the tube: Animated Uploads
A monthly roundup of feature films and cinematic oddities you can stream on YouTube and such for FREE!
Welcome to the tube, where we highlight movies you can access for free on the Internet // Today we’re looking at the secret treasure trove of great animated films available on YouTube //
When a movie is available on YouTube, Vimeo, or another tube site, it’s as available as anything possibly could be. There are great movies out there that never got a proper disk release and weren’t available to stream anywhere until they started floating around on YouTube. Trouble is, a movie that’s only available on YouTube is virtually as inaccessible as ever because it’s simply not the way most people (including myself) have been trained by the market to watch movies.
Thing is, as Hollywood is all bought up by telecom and tech companies or whatever, and juggling streaming subscriptions becomes an increasingly untenable, cost-ineffective, and all around poor-quality proposition, we should be looking for cinema on platforms where the controls are more in the hands of the people. YouTube is as riddled with problems for content providers and consumers as any platform, but it’s also one of the few widely available ones where people can upload and watch whole-ass movies for free.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some great “boutique” streaming services out there, and one or two of the big ones boast phenomenal movie libraries (that they typically don’t bother to curate, advertise, or even acknowledge). But as long as we’re all watching movies on the Internet, I think we should start shifting the ecosystem toward platforms that favor user-uploaded and user-created content over corporate-owned and curated stuff. A lot of us have already shifted our news consumption from mainstream corporate media to small independent outlets on YouTube, Twitch, etc. I think it’s a good idea to start doing the same with movies.
So for the first addition of the tube, we’re looking at the thing that got me regularly seeking out free movies on tube sites in the first place — YouTube’s treasure trove of great hand-drawn animated films. Not sure why so many older animated movies have been uploaded to YouTube and haven’t been taken down by the companies that own them, but my guess is that they just don’t care. Outside of anime, the market has completely shifted away from hand-drawn animation anyway. It’s a dying art form, and a truly remarkable one. By my estimation, YouTube is currently home to the greatest collection of animated movies ever. Mad appreciate all the folks out there who have uploaded all this great shit and made it free ‘n available to the rest of us. Here are a handful of my favorite rips.
The Thief and the Cobbler (1993) “Recobbled Cut”
The Thief and the Cobbler is a technically-never-finished animated film by Richard Williams, the prolific artist probably best known for the breathtaking animation of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It was a project of arguably unprecedented ambition in the field, originating in the ‘60s and in production, on and off, for the next 30 years. In 1989, Warner Bros. picked up the project for distribution, cut it up, added songs and subpar animation, and finished it in a rush without Williams’ involvement under the title The Princess and the Cobbler. Classic Hollywood story :/
Fortunately, there’s this great fan edit out there called the “Recobbled Cut,” which bascially assembles a presentation of the film that’s largely drawn from Williams’ original 1992 workprint and sticks as close to his original vision as possible. It’s kind of frustrating to watch when you see unfinished scenes next to some of the most complex hand-drawn animation ever produced, but what’s there is also a fucking miracle to behold. If you have any affinity for animation whatsoever this thing should be at the tip top of your watchlist.
You can watch the latest version of the Recobbled Cut here.
Allegro Non Troppo (1977)
Allegro Non Troppo is a trippy 1976 Italian parody of Disney’s Fantasia, featuring six pieces of classical music and accompanying animated sequences, with black-and-white meta live-action scenes featuring the conductor, animator, musicians, and studio audience. The live-action scenes are ok, but all the animated sequences are really great, visibly not quite in the budget range of Fantasia but every bit as interesting and super inventive both thematically and stylistically.
You can watch Allegro Non Tropo here. Somebody also uploaded a cut that’s just the animated sequences, which you can watch here.
Space Adventure Cobra (1982)
Ever had the thought, what if Cowboy Bebop were hornier and more psychedelic? Enter Space Adventure Cobra, a glorious product of the ‘80s cyberpunk anime boom that infuses the genre with a disco-hippy-retro-spy sense of camp and visual maximalism. The titular Cobra is a notorious and notoriously cool space mercenary with a killer left arm that turns into a whole-ass gun on command, tasked by a sexy bounty hunter lady to track down and rescue her sister from a shiny crystalline bad guy whose literal name is Crystal Bowie (ground control to Major Tom, amirite?). Almost every shot of this movie is its own dense piece of vaporwave tumblr fodder.
You can watch Space Adventure Cobra here.
Heavy Traffic (1973)
Heavy Traffic is the 2nd film of legendary underground animator Ralph Bakshi and my favorite animated film of all time, if I had to pick. I wrote our last auteruism on Bakshi last year, here’s what I had to say about Heavy Traffic then:
“With the success of Fritz the Cat under his belt, Bakshi was finally able to make an original film focused on human characters. In a clearly autobiographical move, the protagonist of Heavy Traffic is an underground cartoonist who takes inspiration from the people on the streets of a dilapidated 1970s New York. The film is a blazing portrait of an America in tatters and the messy lives of the cartoon caricatures-turned-three-dimensional outcasts moving through its ruins. New York Times critic Vincent Canby ranked Heavy Traffic among the best films of 1973 alongside Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and George Lucas's American Graffiti. To quote a tagline from the film's trailer, ‘it's animated, but it's not a cartoon. It's funny, but it's not a comedy. It's real, it's unreal, it's heavy,’ and it remains Bakshi's magnum opus.”
You can watch Heavy Traffic here.
Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie (1994)
A killer anime adaptation of Street Fighter II the game, this is a total fuckin’ banger. Hand-drawn animation once again proves itself an optimal medium for the type of explosive frenetic fist-pounding earth-shattering action we so often see horribly executed with vomity CGI in Marvel movies etc. today. Makes the new Mortal Kombat, which I really liked, look like a boring dud in comparison.
You can watch Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie here.
Felidae (1994)
Felidae is a German gritty noir Watership Down for cat lovers, following the exploits of house cat Francis as he investigates a series of feline murders in his new neighborhood. The juxtaposition of ultra violence and adult themes against a Disney-esque backdrop and cast of animal characters is really unique and pretty awe-inspiring.
You can watch the English dub of Felidae here.
Wicked City (1987)
Just discovered this one last month and included it in my most recent Letterboxd diary roundup:
“I’m a novice in the anime department, but this was one of the most gorgeous and visceral animes I’ve ever seen. Maximum vaporwave. Great mix of pulp, sci-fi, body horror, and comic-book action. Just to warn ya it’s pretty fucked up in parts, like, in a rapey tentacle porn-y way, but idk man, I just always dig well-done, lurid hand-drawn/2D animation, and this one definitely rips.”
You can watch Wicked City here.
…that’s it for now. Probably gonna do another one of these soon. Next time we’ll be looking at microbudget independent films from a group of guerilla filmmakers doin’ their own shit, putting it up for free on the internet, and promoting other artists who are doing the same. You can check out a whole bunch ‘o these films here in the meantime.
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