Issue #104 | June 21th, 2026
Hey Reader 👋
Okay. I'm going to be honest with you guys.
I was about to dictate this intro… and I couldn't do it. I just couldn't speak. I was so exhausted, so close to the edge of burning out, that the words wouldn't come.
And then my wife called.
Thank god she did. We talked. She talked some sense back into me. And somewhere in that call I got enough air back in my lungs to go write the film review you'll read below - and now I feel good enough to just tell you all of this.
Here's the thing nobody warns you about when you start a newsletter like this. You never imagine that one day you'll be sitting here telling almost a thousand people about this kind of personal stuff. And honestly? I find it a little insane. You're reading these words right now. That's wild to me.
But I think it's good.
I'm no guru
Some people on LinkedIn call me a guru. I'm no fucking guru. I'm just a dude with a lot of experience and maybe a little more resilience than average. That's it. I'm still in there with you. Still learning the game while I teach it. Don't ever put me on a pedestal - I'm right next to you in the mud.
The community is the bright spot
Yesterday in office hours I had one member show up. Just one. And we spent the whole time digging into how to build his freelance career. It was great. You really feel it in those moments - that you're actually helping someone move.
Think about it. Without the community, he'd spend ten times the hours figuring this stuff out alone. It's an accelerator. That's what makes me happy about the whole thing existing.
What's actually hurting
The painful part? I barely have time for Animator NOW right now. And that's my baby. That's the business I care about most. I can't give it what it needs.
Same with everything else I love - music, surfing, all of it. On the side. Parked.
And I think that's exactly why I'm on the edge. These past months, my life got stripped of almost everything that makes me happy. So now I need to walk back toward those things, slowly. I'm hoping summer helps with that.
If you're feeling like shit too - if your daily work is grinding you down - please hit reply. This isn't really a newsletter. It's a personal email. I'll be genuinely glad to read your words and write back if you're going through a rough patch.
Alright. To end on a brighter note… there's a bunch of cool stuff below that I put together for you this week.😊
Let's get into it. 🔥
The Spotlight
A small boy drags through a typically grey Sunday. Church with the parents, then the long lunch at the grandparents' place where the adults talk over each other about money and the factory that just closed. Bored out of his mind, he wanders out and starts flattening coins on the train tracks… and one of those coins ends up doing something very strange to a passing bear.
I love this film.
It's funny, but the comedy is so discreet. It's never shouting. It's just always there, sitting quietly under everything, and you have to lean in a little to catch it. And underneath the comedy there's this melancholy that I think almost everyone feels instantly… that very specific boredom of being a kid on a Sunday afternoon, stuck at a family lunch, time moving like glue.
That's the thing that gets me.
So many films that reach back into childhood end up melancholic and nostalgic, and I love that. There's a poetry that comes out of it that you can't really fake. Doyon hand-drew this entire thing on paper, on a light table, over two years. Fifteen boxes of drawings. And it shows - not in a precious way, but in the way the whole thing breathes.
The design is just fun to watch. There are little gags and weird funny details hidden all over the frame, in the layout, in the way characters are drawn. You don't catch them all the first time. This is a film that needs a couple of watches to really grab everything, and that's a compliment.
It's full. There's so much in there.
And here's what I keep coming back to - this does not feel like a student film. It's deep on every single level. Design, layout, animation, sound. Every part of it is doing real work. And yet it still feels light. That balance is incredibly hard to pull off. Most people land on one side or the other.
The music reminds me of Amélie Poulain, which immediately puts me in that bittersweet French place.
It got nominated for an Oscar, and honestly, it deserved it.
Go watch it. Then watch it again.
🎬 Credits
Director: Patrick Doyon
Writer: Patrick Doyon
Production: National Film Board of Canada - nfb.ca
Producers: Marc Bertrand, Michael Fukushima
Music: Luigi Allemano
Editing: Jelena Popović
The Job Fair
- Animator (Film & Episodic) - Framestore · Melbourne, Australia (Remote / Hybrid options)
Multi-Oscar-winning studio expanding its film and episodic team, looking for an animator to handle primary and secondary character performance in Maya. Pure keyframe character work - weight, balance, acting, story-driven shots alongside animation leads and supervisors. Posted: June 19, 2026.
- CG / Facial Animator - Swaybox Studios · New Orleans, LA, USA (In-house only)
Puppet-meets-CG studio working on a new project with DC Studios / Warner Bros Pictures Animation and Matt Reeves' 6th and Idaho. They want a skilled facial animator with real film experience for expressive, performance-driven character work. I couldn't lock down the exact posting date on this one, so I'm flagging it as a lead rather than a confirmed in-window listing - worth a click if the project excites you.
The Random Stuff
🛠️ The Chrome extension that copies any website into Figma
Okay, this one is borderline insane.
If you've been around web design as long as I have, you'll understand why my jaw was on the floor. There's a new Chrome extension that lets you visit literally any website… and rip the whole thing into Figma. Not a screenshot. Everything becomes real, editable objects.
Think about what that means. Want to study how a site is built? Done. Want to grab an asset, an icon, an image, a layout you love? There you go. It's almost unfair. I keep going back and forth between "this is a gift" and "this is going to break a few people's brains." Either way, you need to see it.
⌚ 9 cheap watches that aficionados secretly obsess over
I've been fascinated by watches since I was a tiny kid. Still am.
I can't drop money on the grails I dream about, not for now anyway. But lately I've got this 80s nostalgia thing crawling all over me, and honestly? I'm a little sick of my Apple Watch. I want to disconnect. I want a watch I can just pull on without it pinging me about my heart rate.
This video runs through nine cheap watches that the real heads quietly love, and why they love them. The Casio A168 is right there on the list… the exact one I probably owned like 35 years ago. I want it back. There's something about going small and dumb and beautiful instead of smart and connected. If you've got the same itch, this'll scratch it.
🎵 Daniel Lopatin on scoring Marty Supreme
I just saw Marty Supreme. Loved it.
Pure Timothée Chalamet acting clinic, and you know I'm a huge fan. I've seen everything he's done. But the real discovery for me was Daniel Lopatin, the guy who wrote the score (you might know him as Oneohtrix Point Never).
It's a full-on throwback. Synths, those specific textures, that borrowed-80s feeling that just… resonates with something deep in me right now. As I build out my studio, I can feel myself getting pulled exactly in this direction. This is the kind of music I want to start making, and I cannot wait to begin. Watch the interview. If you make music, or just love when a score becomes the film, it's worth every minute.
Like what you're reading? Don't keep it to yourself.
Forward this to one person who'd love it.
That's how we grow this thing. One animator at a time. 🥰
Philippe Duvin
Founder, Animator NOW
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