#rankin bass productions

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Mad Monster Party (1967)

[stone-cold-groove]

Let’s roll.

[ambersadventuresinwonderland]

Happy Easter!!! 🖤🐰🦇🥚

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

[mudwerks]

ThunderCats Cheetara and WilyKit Production Cels Group of 2 (Rankin-Bass, c. 1985-89)

[cormancatacombs]

Never too early to give kids a taste for magical reindeer flesh I guess

[cartoon-and-animal-lover]

There are a lot of crazy connections in animation, and here are some of my favorites.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and The Last Unicorn were both produced by Rankin-Bass, and it’s honestly kind of funny considering that when you watch them both back to back.

However, TLU was animated by Topcraft, which was a Japanese studio that later animated Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind before evolving into Studio Ghibli. So that means there’s a direct link between Rudolph and Princess Mononoke. 

Plus, some of RB’s stop-motion animators also worked on a film from 1979 called Nutcracker Fantasy, including Tadahito Mochinaga, the animation director on most of the sixties stuff like Rudolph. It has a very similar style to the stop-motion RB specials, but was actually produced by Sanrio. So there’s also a direct link from Rudolph to Aggretsuko. 

Romeo Muller wrote the majority of the Rankin-Bass stuff, but he also did work for Fred Wolf Films, including writing all three Puff the Magic Dragon specials. And Fred Wolf Films also provided the animation for The Mouse and His Child, another Sanrio film. 

Oh, and both Rankin-Bass AND Sanrio have a direct link to Osamu Tezuka as well. Like, you probably already know Sanrio produced both Unico films, which were adaptations of Tezuka’s work. But Mushi Productions, the same studio that animated a lot of Tezuka shows like Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion, animated Frosty the Snowman for Rankin-Bass!

Speaking of Unico, both films were animated by Madhouse, which later made a lot of really edgy and mature anime like Ninja Scroll, Perfect Blue, Death Note, and Black Lagoon. 

Before starting up Mushi Productions, Tezuka briefly worked for Toei Animation. Toei is a studio you know best for stuff like Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, and One Piece, but they also did some outsourced work for some American studios back in the day, including some work for Rankin-Bass (again!), and the eighties My Little Pony series. Oh, and Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata did work there early on, so there’s another Ghibli connection.

Speaking of My Little Pony, the G1 series (along with other Hasbro cartoons like Transformers and G.I. Joe) was produced by Marvel Productions, which was actually directly spun off from DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, the studio that produced both the Pink Panther cartoons and most of the seventies Dr. Seuss specials like The Cat in the Hat and The Lorax. If DePatie-Freleng’s name sounds familiar, that’s because one of the founders was famed Looney Tunes director Friz Freleng. So I guess MLP has a connection to both Dr. Seuss AND Looney Tunes. 

I could go on and on, and maybe I will in an eventual reblog, but I think you get the point by now. 

[interretialia]

Cur exercitationi alforum non adfuisti?!

Why weren’t you at elf practice?!

(Fons Imaginis.)

[shadowwingtronix]

BW's Daily Video> Reacting To Older Animated Hits

BW's Daily Video> Reacting To Older Animated Hits

Catch more from The Corridor Crew on YouTube  

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Gandalf the White - The Return of the King (1980)

[kyuponstories]

Update nobody cares about coming thru! 🤪

OCB is going on hiatus indefinitely. It's just not fun trying to write a joyous story based on someone who's determined to be pessimistic rn. Instead, I may just focus on Eyes of the Beholder for now since I've already started scripting the first episode. And since it's an angsty fantasy WIP, I have a fun stop-motion project that I'm gonna be scriptwriting beside it! Will reveal more details on that one later. 😉

[surfinthehighway]

Honestly block “#rankin bass” if you don’t want this to become a Rudolph blog…. Im trying to rb as much today as I can but like… rudolph is any season like it starts in springtime im right

[chernobog13]

The attraction was immediate and palpable!

[prokopetz]

The fun thing about how American fandom culture seems to have settled the perennial What Is Anime debate by deciding in favour of "anything that was physically animated in Japan is anime, regardless of any other dimensions of its production" is how it interacts with all those American/Japanese and Canadian/Japanese co-productions from the 1970s and 1980s. If applied with an even hand, this rule would oblige us to conclude that the 1977 Rankin/Bass adaptation of The Hobbit is anime, which is both ridiculous and objectively correct.