AnimationResources.org – Serving the Online Animation Community

Download RefPack068 ReviewEvery month, Animation Resources shares an amazing Reference Pack with its members. These carefully curated collections 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. Members will have 30 days to download the current batch of treasures from the Animation Archive A new RefPack will be posted at the beginning of the next month. Bookmark the Members Only Page and remember to check back every month, because when the new month starts, the old downloads go POOF!

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REFPACK068: February 2025

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…

PDF E-BOOK:

Billy DeBeck’s Barney Google

Daily Strips – May 7th to October 5th, 1923
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William Morgan DeBeck (April 15, 1890 – November 11, 1942), better known as Billy DeBeck, was an American cartoonist. He is most famous as the creator of the comic strip Barney Google. The strip was especially popular in the 1920s and 1930s, and featured a number of well-known characters, including Barney Google, Bunky, Snuffy Smith and Spark Plug the race horse.

The dilapidated, blanket-covered horse was a huge hit with readers, a marketing and merchandising phenomenon that has been called the Snoopy of the 1920s. Toys, balloons and games were among the popular items adorned with Sparky’s image. When DeBeck introduced the horse, he also introduced a little-used technique into the strip- ongoing continuity. Barney Google went from being a gag-a-day strip to one in which both humor and suspense kept readers coming back every day.

DeBeck’s art style falls in the "big-foot" tradition of American comic strips. His influence continues to be felt. Modern cartoonists like Ralph Bakshi, Robert Crumb and Bobby London have expressed their appreciation of DeBeck’s pioneering work.

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Three UPA Directors

John Hubley / Bobe Cannon / Pete Burness

UPA made a name for itself with a fresh approach to animation using a modernist visual aesthetic, similar to the magazine cartoons of Virgil Partch and Sam Cobean. Three directors stood out at UPA. In this Reference Pack we are presenting a film by each of them for you to compare and contrast.

John Hubley

Ragtime Bear (1949)

The hallmark of Hubley’s directoral style was his focus on personality- not formula personalities like in Disney films, but uniquely specific ones derived from observation of life. Magoo isn’t the only specific character in this film. All of them, even the hotel employee is keenly observed. Hubley also put a strong emphasis on sound in his cartoons. Many of them feature Jazz soundtracks by well known musicians. Hubley encouraged Jim Backus, the voice of Magoo, to ad-lib asides further defining the personality and establishing Magoo as the star character of UPA.

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Bobe Cannon

Georgie And The Dragon (1951)

Cannon’s work at UPA contrasts sharply with the more slapstick animation he produced under Jones, Clampett, and Avery. Set against the gag-filled landscape of animated short films in the 1950s, his films stand out, bringing a simple and endearing quality to the screen. Cannon’s sense of appeal isn’t just limited to design; it extends to the animation itself, which has a fluid and whimsical quality. Take a look at the sequence of Georgie and his new dragon fumbling around until they land in the basement. Notice the flow of the poses, the masterful arcs and slow ins and outs that Cannon employs. This clearly contrasts with the other two shorts featured, where Burness and Hubley focus on sharp, unique designs and snap to pose motion to emphasize the comedy. However, Cannon’s apparent simplicity is deceptive. He is carefully balancing the fundamentals of design and motion to create a hyper-reality that feels like magic.

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Pete Burness

Pete Hothead (1952)

Released in 1952, "Pete Hothead" is a wonderful example of Pete Burness’s work not just because of the style of the cartoon, but because it was based on Burness himself. Bill Scott and Phil Eastman used Burness’s reputation for having a short temper as the basis for a gag-filled cartoon. Lead designer Ted Parmelee, who also art directed the UPA short "The Telltale Heart" (1953), was given free rein to take the flat stylized perspectives of UPA’s house style to an extreme degree. From the opening scene to the layout of the department store, Parmelee pushes the artwork to near-total abstraction. Burness’s tight timing and clear staging prevent the hyper-detailed backgrounds from totally upstaging the character animation.

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SD VIDEO:

Opera

Bruno Bozetto / Italy / 1973
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Bruno Bozzetto is an Italian animator known for his animated parody of Fantasia, Allegro Non Troppo (1976); his take on superheroes VIP My Brother Superman (1968); and his animated "Spaghetti Western" West And Soda (1965). (See previous Reference Packs.) "Opera" (1973) serves as a precursor to Allegro non Troppo. Brimming with visual gags, Bozetto’s short takes a stab at the self-importance and inanity of famous operas and the audience that attends them. As a bonus, Bozetto tosses in ridicule towards the uncaring hypocrisy of the United States as well as the pitfalls of industrialization. His fun sense of design and frenetic animation are perfect for political satire, proving that comedy is a more effective way to put a point across than didactic seriousness.

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Three Films By Hans Fischerkoesen

At The Bosom Of Nature (1951) / Dead Point (1955) / The Recipe (1957) / Germany

Often referred to as the “Walt Disney of Germany”, Hans Fischerkoesen was arguably the most influential German animator of all time. His prolific advertising career began in 1921 and spanned until his death in the early 1970s, achieving widespread fame throughout Europe. Although much of his early work is lost, his greatest success occurred in the decades after WWII in the small town of Mehlem, just outside of Bonn. There, no longer stifled by Nazi restrictions of the 1930s and 40s, he produced over a thousand animated commercials. Today, we share three examples from the peak of Fischerkoesen’s career.

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The Taming Of The Black Giant

Irena & Karel Dodal / Czechoslovakia / 1935

The tale of Irena and Karel Dodal is one of triumph and tragedy. In 1933, the couple founded IRE-Film, the first commercial animation studio in Central Europe. After receiving a contract with the Czecho-Slovak broadcast company, Radiojournal, IRE-Film animated over 30 advertising shorts over the next 5 years. "The Taming of the Black Giant" is an advertisement for Saponia soap. It pushes the bounds of animation up to that point by incorporating touches of Constructivist and Surrealist design, movements popular in Prague’s art scene at the time. Clearly influenced by the films of the Fleischer Brothers, it succeeds at establishing a Czech style of animation. However, their success was short-lived. In 1938, the Nazis annexed Czechoslovakia and IRE-Film was forced to close its doors. Irena Dodal’s family was Jewish, so they were incarcerated in the Resienstadt ghetto until the end of the war. They both survived and emigrated to the United States and then Argentina; but they were never able to re-establish themself in animation.

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ANALYSIS:

Rod Scribner

Curated By David Eisman
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There are so many legendary figures to discuss from the Golden Age of animation: Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, and Friz Freleng to name just a few. However, when I first began learning about this period of animation history, the figure who stood out to me the most was Rod Scribner, so that is who I will be spotlighting for this breakdown. Rod Scribner was a master of acting in animation. Specifically, he was exemplary in imbuing his characters’ performances with a wild, chaotic energy that is just undeniably captivating on screen.

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VIDEO PODCAST:

Bill & Karen Drastal

Animated Discussions 021 / Hosted by Davey Jarrell with Bill & Karen Drastal
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Bill and Karen Drastal have been working in the TV animation industry since 2017. After working for many years as a caricaturist, Bill worked as a storyboard artist at Bento Box and Warner Brothers on shows like The Great North, Central Park, HouseBroken, and Yabba-Dabba Dinosuars!, where Karen also worked as a layout artist. They formed an independent animation studio in 2018 called Chubby Beagle Productions to provide an alternative to big studio animation. Through Chubby Beagle, Bill and Karen directed the storyboards and animation for the animated feature, Maxxie LaWow: Drag Super-shero, which has been making headlines in the festival circuit over the past year. Listen to Bill and Karen talk about what it’s like to run a small animation studio in the latest of Animated Discussions!

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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 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 two 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.

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JOIN TODAY!
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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Animation Resources Needs Your Help!

It’s the end of the year and it’s time for us to back up all the images and videos we’ve digitized lately. All of our hard drives are full and we need about two hundred terabytes to protect the material our volunteers have gathered for our archive this year. A 22 TB hard drive costs $275. The holiday season is coming up; and if you’d like to remember us in your gift list, we would greatly appreciate it.

You can gift a membership to a friend or peer or donate directly using the PayPal link below. We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational foundation, so your gift may be tax deductible. All of the funds received will go to expanding our offerings to our supporters.

Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its projects. Even if you can’t afford to contribute a lot right now, please click the button below to donate whatever you can afford using PayPal.

Download RefPack067 ReviewEvery month, Animation Resources shares an amazing Reference Pack with its members. These carefully curated collections 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. Members will have 30 days to download the current batch of treasures from the Animation Archive A new RefPack will be posted at the beginning of the next month. Bookmark the Members Only Page and remember to check back every month, because when the new month starts, the old downloads go POOF!

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MEMBERS LOGIN To Download

JOIN TODAY To Access Members Only Content

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REFPACK067: December 2025

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…

PDF E-BOOK

Henry Heath

Omnium Gatherum Volume One
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The late 1700s and early 1800s marked an unique time in the history of British cartooning. Political and social satire was at the forefront of popular culture, and cartooning was flourishing courtesy of the technology of copperplate printing. World events. particularly the descent of King George III into mental illness, the rise of the rivalry between the Whigs and Torys, the upsurge of urban poverty, and the Napoleonic wars in France provided the conflict to grease the wheels of political satire. Great caricaturists like James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank became famous for their cartoons which sold by the thousands.

At this time newspapers and magazines were not yet the primary venue for political cartooning. Instead comic images were sold as individual prints or broadsheets. The price of prints was well within the reach of even the most humble person. Young and old, rich and poor scrambled to snatch up the brightly colored comic images to pin on the walls of their home. When they tired of them, the tossed them in the fireplace and got new ones. In this way, they served much the same purpose as the Japanese woodblock prints which were popular around the same time halfway around the world.

The subject of this e-book is a cartoonist named Henry Heath. Normally, I would provide a brief biography here, but I’m afraid almost nothing is known of Heath. He was active in London around 1840, publishing dozens of cartoons making fun of London street people, rural commoners and various ethnic types, as well as sketchbook pages titled “Omnium Gatherum” which is Latin for “Hodgepodge”. Unlike his contemporaries, he seems to have had no interest in politics, focusing instead on gags involving fishing and horseback riding. There are a series of prints on a variety of themes, including one on the problems faced by young husbands. But of primary interest here are the pages of sketches dealing with demonology and witchcraft. Heath’s imagination has no bounds, rivaling Hieronymous Bosch for its surreal extremes. I think you’ll find them fascinating. The only other bit of information I can find about Heath is that shortly after the publishing of this group of cartoons, he emigrated to Australia and was never heard from again.

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DVD QUALITY VIDEO:

Tuberculosis: You Can Help

Paul Fennell Studios (ca. 1945)

Industrial films are fascinating to study. Their primary purpose was to educate and inform, but they also needed to hold the audience’s interest. Animation provided the perfect balance of function and fun. These films were designed with a very specific audience in mind, and were ephemeral films- after their audience had been reached with the message, the films were no longer needed. For this reason, only a small fraction of the number of industrial films produced over the years survive. Budgets were very low and schedules were short. Dialogue, music and design had to carry the show.

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DVD QUALITY VIDEO:

Theatrical Commercial Reel

Paul Fennell Studios (ca. 1938-1939)

Ed Benedict was a pioneer of using animation for advertising. In 1937, Benedict animated on a Walter Lantz cartoon sponsored by Ipana Toothpaste, and it gave him an idea. Along with Jerry Brewer, he pitched Richfield Oil with the idea of projecting animated commercials on billboards in busy downtown areas, synchronized to the flow of traffic. The project fell through, but Benedict and Brewer continued to pick up commercial work, producing promotional short subjects with musical themes for theatrical release.

In 1939, Benedict began freelancing for Cartoon Films Ltd, which was built from the studio and remaining staff of the old Ub Iwerks cartoon studio in Beverly Hills. Along with director Paul Fennell, Benedict designed and animated a series of one minute cartoons for clients like Shell Oil and Rinso Soap. These cartoons were provided to theaters at no charge, and the production of the animation was underwritten by the sponsor. However independent theaters were few and far between. Most were locked into block booking contracts, where they could only run the films supplied to them by the studio with whom they were affiliated. Cartoon Films’ animated commercials got squeezed out of the market, and Fennell and Benedict went their separate ways. In the late 1940s, Ed returned to Fennell’s studio and picked up where he left off, designing industrial films and animated commercials designed for the new medium of television.

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Army-Navy Screen Magazine:

The Navy After The War

First Motion Picture Unit (ca. 1945)

The Army-Navy Screen Magazine was a series of short subjects shown to military personel during World War II. The films preceded the screening of a Hollywood feature and served several purposes… First of all, it shared news of home with GIs on the front lines, secondly it provided information about the progress of the war effort, and lastly it trained servicemen in an entertaining manner.

Under the supervision of director Frank Capra, the series included animated cartoons featuring Private Snafu produced by Warner Bros, as well as training films with animation by UPA, MGM, Disney and Harman Ising. This particular installment of the Army-Navy Screen Magazine features brilliant design by John Hubley, and probably was made shortly before he left the service to join UPA.

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You Are A Human Animal

Disney / 1955-1977

Animation is not only an entertainment medium, it can also educate. When educational films are overly didactic and dense with content, they often fail to get the ideas across. But animation engages the audience and presents information in a clear symbolic way that remains in the mind long after the film is over.

At the end of WWII, no studio was better equipped to put their staff to work to educate and inform than Disney. With the debut of the Disneyland television program and the Mickey Mouse Club, Disney had opened up a whole new distribution medium for this kind of educational entertainment. “Man In Space”, “Our Friend the Atom” and the nature series “True Life Adventures” were distributed on 16mm film to schools and libraries. Nearly every child growing up in the 50s and 60s saw Disney educational films. The most popular series in schools were the group of Jiminy Cricket educational films packaged under the titles, “I’m No Fool” and “You Are A Human Animal”. Most of these films are rarely seen today.

We’re particularly proud to be able to share this new transfer of the “You Are A Human Animal” series with our members. These eight films focus on health subjects for elementary school age children. The first film introduces the idea that people are animals, while pointing out the differences between humankind and the animal kingdom. Next, the five senses are introduced. Then the films focus on eyesight, nutrition, the systems of the body, hearing, the sense of touch, and smelling and tasting.

The limited animation techniques employed in these films are directly applicable to modern internet animation, and the appealing imagery and color shows how careful design and compositional planning can make a film look simple and appealing. For economy, the fully animated scenes were cleverly reused in each film. Also note the expressive thicks and thins in the lines. This was referred to “TV inking” and its purpose was to allow expression and detail to read clearly even at low resolutions. (Does that give you any ideas about how line quality could make mobile app animation look better?) We hope you find these films useful in your self study and find ways to incorporate these techniques into your own work.

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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 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 two 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.

---

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.

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