A Renaissance Happening Right in Front of Us

Welcome! It’s another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and the plan goes like this:

• 1. Another look at things that aren’t being lost.
• 2. A little about Nina Shorina.
• 3. Animation newsbits.
• 4. The last word.

With that, let’s go!

1. What’s coming back

A lost film by Georges Méliès, first screened in the 1800s, was found last year. This past February, it came online. The print was on nitrate stock, which is unstable and flammable, but it survived undiscovered for some 100 years. Now, Gugusse and the Automaton is back.

That film isn’t animated. But the same thing is happening in animation all around the world. Lost films are getting found, degraded films are getting restored and restored films are getting released.

The Legend of Miragaia (1931), one of the earliest Portuguese animated films, was considered lost. Earlier this year, it turned up at a flea market in Lisbon. The lost La transmisión del mando supremo (1921), Chile’s first animation, was located in a private collection in 2023. Today, it’s online for free.

We wrote recently about The Idea by Berthold Bartosch. Although influential, it decayed with time. In 2019, a project was begun to revitalize the film with modern tools. “The restoration of The Idea (1934) could not have been done properly without the help of digital technology,” noted two people involved.

The new version hit DVD at the start of this year, accompanied by six minutes of Bartosch’s Saint Francis, a masterpiece mostly destroyed during World War II. Both look amazing. Neither was widely available in this form even 12 months ago.

Right now, all of us are living through a renaissance in animation preservation. It’s a defining part of the 21st century, and we’ve mentioned it before, but not often enough.

It’s become so normal that it’s easy to take for granted. As you read this, endless restored classics from communist Poland (here) and the former Yugoslavia (here) are sitting online for free. The same is true of Canadian animation (here), and beyond.

In America, major works by Slovakia’s Viktor Kubal and Hungary’s Marcell Jankovics are out in beautiful quality and at reasonable prices. Meanwhile, back in June, three films by the stop-motion master Jiří Trnka (The Hand, Old Czech Legends and The Czech Year) appeared in Britain on a region-free Blu-ray, subtitled.

Some of those films had badly declined even in Trnka’s own time. “Already, The Czech Year is almost gone today. The color is disappearing from the negative and no one cares to preserve the thing,” Trnka said in 1963. Following its restoration in the 2010s, though, it now looks as good as it did in the ‘40s.

In its heyday, Trnka’s work changed the world: animators from Czechoslovakia to China, and Japan to the USSR, took notes. What does it mean for that work to return? No one knows.

That goes for the rest of this stuff as well. What’s happening is still underway, too fresh to assess yet. And many factors are causing it.

For one, governments once lukewarm toward animation are treating it as national heritage. Mexico just restored six of its earliest cartoons; Cuba is fighting to save the work of Juan Padrón; Spain revived one of its first animated features in 2022. This March, Armenia retook control of Armenfilm, the studio that used to house its best animators, and there’s already talk of “film heritage preservation.” Ukraine, likewise, has been doing a lot.

Besides government interest, older studios want to renew their back catalogs. Take Soyuzmultfilm’s re-releases last year, or the mass restorations by Shanghai Animation Film Studio, or the deluxe treatment that Toei Animation is giving its mid-century films (the next one is due in October).

The boom in boutique distribution helps, too. In the 2020s, Deaf Crocodile (with which we’ve collaborated) has brought back films like The Snow Queen, Heroic Times and The Pied Piper, the last with strong approval from its director.

Also helping: an army of unpaid film enthusiasts who track down, preserve and restore older animation.

Last year, we broke the news that Roy from Space (1983), a lost feature from Mexico, had been found. Its discoverer, Alejandro Vidal Charris, was someone with no background in film or animation. He simply had free time during the pandemic. “Everybody was bored in their houses, so, out of boredom, I started to Google about lost media,” he told us. The film comes out on Blu-ray this month.

Enthusiasts like Charris are working overtime. You find groups of them behind the growing Vidachestvo Archive, and the underground scanning project to preserve 35 mm prints of Soviet animation. They’ve salvaged The Thief and the Cobbler and the Raggedy Ann & Andy movie, and rarities like Sailor and the Devil (1967).

An animator named Daniel Aguirre Hansell happened to find that last one in 2021, and he got it stored with the BFI. While waiting on a full restoration, he’s kept digging — he posted a rough reconstruction of Sailor on YouTube just today.

There’s a lot of swirling energy. You could chalk it up to the internet, or to the power of modern restoration tools. Both are part of it. But the biggest thing is the spreading awareness that 20th-century animation wasn’t simply ephemera. It mattered, and its achievements need to be kept alive.

It needs to be said: the animation canon isn’t settled. You may have seen it fluctuate in your lifetime. During the late 20th century, the Warner cartoons were inescapable, and UPA was pretty niche. More recently, UPA’s films have resurged a bit, and Bugs Bunny’s fame isn’t what it used to be.

Hungarian movies like Heroic Times and Jankovics’s Son of the White Mare have spread widely in the 2020s, but they were obscure in their own era. In the ‘70s, Raggedy Ann & Andy was a dire flop disowned by most of its team; viewers from Gen Z, watching it on YouTube, have turned it into a cult hit.

As older and lost work gets a second chance, everything is subject to change. There was a period when Lotte Reiniger’s Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) was known only to the hardcore. Since its restoration in 1999, it’s had a huge rise.

The films of Reiniger’s assistants Berthold Bartosch (of The Idea) and Walter Ruttmann were similarly beaten up by time. The latter’s Lichtspiel Opus I (1921) is a brilliant piece of abstract animation. It was only reassembled around the turn of the millennium. The film is currently on YouTube with hundreds of thousands of views; anyone can take inspiration from it.

That new release of Bartosch’s work, including the fragments of Saint Francis, represents an opening for another remarkable talent. And he isn’t alone.

With every Thunderbean compilation of early American cartoons, and every John and Faith Hubley film streamed by Criterion, and every oddity like 3DV (1983) dug up by passionate people online, the shape of animation shifts a little. What inspires the next wave of artists could easily be something new — in the sense that it’s very, very old.

2. Animation news

2.1: Nina Shorina, 1943–2026

The news broke last month. Sergey Kapkov, maybe the leading historian of Soviet animation, shared it on Facebook. “July 19, a month ago, Nina Shorina passed away — director, screenwriter, actress, artist, producer,” he wrote.

Although Shorina’s work isn’t widely known today, she was a major director in the USSR’s later years, especially during perestroika, when the arts opened up. The scholar Pavel Shvedov has numbered her among the “masters of puppet animation” in Soviet times.

During the ‘50s and ‘60s, Shorina acted. But she grew disillusioned with the Soviet film industry. “I have seen plenty of broken paths in acting and filmmaking during those years; cinema was surrounded by an enormous quantity of useless people, sometimes harmful to creativity as well,” she wrote. So, she gave up on live-action features and even documentaries, which she said “told nothing but lies.”

Shorina retrained and found a refuge in animation, working at Soyuzmultfilm and Studio Ekran. In the ‘70s, she directed Moomin films (watch here and here) and more for television, and she began to experiment with poetic, avant-garde material in shorts like Beautiful Peri (1982). According to scholar Jayne Pilling:

… even [in animation], she ran up against the system. One film, based on a fairytale … drew criticism for “eclecticism” for mixing styles … Tale of a Tall Man was criticized for being ideologically unsound.

Nevertheless, Shorina leaned further into the left-field, adult-oriented films she wanted to make. Tale of a Tall Man (1983), which “only appeared to be targeted at children,” was followed by The Poodle (1985) and The Door (1986). Pavel Shvedov called the latter probably her “most important work,” which “absorbed the atmosphere of the start of perestroika.”

The Door is a blatantly arthouse film, and politically incendiary, and dreamlike in the way Shorina’s mature animation became. It’s pretty extraordinary. Others at Soyuzmultfilm didn’t think she’d get away with it, and she agreed. As the Boston Globe reported in 1987:

At a press conference in Annecy, Shorina, a Muscovite, said that when she began planning this film, she didn’t expect it to be shown. “However, we decided not to be afraid,” she said. “And now we have an open door in our country and we must realize we can use it.” Despite the Gorbachev-era changes, it is still difficult to get approval from the Soviet animation studio for philosophical and avant-garde films. “But you can use a little deception,” she added. “The Door was billed as a children’s film.”

Shorina’s work was new, and it gained attention in the West. The Door won an award at Annecy; The Poodle wowed director Michel Ocelot. She spent the last part of the ‘80s making full-on perestroika films like Dream (watch), strange and personal animation that doesn’t readily show its hand.

In her later years, Shorina wasn’t regularly in the press. “I like being away from the limelight, from the momentary, from advertising,” she said. Media proliferation in the 21st century made her uncomfortable: it “destroys identity,” she said, and replaces it “with pure information.”

For her, though, animation was an antidote. She wrote in the mid-2000s:

Making anything worthwhile today takes almost heroic effort. But it is justified, because the worst thing for an artist is to become stuck to the vast, faceless mass of “creators,” systematically killing their “consumers.”Fortunately, for others, creative work is a way to survive, an opportunity to breathe. Animation remains practically the sole region of cinema where an artist’s conception, individual thought and personal example reign. Inside the cold multimedia space emptiness grows more and more; animation, which is done mainly by the artist’s hands, is still trying to revive the steadily deadening world.

In Shorina’s classic work, you feel that insistence on meaning and personal artistry. Animation like The Door wasn’t built to spec, or to fill a slate. She demanded more. If you’d like to explore further, you can find several of her films with subtitles on Animatsiya.

2.2: Newsbits

• Mexico’s Roy and Arturo Ambriz took their next feature, Ballad of the Phoenix, to Venice on their quest for funding. Variety has details and a promo still from the film. (Also, the directors’ I Am Frankelda just won two awards.)
• In America, Coyote vs. Acme had a solid second weekend, with $11.3 million at the box office.
• In Britain, the leader of Aardman Academy spoke about stop motion as an answer to GenAI. “We teach our students to be themselves,” he said. “We teach them to be a little bit wonky. … And we teach them to not try and polish everything within an inch of its life because that’s what people want to see.”
• All Wishes Come True landed in the top three at the box office, earning around $280 million, during China’s summer moviegoing season. See the trailer here.
• Meanwhile, the Chinese cult film Niu Lai ended up making more than $9 million at the box office, according to Maoyan.
• FukuFuku Map, directed by Sunao Katabuchi, was a big hit with Japanese viewers on YouTube this year. Now, it has English subtitles.
• Two animated films from Cuba were selected for a film festival in New York, TAFFNY, taking place later this month.
• One more from China: the Kongzang Animation & Comics Archive posted a large cache of old documents from Shanghai Animation. They reveal the thinking behind some of the studio’s classics.
• In America, the National Museum of Animation put together a showcase of IndieCade’s history, and the place of animation in indie games.
• On an anime panel in Nigeria, a Japanese exec spoke about corporate outreach in the country. “There are lots of people here; more than two hundred million. … So, if we can have fandom from Nigeria, that’s a big number,” she said.
• In Australia, animator Ben Marriott assembled a list of his favorite animation and motion design of the year so far. Find it on YouTube.
• Finally, as mentioned, we looked into The Idea (1932) — a film that changed animation.

3. Last word

Thanks for reading! That’s a wrap for today’s issue. To end off, a couple of personal comments from the two of us:

Jules: Speaking of early animation like La transmisión del mando supremo, I have a fascination with the animation techniques of that era, when people were still first deciding how drawings should come to life. There’s something about the way Felix the Cat cartoons like Frolic at the Circus animate by moving between solid, direct poses I find strangely magnetic. It’s also a reminder that the rubber-hose technique and Disney’s later formulation of the 12 principles of animation weren’t inevitable, but a development of a particular tradition of making cartoons move.

John: I grew up with old movies: Capra’s work, All About Eve, The Maltese Falcon. Those films are part of me. But a lot of early and silent movies (Metropolis, Chaplin and Keaton aside) were tough for me — the technique felt old-fashioned. That’s changed in recent years. As I’ve studied, I’ve realized that the best movies from the 1910s and ‘20s aren’t really antiquated. Their approach to images, editing and story is just a different set of languages than the ones common now. Learning those languages, I can see that animated films like The Post and Lichtspiel Opus I (and films from their time in general) have a real sophistication, and an amazing amount going on.

Until next time!

See Blink Blank #3 (Spring/Summer 2021).

From a Trnka interview in Kulturní Tvorba (April 30, 1963).

Details about the restoration of Prince Achmed come from the Journal of Film Preservation (July 2000), the archived Reiniger official site and this article by William Moritz.

See the books Avant-Garde Film and Harmony and Dissent for details about Lichtspiel Opus I’s reconstruction.

Quotes from Animation: A World History (Vol. 2) and Women & Animation: A Compendium, two important sources for the Shorina section.

The quote is from Mikhail Gurevich and Giannalberto Bendazzi in Animation: A World History (Vol. 2).

See The Boston Globe (June 4, 1987).

Ocelot praised The Poodle in an interview with OpenSpace.

See this archived interview with Shorina.

From the book Our Cartoons. Note that part of this translation comes from She Animates: Soviet Female Objectivity in Russian Animation.