Animation Obsessive has always treated its readers as working artists first and fans second. That distinction matters — and it shows most clearly in the publication's recurring resource roundups, which treat the question of artistic education not as a sidebar to animation coverage but as its beating heart.
The fifth installment of the "Artist Resources We Love" series arrives as a deliberately mixed offering: part practical toolkit, part history lesson, part philosophical argument about how artists should learn. The editors have assembled five distinct resources — spanning YouTube tutorials, scanned art history books, an emerging online educator, a 19th-century master's archive, and the public domain at large — and wrapped them in a set of convictions about craft, access, and creative freedom that are worth unpacking on their own terms.
The Baxter Benchmark
The lead resource is a 44-minute YouTube walkthrough on animated walk cycles by James Baxter, one of the few key animators whose name carries genuine weight outside the industry. Animation Obsessive positions this correctly: Baxter's contribution to films like Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the cultural notoriety that followed his viral work on The Amazing World of Gumball, has made him something close to a household name among animation enthusiasts. That a figure at his level would post a free, publicly available master class is genuinely notable.
The editors describe Baxter breaking down walks "in three styles: realistic, quasi-realistic and cartoony," with tips rendered in his characteristic tight, three-dimensional draftsmanship. One commenter's reaction, quoted in the piece, captures the response to the video's release: "If you listen closely, you can hear the cheers of thousands of animation students from across the world as this video was posted." Animation Obsessive flags this as "one of the 2026 highlights in the animation world so far" — a strong claim, but not an unreasonable one given how rarely working animators at Baxter's tier produce accessible instructional material.
The piece makes a smart observation about Baxter's utility beyond his immediate audience: "Even artists with looser, more abstract approaches can get something from watching Baxter explain what he's doing and why." The value of watching technical masters articulate their reasoning — not just their results — is something art education often undersells. Watching a virtuoso work is one thing. Hearing them describe the intent behind each decision is another kind of lesson entirely.
Cartoon Modern and the Long Tail of a Great Book
The second recommendation is Amid Amidi's Cartoon Modern, a book from 2006 that Animation Obsessive scanned and posted for free in 2021. The re-promotion here is justified: the newsletter's readership has grown roughly fortyfold since then, meaning the vast majority of current readers have never encountered it.
Cartoon Modern maps the mid-century rupture in American animation — the departure from the Disney classical style toward the modernist aesthetic that defined the 1950s and early 1960s, and that later fed into shows like The Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack. Amidi's own introduction, quoted by the editors, describes that historical moment with precision: "Animation artists conceived a bold visual style that was derived from the modern arts, assimilating and adapting the principles of cubism, surrealism and expressionism."
The book's recovery of neglected figures — including Sterling Sturtevant, who contributed to Mr. Magoo and the advertising animation world — represents the kind of scholarly work that tends to stay buried in physical collections. Animation Obsessive notes that it still uses the book in its own writing about mid-century animation. That's a meaningful endorsement: resources that practicing critics return to are resources worth knowing about.
Jake Taplin and the Accessible Tradition
The third pick introduces Jake Taplin, a young self-taught artist who has built a following by making academic painting techniques approachable. The academic tradition — associated with 19th-century painters like Bouguereau and Poynter — has historically carried connotations of stiffness and elitism, and its revival in certain corners of the contemporary art world has sometimes amplified those connotations rather than dispelled them.
Taplin's project, as Animation Obsessive describes it, is to push back against that. His 2025 question — "Does learning to draw mean we have to suffer and even learn to dread drawing?" — frames his mission clearly. The editors note that "Taplin brings a sense of excitement and momentum when he talks about drawing and painting," and that his videos have reached millions of views despite covering material once considered inaccessible to general audiences.
The piece highlights a specific argument Taplin makes about the Bargue plates — a set of drawing exercises studied historically at the École des Beaux-Arts and now central to many traditional art school curricula. Taplin, while a fan of the exercises, cautions against how they are currently taught. He notes that students today "spend dozens and sometimes even a hundred-plus hours copying" each plate, whereas the original students at the École worked under strict time limits — completing 18-by-24-inch figure drawings in twelve hours. The concern, he argues, is that prolonged copying produces work that is "stiff and overly flat," focused on surface aesthetics rather than structural understanding.
This is a genuinely useful distinction. The danger of treating any canonical exercise as an end in itself — rather than as a means toward internalizing principles — is one that recurs across disciplines. Taplin's framing of that danger as a pedagogical problem within academic revival circles, rather than a condemnation of the tradition itself, is more precise and more useful than blanket rejection.
Critics might note, however, that Taplin is still a developing artist whose theoretical positions are evolving in public. There's something admirable about that transparency, but it also means readers should approach his arguments as working hypotheses rather than settled conclusions. The piece acknowledges his humility without quite flagging this limitation.
Turner's Sketchbooks and the Case for Artistic Education
The fourth resource is the Tate's online archive of J. M. W. Turner's sketchbooks, drawings, and watercolors — thousands of works, organized chronologically and exhaustively documented. Turner is an unusual choice for a publication primarily focused on animation, but Animation Obsessive makes the connection explicit by quoting the late director Frédéric Back:
"All too often, young people limit themselves to technical training without first (or at the same time) acquiring the kind of artistic education that opens their eyes and minds, freeing them to be creative with their animation — or to choose another line of work if they find it doesn't suit them!"
The editors suggest that Turner's sketches are instructive precisely because of their casualness — "seeing how casual and non-literal Turner's lines were, and how much more attention he paid to light than to firm shapes." Turner's mature work sits at the edge of abstract expressionism; his Sun Setting Over a Lake (1840) barely resolves into identifiable forms. Tracing that development through his sketchbooks gives artists a view of how technical facility, once internalized, becomes something looser and more intuitive.
For animators specifically, this matters. The history of animation is full of artists who came up through rigorous technical training and then found ways to break or dissolve those forms — the UPA artists discussed in Cartoon Modern are a direct example. Understanding where technical rules come from makes it easier to know when to abandon them.
The Tate archive is genuinely one of the better online art resources available — meticulous, free, and deep. This is a recommendation that benefits artists well beyond the animation world.
The Public Domain as Creative Rebellion
The fifth and most expansive recommendation is the public domain itself — a category rather than a single resource. Animation Obsessive points to a range of collections: the Public Domain Image Archive, Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis, and the public collections of the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and the Library of Congress.
The argument the editors make here goes in two directions. The first is practical: the public domain is full of images, sounds, and stories that can be repurposed as background art, collage material, or source narrative. The second is more pointed: at a moment when so much of culture is controlled by a small number of large corporations with extensive copyright portfolios, working in the public domain carries a kind of defiant independence. As the piece puts it, "taking a piece of the public domain for yourself is almost rebellious."
Animation Obsessive notes that some public domain works may come with country-specific restrictions — early Tintin, Mickey Mouse, and Miss Marple are free in the United States, for example, but require care in other jurisdictions. That caveat is important and often overlooked. The piece also flags a surprising recent development: a collection of Philip K. Dick stories has entered the public domain — "by accident," the editors note — and was already adapted into an animated short, The Gun, in 2025.
The historical examples the editors cite are well-chosen. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) both drew on fairy tales that were already freely available. The Soviet Winnie-the-Pooh (1969) and the 1953 The Tell-Tale Heart adaptation similarly demonstrate what becomes possible when artists treat freely available narratives as raw material rather than protected property.
Critics might reasonably point out that navigating the public domain is not as simple as it sounds. Digitization projects, metadata errors, and the uneven pace of copyright expiration across countries mean that artists working with public domain material often need legal guidance that this kind of roundup cannot provide. The piece gestures at this complexity but doesn't dwell on it — which is appropriate for a newsletter roundup, though artists pursuing this path seriously will need to go further.
What These Five Resources Share
Taken together, the five picks reflect a coherent editorial philosophy at Animation Obsessive. The editors are interested in democratizing access — Baxter's free lecture, Amidi's scanned book, Taplin's open tutorials, the Tate's free archive, the public domain collections — but they are equally interested in the argument that broad artistic education matters as much as narrow technical training.
The Frédéric Back quote anchors this argument. Technical training without artistic context produces animators who can execute but not originate. The editors' recurring recommendation of art history, classic films, and historical master painters is not nostalgia — it is a consistent position about what animation requires from its practitioners.
The brief newsbits section at the end of the issue, not the focus of this issue's resources section, reports that the Academy Awards' animated feature and short went to KPop Demon Hunters and The Girl Who Cried Pearls — the latter a National Film Board production, continuing Disney's now multi-year losing streak in categories it once dominated. The note fits the broader context of the issue: institutional power in animation is shifting, and independent and international production continues to generate some of the medium's most recognized work.
Bottom Line
Animation Obsessive's fifth artist resource roundup earns its place in the series by combining practical utility with intellectual seriousness — these are not arbitrary picks but a curated argument about what serious artistic development actually requires. The Baxter lecture alone justifies the issue; the Turner archive and the public domain framing elevate it. Animators who approach these recommendations as a curriculum rather than a checklist will find genuine value across all five.