Animation Anthologies

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The Shivering Truth is an series on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. There are two seasons, 12 episodes, and 1 pilot.

Start with "Chaos Beknownst" and let me know what you think.

Bill Plympton famously makes hand drawn feature films, more or less by himself.

More recently, young animator's like the late night wirk club have made anthology films, where each animator did one episode.

But that's kind of where you have to look, and how you have to think of it: as several short films.
There's loads of short films animated by one person. I myself have made a few.
But my entire career's output doesn't add up to a feature lenght film - you see, Bill Plympton cuts down on everything, and some scenes are hardly animated at all.

It gets a bit easier with puppet animation, because once the puppet is made, animation can be relatively fast.

And eventually, there's 3D. If you know how to go about certain things, you can easily make a feature lenght film on your own. Just not a pixar film. But if you find some cheap motion capture solution like a kinect and an iphone, you can basically create all your character animation in no time. It won't be great without investing a few minths of cleanup - but still, a few months of work, in hand drawn 2D, amounts to a few minutes of film - wheras here, you'd end up with enough cleaned up data for a feature. It just won't be *good* animation

It's just a question of time and what style/technique you're going for. And how long you can afford to do it before you're broke, but a patreon can fix that ....

What kind of animation do you intend to use and what audiences are you wanting?

All three are directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, who spent ten years drawing the Akira Manga and had assistants who helped on that. Then he directed the Akira film, which was a massive undertaking that restructured how anime were produced. - these three are based on manga shorts he had drawn, and which were published as Manga anthologies long before the film anthologies.
But he didn't *animate* them.
Also: Otomo's Steamboy was the most expensive anime produced in its tome (I don't know if it still is) on a budget of 12 million dollars. Japanese animators are chronically underpaid and overworked, to the point where it's hardly a career option any more.

Have you also seen Genius Party?

Yes.

You should have a look at some indie animators. Sawako Kabuki or Sarina Nihei or Mirai Mizue, if they have to be Japanese.

That's the scope most single animators are doing.

Ok. Have you seen Twilight Q. That's an anime.

No, I haven't.

Where are you heading with this, asking about individual anime anthologies?
There's hundreds of them - animated anthology is apparently a thing in Japan, meaning, these would run in cinemas or on TV like a regular movie, offering an outlet for young artists who are making their first attempts at directing, for example.
There's nothing comparable in the west.
But hey, at least the US has comic books, an adjacent medium to try out visual storytelling ideas. I'm in Europe, we have some very conservative french comic books, and that's basically it.

Ok. How many American animation anthologies are made by just one animator?

I honestly don't know. I do knoe Bill plymptons is highly prolific, but he's making shorts and features, and there's Don Hertzfeld, who made a feature length film in three half-hour episodes. But I don't know any anthologies like the Japanese ones - actually, no, recently there's been Love Death and Robots on Netflix, and the Adult Swim puppet animation shows, Robot Chicken and the sorts. I'm not that knowledgeable regarding puppet animation, though.

But... "Single animator anthology" is probably a genre that doesn't exist at all, yet.

Are you planning on making one?
It's going to be tough, man, but I wish you all the best with it. You could possibly create the first entry in this genre, if nothing else.

Yes. It will be both live action and animation. What types of animation are out there?

Cool. How old are you?

- animariin is basically any process in which you take individual images and change things deliberately so it looks like movement, rather than recording movement as it's happening.
So, if you can make pictures, you can make an animation from it. That means there's an infinite number of types. I've seen animation where every frame was embroidered in underwear. There's people who paint in oil on glass, and then shift the paibt around from frame to frame.
I've seen people making abstract animated patterns from nails they nailed into a board of wood - you get the idea.

i'm 25.

Okay, so you:re a grown up. You can do some research into the thing you want to do, regarding techniques etc.

I used to do a lot of hand-drawn, frame by frame animation. But I could only produce about 2 seconds of animation a day that way (I'd also draw the backgrounds).
Only few clients were interested in waiting that long though so for work, I mostly do some form of digital puppetry, either 3D or digital cut-out animation.
If you want to make a film on your own, and not just one short film, I recommend you like into "puppet tool" animation in a software called "After Effects"

Have you seen The Prophet?