ReBoot Rewind

April 5, 2026
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Over thirty years ago, ReBoot started airing as one of the first 3D-rendered television series. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original season, an 8-part documentary was independently released in September of 2024, named ReBoot Rewind.

During filming of the documentary, the crew found that the original studio still had the original master tapes of the episodes, but they were stored on a medium that is no longer easily viewed. The masters are on large magnetic tapes, but encoded digitally to retain full resolution of the original renders and composites.

Unfortunately, because the technology to view the tapes is no longer easily accessible (the few remaining legacy decks to read the tapes are prohibitively expensive and have a limited number of read-hours before needing maintenance), all existing copies of ReBoot are actually just lower resolution versions of the masters, which were used for airing on TV in the 1990s. Which means that the resolution is 480 vertical interlaced scan lines, a very low resolution. That includes the official ReBoot DVDs (which I own)!

And there is a separate problem: now that the master tapes are so old, they are disintegrating. Even reading the tape once will destroy it. And the longer the tapes sit around, the more damage they will accrue.

So the documentary crew convinced Mainframe (the production company) to let them try and convert the master tapes to full-digital copies. That’s where Linus Tech Tips, a popular Canadian YouTube technology channel, stepped in and provided some funding to help this project move forward, along with one of their sponsors, KIOXIA, a memory and solid state drives company.

Using the funding, the crew was able to purchase legacy decks to read the master tapes and buy extra parts and labor to get them working. And after a lot of work, the master tapes are actually converted to full digital files!

You can watch the entire Linus Tech Tips video describing the technical problems with the master tapes and the solutions to getting full-resolution digital versions of the episodes:

And if you want to watch full episodes of ReBoot in their original full-resolution glory, head over to the Mainframe YouTube channel, where they are slowly releasing episodes! Note: they are only on season 1, episode 5, so converting the raw digital data from the master tapes to YouTube-ready files seems to be taking lots of time.

But rest assured, the raw data has been extracted and preserved from the deteriorating master tapes, so the original ReBoot renders have been preserved for history!

New Gorillaz Traditionally-Animated Video

March 8, 2026
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Gorillaz, the virtual band created by musician Damon Albarn and comic artist Jamie Hewlett, recently released their ninth album, The Mountain. As part of the release, they also created a beautiful animated video with three of the songs from the album, “The Mountain, the Moon Cave, and the Sad God”.

The final animation is unique because it was produced using a hybrid workflow of traditional (hand-painted) images with digital effects, with the ultimate goal of recreating the feel of Western animated films from over half a century ago. The animation team purposely imposed on themselves some of the same constraints that mid-20th-century animators would have faced, and solved them with the same tricks and techniques. But they also judiciously used modern technology to speed up their workflow, like using Photoshop over hand-painted backgrounds to add fine detail to the background images.

The end result is a superb animation, set to fantastic new music, telling a beautiful visual story. The influence of The Jungle Book is obvious in the first part of the animation, the Moon Cave sequence is an homage to surreal sequences in older animated films, and throughout it all the main characters stay on-model with Jamie Hewlett’s design.

If you want to learn more about the specific techniques and workflow used in the animation, Cartoon Brew wrote a much longer article from interviews with the animators that includes some of the original artwork used in the animation.

Ska Tune Network

February 25, 2026
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Usually, YouTube recommends videos from a mix of channels I actually watch and some that it thinks I might like. Usually, I’m not that impressed by those random recommendations. But every once in a while, the YouTube algorithm finds a perfect new recommendation. And today, I just uncovered another one of those gems.

What did it recommend? A cover of “Killing in the Name”, by Rage Against The Machine, by Ska Tune Network. That’s right, it’s a ska cover! And it is all one person performing everything!

The performance is fantastic, the video is well edited, and the music sounds great. And there are some other fine details that really make it perfect. The logo for the channel is designed to look like the old Cartoon Network logo. The end screen for showing Patreon credits and asking for subs/likes/merch sales is also very entertaining. And the final perfect detail: one of the posters in the back left of the room is a beautiful Cowboy Bebop art poster by Alexander Iaccarino, which I also have!

Enjoy the video and check out some of the other songs on the channel!

Dragon Ball 40th Anniversary

January 26, 2026
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The original Dragon Ball animation series turns 40 next month! And in celebration, the studio released a special video to commemorate the occasion:

The video includes a new animation focused on “translating the textures and colors of Akira Toriyama’s illustrations into motion” (according to the YouTube description), along with a moving musical score.

And watch to the end, because it includes an announcement! Enjoy!

OK Go’s New Music Video, Produced by Blender Studio

September 22, 2025
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Earlier this month the band OK Go released a new music video that was created in Blender!

If you have not seen any of OK Go’s music videos in the past, you are missing out on some insanely creative and iconic video productions. For another recent example, their video for the song Love used 29 robotic arms and 60 mirrors to create a crazy moving kaleidoscope recorded in a single 4-minute take.

For their most recent video, the band teamed up with artists Will Anderson and Lucas Zanotto, along with Blender Studio, to create a unique lyrics video for the song “Impulse Purchase”. The 3D animated video combines hand animation, eye/face tracking , and geometry nodes to showcase the lyrics along with procedurally generated characters and crowds.

As part of the collaboration with Blender Studio the video is an open project, meaning that the source file (a single .blend file that contains the entire animation) for the video is available to download and view in Blender (Blender Studio subscription required). If you are curious to see a real production animation using geometry nodes, consider donating to Blender Studio to gain access to the file along with many other Blender Studio open projects!

Fan-Made Animation of Saitama vs. Frieza

July 22, 2025
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I stumbled on a popular YouTube channel that creates fan animations of popular anime crossovers, especially focusing on Saitama from One Punch Man. The most recent complete animation is fantastic: it features Saitama in the Dragon Ball Z universe, fighting “Black Frieza” (another powerful transformation of Frieza in the Dragon Ball Super manga not seen in the animated versions yet).

The fight animations are top-notch, the fight explanations are very DBZ-esque, and the action is punctuated by some great comedic moments fitting for a One Punch Man homage. And as a bonus, there are no random cutaways to Bulma, King Kai, or Mr. Satan!

I plan on going back and watching the other shorts on the S.L.H. Animations channel. For instance, there are videos for Saitama vs. the Demon Slayer villains, Saitama vs. Genos, and some Dragon Ball Super animations.

The Decline of Cartoon Network

June 3, 2025
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I finally cancelled my linear TV subscription last year (YouTube TV) and switched 100% to streaming subscriptions. But there was one channel that kept me from making that switch years earlier, and it was Cartoon Network.

So I was sad to learn that Cartoon Network has had a very bad financial decade. Bloomberg Businessweek published the original article (behind a paywall) and Cartoon Brew wrote a summary of the details.

In very brief summary: revenue is down 80% in the last decade, young viewership of Cartoon Network content on Max (HBO Max now?) is significantly lower than competitors (dead last in some demographics), and in response the Warner Bros. leadership is focusing on established IP instead of creating original content.

Unfortunately, Adult Swim is included as part of Cartoon Network. The drop in revenue includes Adult Swim and viewership of the block has dropped 84% in the last decade. The only good news is that some original content from Adult Swim has decent performance on Max.

I don’t know how the Toonami sub-block is faring, but they are late to show some of the latest seasons from their biggest anime series in recent years, like My Hero Academia and Dr. Stone. That cannot be a good sign. I hope Tom and SARA are able to keep broadcasting!

FLCL Reanimated

April 26, 2025
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On this day 25 years ago, the first episode of FLCL aired. The original six episode OVA, a collaboration between acclaimed animation studios Gainax (best known for the Evangelion franchise) and Production I.G. (the Ghost in the Shell movies and series), earned international success when Adult Swim aired the series three years later.

FLCL is one of my favorite anime series of all time, and I still regularly re-watch those first six episodes. I am less of a fan of the subsequent seasons, but I appreciate that those original episodes were so impactful that they spawned four more stories.

Today, FLCL Reanimated was released, a shot-for-shot recreation of Brittle Bullet, the fifth episode of the season. More than 300 animators collaborated on the final result over four years. The soundtrack and voice acting is the original English dub, but the animated scenes are all brand new. And there are even some Adult Swim-esque commercials thrown in for some extra fun.

James Lee’s New Workflow Without Adobe

January 4, 2025
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James Lee, a popular YouTube animator, posted a new video today about the tools he uses in his new workflow. After using Adobe for over a decade, he finally pulled the trigger and switched completely away from all Adobe products.

If you are not familiar with James Lee’s work, his satirical YouTube videos are from the point of view of Nox, his alter-ego. The clips of Nox speaking to the viewer are highly stylized video footage, intermixed with short 2D animations, motion graphics, 3D animations, and occasional stock footage.

A year or two ago, he released a video titled “Breaking up with Adobe” (caution: nsfw), which ended with Nox crawling back to Adobe while lamenting the unhealthy relationship. A couple months ago, he released “When OneDrive Ruins Your Day” (caution: swearing), which revealed that the video was made without any Adobe tools.

In his newest video, “How I Broke up with Adobe” (caution: more swearing), he goes into a little more detail about his new pipeline.

And as a final reveal, he explains how he switched his operating system from Windows to Mint, a variant of Linux. He acknowledges that there is a learning curve, but I appreciate his explanation of the benefits of switching and his enthusiasm of the technology.

I need to switch to Linux on my secondary computer sometime this year, before Windows 10 support runs out in October. I am also looking forward to experimenting with Linux as a desktop OS, because it has been years since I used it that way (and even then, it was only for software development at work). I still don’t know if I will use Mint, Arch, or some other distribution, but it’s good to hear how well Linux is working for other people.

The Future of Blender NPR

December 22, 2024
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I have written about non-photo-realistic (NPR) rendering in Blender before, but typically the techniques rely on some hacks in the node editor and still require a lot of attention to look passable.

But I learned that there is an independent animation studio that uses Blender to create shorts with a style inspired by anime: DillonGoo Studios. Even more interesting, that studio has created their own custom build of Blender, GooEngine, which is how the studio creates their own shorts.

GooEngine adds new shader nodes to Blender that greatly improve its NPR abilities. For a full overview of the nodes and examples of how they are used, DillonGoo has an excellent introduction video. The first few minutes of the video also show the problems with the built-in “Toon Shader” node of Blender.

What is most exciting is that the custom features of GooEngine are now slated to be added to the main Blender source code! The DillonGoo studio developers are now official code contributors to Blender, and have even contributed valuable code to v4.3 (light-linking, something Blender has always lacked).

Take a look at the official announcement (video below) and some of DillonGoo’s anime-style shorts! Or if you’re feeling adventurous, download and try out the prototype build of Blender!