Happy Sunday! It’s a new issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s what we’re doing today: 1️⃣ How background painter Nizo Yamamoto rose. 2️⃣ Animating for a documentary, plus animation newsbits. Just finding us? You can sign up to receive our Sunday issues for free, weekly, in your inbox: Sign Up Now, here we go! It was a shock when the news broke, last summer, that Nizo Yamamoto had passed away.

The role that Walt Whitman’s “The Learn’d Astronomer” plays in Breaking Bad is one of the first things I ever wanted to write about for PopPoetry—seeing the work of a poet being such an integral part of the show’s plot was utterly thrilling to me. And not just any show: one of the most critically acclaimed television shows of all time. Good screenwriters choose poetry that makes sense for their characters when these mash-ups do happen, and Vince Gilligan knocked it out of the park by selecting the so-called Grandfather of American Poetry.

Happy New Year everyone! 🎇🎆 I’ve long felt sorry for Southwark Bridge. Who ever talks about it? This is central London’s least used bridge, and always has been. It’s the span with no fan; the underclass overpass. It is a bridge of meagre renown. But that’s not really fair. Southwark Bridge is a characterful crossing, imbued with unique shapes and colours. It has also a history to compete with any of its neighbours, albeit a tragic one.

With Tottenham Hotspur's rich history tradition in the FA Cup, it would be all too easy to overlook just what an astonishing achievement it was when Martha Thomas' dramatic extra-time strike sent the women's team to Wembley. Spurs lifted the men's FA Cup for the first time way back in 1901 as a non-league club and remain the only such outfit to do so in the history of the grand old competition.

I’ve been playing around with AI image-generators to see what would arise from prompts about some Jamaican/Caribbean mythological creatures. My first attempt was for The Rolling Calf. I am fascinated by Jamaican mythology …. myths and legends in general. After I did this first attempt at generating these AI images, then I realized that some aspects of my prompt needed an adjustment … I’ll refine and post more eventually … The Rolling Calf… some accounts have it as closer to a Minotaur, with the upper body being that of a calf and then from the waist down, a man.