The hot summer days are turning into hot autumn nights around these parts of the Great Lakes State. It’s true, we have a lot of work to do in the coming weeks, but for now, as the summer evenings shorten you’ve gotta squeeze in as much fun as you can! If you’re looking for suggestions to chill on your porch as you watch the lightning bugs begin to light up our yards, perhaps this month’s animation books might be your speed?
The International Animated Film Association, ASIFA, should be a familiar organization to most readers of this blog. They are an international organization that is “devoted to cultivating and promoting the art, craft and profession of Animation”. The corporately structured and organized ASIFA Hollywood is responsible for the yearly Annie Awards and often lends their expertise to preservation and education through their various initiatives and partnerships. Most recently, this past May at the 2026 UCLA Festival of Preservation, ASIFA Hollywood premiered their latest restoration efforts and showed off two Mighty Mouse shorts – the 1941 and ‘42, The Mouse of Tomorrow and Copy Cat.
As for the rest of the non-corporatized ASIFA chapters around the world, their missions often shift depending on the needs of the area and the artists within those spaces. Shout out to ASIFA South in Atlanta, Georgia, who have, for the last two decades, cemented themselves as a bridge between the Atlanta professional animation scene and those that yearn to learn and join in.
In my neck of the woods, we have the insoluble ASIFA Central chapter. Spanning the hard to define midwest and with members who log into a monthly virtual coffee hour from around the world. ASIFA Central is a ragtag group of artists, teachers, and students of animation, who are, quite frankly, the most thoughtful, passionate individuals I’ve had the pleasure to get to know.
In 2025, ASIFA Central celebrated five decades since its inauguration and inspired by ASIFA’s ASIFA 50th Anniversary book, ASIFA Central chapter president, animator and retired pharmacist Jim Middleton, has been compiling 50 years of newsletters which has been published in a new two-volume set.
I’ve been busy this summer parsing through these newsletter collections and it’s been a pleasure and a fascinating adventure learning about local animation history while also getting a crash course of how the artform at large was changing as it was being experienced locally. Two of the clearest examples of this was watching the discussions surrounding the slow integration of the internet (complete with tutorials!) and the exciting new prospects of CGI in the late 80’s and early 90’s as it was directly impacting artists here in the midwest.
Topics in each volume run the gambit. There are announcements and celebrations of personal projects, interviews with animators, lectures, obituaries, film and software reviews, festivals (Like the prominent and now defunct Kalamazoo International Film Festival), retreats, and even field trips (Like to the Stay Tooned Gallery [sadly, also defunct]). Additionally, throughout each volume are various ASIFA East and ASIFA San Francisco’s newsletters that were forwarded at the time to ASIFA Central members giving us a glimpse at what was happening in the rest of the US. It’s really fascinating to see how the ASIFA community handled itself in the pre-instantaneous communication days pre-internet and how individuals connected to one another.
These volumes have been bittersweet to read. It’s fantastic that the members of ASIFA Central have done such an amazing job of keeping together an archive which we can go through today and learn from – which has been invaluable for correcting specific dates of various periodical and book publications. But as I reflect on the early internet of the late 90’s and early 2000’s, we’ve already lost access to so many various forums, blog-o-spheres, and other communication based communities. No remnants of quite a few animation communities exist today and so we must ask ourselves in what ways can we replicate the success of ASIFA Central’s newsletter archive so that we can ensure our own animated adventures today can be enjoyed in the future?
Fifty Animated Years – ASIFA Central: The Newsletters Volumes I and II were independently published and are available now in paperback on Amazon for $13 each.
Over the Hollywood Hills: Across the Country, Through the Animation Industry and Over the Garden Wall by Miranda Dressler is an adorably drawn autobiography and homage to the end of Cartoon Network as a creative corporate structure. In this 40 page comic, Dressler discusses their development from art student to professional working on series like Disney’s Kick Buttowski, Fox’s Bob’s Burgers, and, most impactfully, Cartoon Network’s Over the Garden Wall. Dressler’s passion for what Cartoon Network represented – community, bold artistic direction, and a level of artistic freedom – is apparent throughout the comic and a warm sentimental reminder of the power of fulfilling a lifelong dream.
Over the Hollywood Hills: Across the Country, Through the Animation Industry and Over the Garden Wall by Miranda Dressler is published independently and available on the artist’s Etsy store.
In September of 2025, Glitch Productions, the Australian independent animation studio known for The Amazing Digital Circus, released a pilot for a 2D hand drawn animated series called Knights of Guinevere, which is set up to be a futuristic, dystopian sci-fi thriller.
Released in conjunction with the pilot, a paperback and hardcover Art of… containing every imaginable piece of art within the 27 minute pilot was released. The book is divided into four parts: Characters, The Planet, Early Concepts, and Crew Art. Usually, an Art of… book like this covers a 90 minute film or an entire season of a show. It is impressive to see how the folks at Glitch have packed just a single pilot episode into this 250 page behemoth.
Knights of Guinevere: The Art of the Pilot is available in paperback as the hardcover has since sold out and available through Glitch Production’s online store.
That’s all for now! As always you can dive in and enjoy the complete Animation History Bibliography section of this Cartoon Research website. See you next month with another round up of animation book news and reviews!
Orrin Scott is an animation researcher. His research focus has been on how society interacts with animation as a form of communication, commerce, art, and entertainment. He is the administrator of the 
I was a member of ASIFA-CENTRAL something like 40 plus years ago when Dave Daruska was the “head honcho” in Chicago. As a group, we helped have a “wine and cheese” reception for Fleischer-Disney, etc. animator Shamus Culhane in Chicago, and Dave asked me to interview Shamus for a Chicagoland cable TV station when he was a guest of honor at the Animation-Plus art gallery in downtown Chicago. We were also judges one year for the Chicago Film Festival in the animation category. Probably the most disasterous meeting we had was when Paramount gave us “free passes” to see Ralph Bakshi’s COOL WORLD in 1992. We “were in the know” about what kind of animated film it was, but many patrons in the theater audience were parents with very small children. The showing did not go well, as I remmeber. We also helped sponsor a showing of HOPPITY GOES TO TOWN for animator Gordon Sheehan at the Gatweay Theatre (at the Copernicus Center) in Chicago. If I could get a hold of Dave D., he’d have a lot more to say about ASIFA-Central in Chicago. Later, I believe it was headquarted in MIchigan and Deanna Morse was “running the show.”
“…the hard to define Midwest….”
I suppose the Midwest may be defined as “the big blob on the middle of the map of North America that coastal sophisticates refer to as ‘Flyover Country’.” As a Michigan native myself, even as a child it seemed obvious to me that the Great Lakes and the Great Plains were distinct geographical regions, and the umbrella designation of “Midwest” had no real validity. Duluth and Buffalo have more in common with each other than the former has with Fargo, or the latter with New York City.
Man, I would love to see those restored Mighty Mouse cartoons. Here’s hoping that ASIFA will get around to restoring the cuts in classic Terrytoons like “The Crackpot King”, “Swiss Cheese Family Robinson”, “Flying South”, etc.
“Knights of Guinevere” looks intriguing, and I hope I don’t lose interest in it as soon as I did in “The Amazing Digital Circus”. I get a little tired of all the unrelentingly dystopian future worlds. I can remember when science fiction offered a hopeful vision for the future. Oh well, as Arthur C. Clarke put it, the future isn’t what it used to be.