

Throughout their careers, Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising pushed to produce films with high production values to compete with Disney on his own turf. This ended up causing friction with the studios that financed their cartoons. There was no set footage limit for their shorts. Many of them run three or four minutes longer than other studios’ cartoons. The emphasis on lavish backgrounds and full animation became so much of a focus at times that entertainment value suffered. It was all eye candy and overlapping action with very little humor. Rudy Ising was once quoted as saying that he aspired to make a cartoon without a single gag… and with a couple of his films, he might have actually succeeded at that. Their cartoons were needlessly complex, over-animated and had timing that was sluggish to the point of dragging.

Clearly, this couldn’t continue. MGM fired Harman and Ising in 1937 and created an in-house animation studio. But they required the team’s experience to produce shorts on a schedule, so they hired them back the following year to work with a team of younger artists. The shorts produced in this transitional time didn’t exhibit the influence of the young blood at first, but after a year or two the humor in the shorts became more focused. In particular, the influence of Bill Hanna made a pronounced improvement on the timing. Action became snappier and the pacing of the cartoons sped up. Eventually, Hanna would partner with Joe Barbera to direct “Puss Gets The Boot”, the first Tom & Jerry cartoon, which would set the house style for the studio for the next two decades.

The first cartoon we are sharing, “The Bookworm Turns” was directed by Hugh Harman (and uncredited Friz Freleng). The timing is even and slow. Note how long it takes the bookworm to run from the raven. There are pauses built into the dash, undercutting its impact. Compare that to the chases involving the angry bulldog in our second cartoon, “The Alley Cat”. Hanna skillfully contrasts the smooth motion of the girl cat with the sparky movements of the alley cat, and the animation of the jittery butler is quite unique. It’s amazing how much of a difference there is in just one year’s time.

Harman and Ising departed from MGM in 1941. Several of the younger animators at the studio stepped up to try their hand at directing. One of these was former Terrytoons animator, George Gordon. Joe Barbera had invited him to relocate from New York to Hollywood and he had been animating for MGM for several years before being offered a chance to direct. Our third cartoon, “The Stork’s Holiday” is an anomaly in the MGM cartoon filmography. It feels more like a Warner Bros. cartoon than an MGM one. The anthropomorphic guns are clearly inspired by the work of Boris Artzybasheff, and Gordon would go on to do something similar in an industrial film called “Families Of Steel” at John Sutherland Studios years later.

MGM’s one-shot cartoons have been poorly served on home video. Aside from one collection on laserdisc many years ago, they have only been available to be seen sporadically on cable TV. Animation Resources thanks Advisory Board Member Steve Stanchfield for sharing these interesting films with us.

REFPACK057: Bookworm Turns 1940

MP4 Video File / SD / 8:51 / 142 MB Download

REFPACK057: Alley Cat 1941

MP4 Video File / SD / 9:39 / 185 MB Download

REFPACK057: Storks Holiday 1943

MP4 Video File / SD / 7:54 / 169 MB Download

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Animation Resources is a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization dedicated to providing self study material to the worldwide animation community. 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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