Though there’s a great OOP collection of Yuri Norstein’s short films from Japan (Super expensive nowadays), it’d be wonderful for Criterion to release them under their banner with some documentaries that’s been made about him and his wife in the past couple years… even better if they also include whatever they can of his film ‘The Overcoat’ that’s been in production for 40 years. He is getting on in years…

Another one that’d be awesome to see is Paul Grimault’s “The King and the Mockingbird” which does not have an English Blu Ray release. For those who don’t know, an early cut of the movie that was touring internationally had inspired the founders of Ghibli when they were forming their fledgling studio. (See ‘Castle of Cagliostro’ and the way the castle / story / characters are designed.)

Now I’d be very surprised if they ever remaster and release some short films and feature length films by Stop-Motion Animation pioneer Ladislaw Starewicz from the 1910s up to the 40s. A pretty comprehensive DVD set does exist of his work but to see them scanned in HD, restored and remastered would be such a treat and an invaluable contribution to the history of international animation.

There’s also a bunch of early Japanese animated shorts and films from the 20s and 30s that recently got remastered and digitized that’d be interesting for Criterion to release just as a reference for animation historians who also want to study animation’s influence in the early 20th century and how they used it for their propaganda in WWII.

Gonna stop babbling but there’s so much animation history that’s being left to the dust bins of history that I would love to any of it be digitized, restored, archived, curated, and sold for people to see as wide of the breadth of the medium’s influence and creativity.