How have I never spotted this panel before? It's PERFECT!

scenes from a 1986 biker anime, about a Suzuki GT380 engine rebuild

https://www.globalsuzuki.com/motorcycle/smgs/digital-archive/2_bike/ss2_005.php

the 6 month wait was worth it... Laika just released their trailer for Wildwood, I've been waiting for this since last November

https://www.animationmagazine.net/2026/05/wildwood-teaser-trailer-previews-laikas-fantastical-northwest-adventure/

https://www.laika.com/our-films/wildwood

I mentioned this last November https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2025/11/there-is-laika-studios-and-aardman-in.html

enjoy Zac Retz's illustrations!

This gallery of Scooby Doo and Jabber Jaw is a small example - look through the whole gallery, it's a full episode story

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/1nK3Kq

https://www.behance.net/ZacRetz

https://zacretz.blogspot.com/

https://www.artstation.com/zacretz

https://www.instagram.com/zacretz/

Porsche made a cool ad, sorta Christmas themed at the beginning

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/porsche-ad-without-ai

Follow up to August's post about Pete and Pickles, the movie Hitpig! is now on Amazon

The post from August, for the background info: https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2025/08/yes-that-is-pig-on-elephant-riding.html

you can probably only watch this movie this weekend, and I recommend you do: Cardboard, nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film... it's childhood sweet innocence in a trailerpark, with a dad who is stressed out

https://watch.animationshowcase.com/694c5a27b3b7b9af520eaa13?autoPlay=true&enableBack=true

after this weekend, the only thing we'll have access to are the trailers and making of videos

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cardboard%2C+locksmith+animation

if you know what this is, then your childhood had some cool movies. It also might be the only time a tractor has been portrayed as a movie's antagonist!

If you've got to here, without recognizing the movie, it's the Secret of NIHM - a masterpiece by Don Bluth, who was stifled by Disney, and led an exodus of animators away from a dying Disney animation studio, and they created their own, and made some really damn cool movies: Titan AE, All Dogs Go To Heaven, Anastasia, the Land Before Time

While at Disney, he worked on Sleeping Beauty, Robin Hood, and was the animation director for such films as The Rescuers and Pete's Dragon 

Steven Spielberg teamed up with Don in the late 80s for the films An American Tail and The Land Before Time, and Disney had NOTHING that came close to comparing. 

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0089940/?ref_=fn_t_1

Radio Flyer, the nearly 109-year-old family-owned, Chicago-based company and maker of the Original Little Red Wagon is into animated storytelling for preschoolers, with a new division, Radio Flyer Studios.

Radio Flyer Studios’ Max & Maple: The Can-Do Kids is a new animated series that centers on two siblings whose iconic red wagon is a part of invention-fueled backyard adventures.

https://www.animationmagazine.net/2024/01/classic-toy-co-radio-flyer-ventures-into-family-animation-with-new-studio/
https://www.animationmagazine.net/2025/12/radio-flyer-studios-max-maple-creative-team-discuss-the-imaginative-series-as-first-episode-premieres/

‘Lupin the IIIrd The Movie – The Immortal Bloodline’ comes to theaters in January - English subtitles

Lupin the IIIRD: The Movie – The Immortal Bloodline, the anime icon’s first full feature-length, 2D-animated cinema outing in almost 30 years.

https://www.animationmagazine.net/2025/12/lupin-the-iiird-the-movie-the-immortal-bloodline-breaks-into-theaters-in-january-with-gkids/

steampunk trains and train stations

after the first 100 seconds, it get a bit weird

Rally From Paris to the Pyramids, now in English

I posted about it on Oct, 5th, before there was any info in Elglish, and I've updated that, and they just released this new preview, far more thorough and fun than what was available last month

I just learned who did the outstanding artwork on the Lupin movie Castle of Cagliostro, and directed it... Miyazaki! And he was persuaded by Yasuo Otsuka!

Otsuka was the Animation Director, on the film, as well as Character Designer, and was a supervisor on the 1987 Lupin film The Fuma Conspiracy.

Otsuka teamed with Miyazaki for the 1969 Puss In Boots, involving the cast running around the castle battlements, which was the model for much of the action in Castle of Cagliostro.

 After Puss, Miyazaki and Takahata thought otherwise, joining their mentor Otsuka at A Production. Soon they were working together on the studio’s Lupin (the first TV version in 1971). 

Otsuka could draw shoot-outs and car chases to his heart’s content; he was also the show’s Animation Director. At first, he worked with Lupin’s creator Monkey Punch to adapt the manga to the screen. “But partway through, he quit,” Otsuka said. “He said it was too much for him.”

As a child, Otsuka hadn’t been inspired by cartoons, but rather by trains; the steam locomotives transporting Japanese soldiers near the town where he lived. “I had no idea such wonderful things existed… I walked all the way to the station on holidays.” This was trainspotting as a fabulous adventure and a creative dynamo for a boy artist. Otsuka remembered the engineers even letting him ride in the locomotives.

In 1945, his family moved to Yamaguchi. For Otsuka, the Occupation had a bonus – he could extend his sketching to army trucks at a nearby American base, and scavenged the soldiers’ discarded comics like Dick Tracy. His sketching was a welcome distraction from his first day job, at Yamaguchi’s Bureau of Statistics. He passed an exam for the Japan’s Health and Welfare Ministry – not because he saw a career there, but he needed a pretext to move to Tokyo and (he hoped) become a political cartoonist.

Miyazaki was mentored by Otsuka after he joined Toei in 1963 straight after college. “Otsuka taught me all about motion,” Miyazaki says in the Joy documentary. 

Otsuka wasn’t just teaching new recruits. Between Hakujaden and Hols, he burnished his reputation as an animator on several other Toei films. The Joy documentary highlights his experience on 1959’s Magic Boy, where he animated a duel between the hero and a skeleton warrior. The effect was unintentionally comical, said Takahata, who was assistant director on the film. “The scene was so real, people laughed… We didn’t mean to make it humorous. It’s funny because it’s so serious… The more serious you play it, the funnier it gets.”

One need only visualise Zenigata in Lupin to see how this principle works in anime. In the years after Hols, Otsuka would be increasingly associated with comedy, and with animating funny adversaries like Zenigata. 

Miyazaki built up this association by writing a piece called “A Slanderous Portrait” (included in Starting Point), about his early acquaintance with Otsuka. According to Miyazaki, a “completely drunk” Otsuka roared off one night in his Fiat 500. He appeared mud-spattered the next morning, having buried the car in a road under construction. It’s easy to think that incident could have informed Lupin’s comedy too.

https://blog.alltheanime.com/yasuo-otsuka-1931-2021/

"The 2003 book Lupin III Perfect Book is a celebration of the show’s 30th anniversary. The interview goes over Yasuo Otsuka’s involvement in the license, the conditions of the show’s production and his relationship to other staff members, among others Hayao Miyazaki. 

I often put a Fiat 500 (Cinquecento) into the show, but that was for no better reason than because I had driven it in the past and understood its mechanisms and depicted them enticingly on-screen."

https://fullfrontal.moe/yasuo-otsuka-special-interview

Studio Ghibli never forgot the animator that helped its two core co-founders kickstart their careers. In 2004, Ghibli released a documentary Yasuo Otsuka's Joy of Motion (2004) celebrating his career, while an exhibition of his art was held in Tokyo in 2002. Miyazaki has spoken frequently about his gratitude for Otsuka. "For me he is an excellent mentor," he wrote in his 1982 essay "A 'Slanderous' Portrait." "We did some foolish things together, but we've also talked passionately about the future of animation. It was Otsuka-san who taught me the fun of working." 

 https://www.slashfilm.com/579990/yasuo-otsuka-dead/

As animation director on Lupin III, Ōtsuka was apparently encouraged by Miyazaki (who’d just taken over as director) to include the iconic Fiat 500 in the show — largely because Ōtsuka himself owned one at the time. Later, Ōtsuka drove the same car in a circuit around Kyushu, Japan’s third-largest island, as part of an extended road trip.

In the late ‘90s, Ōtsuka teamed up with Gainax to release a multimedia CD-ROM called Yasuo Ōtsuka Military 4×4 Graffiti. Utilizing Ōtsuka’s extensive knowledge on the subject (he’d been publishing doujinshi and authoring professional books on the subject for years) and personal collection of photos, the CD-ROM was an extended slideshow celebrating military vehicles

https://www.zimmerit.moe/the-cars-of-yasuo-otsuka/

https://halcyonrealms.com/books/yasuo-ohtsuka-mechanical-artworks-book-review/

there is a stage play of Totoro in London, extended til Aug 2026

Why am I posting about it on the car guy blog? Well, it's got a bus (sure, a cat bus - even cooler that was at Comic Con https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-terrific-photo-op-booth-in-studio.html) 

a bus stop, and is a Studio Ghibli production... that really nails it for me. Wish I could see it in person, live theater is incredible

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1240370328120442&set=pcb.1240371504786991

Wayne makes incredible flip books, when he's not on the job at Disney as an animator and animation supervisor (Frozen, Tangled, Big Hero 6, Zootopia) and I met him at Lightbox Expo - you gotta see this 5 stage flip book action sequence!

https://www.instagram.com/p/DHK1q1vx1VS/?hl=en  it's not a thing I can embed though

also see https://www.instagram.com/p/BnZRe06ha8C/?img_index=1 because you might believe me, but if you don't, wouldn't you listen to Banksy? Yup, Banksy featured him in the Dismaland book

https://www.instagram.com/wayne_unten

https://animatingforfun.tumblr.com/

(new to me) Wallace and Gromit Ultimate Cracking Contraptions Fails

the Preston North End Sockamatic

Gran Prix of Europe, an animated family adventure movie coming to screens worldwide with its spirited car racing fable centered around Europa-Park’s beloved longtime mice mascots, Ed & Edda.

A candy-colored contest of mouse versus machine made to celebrate the German theme park’s 50th anniversary, the film’s storyline finds young Edda dreaming of racing in the big leagues. She hatches a plan to disguise herself as her favorite racer to become a Grand Prix competitor to try and help save her family’s struggling amusement park business.

https://www.animationmagazine.net/2025/11/grand-prix-of-europe-director-waldemar-fast-explains-the-films-route-from-theme-park-to-big-screen-adventure

terrific CGI created by Marcio Bukowski to accompany TV Globo!’s coverage of the Brazilian Grand Prix

https://www.thechicane.com/2014/01/31/marcio-bukowskis-cg-f1-transformations/

the Jungle Race, a film about a race between monkeys on a post-apocalyptic island, is a graduation project by a team of ten artists who have just graduated with a Master's in 3D Animation from Brassart School.

https://80.lv/articles/how-a-team-of-3d-artists-created-a-film-about-a-race-in-a-jungle

just campy and 60s goofball as hell, but, Boris Karloff voiced Dr Frankenstein, designed by my favorite illustrator Jack Davis, and Frank Frazetta did the promo art! So, yeah, I'm sharing it! Bass and Rankin stop motion animation from 1967

https://www.frazettagirls.com/products/the-monster-party-print?srsltid=AfmBOoqnPRCbrPLvLafVztLvHbzvgtpkRAD-9Bi9oUm19a2Tov4g7pvL

above, Frazetta art

Above: Jack Davis art, lettering by Paul Coker, Jr. in what looks like a re-purposing, re-edit into a possible TV special version, hosted by Vincent Price. 

Vincent appeared as Evil Irontail in Rankin/Bass' Here Comes Peter Cottontail (1971).

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WesternAnimation/MadMonsterParty

https://enchantedworldofrankinbass.blogspot.com/2024/02/mad-monster-party.html

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1300712778/mad-monster-party-count-dracula-fine-art

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061931/?ref_=mv_close

It's early for Halloween... but hell, I'm less than a week out, and why hold this until then, I figure share it now, so other people can share it too if they want to. Vincent Price, Frank Frazetta, Boris Karloff,... and I bet you've never heard of it!