I love Behind The Scenes style documentaries of animated films. It’s a niche genre but very fulfilling for me – a dad who watches almost exclusively animated TV and films with my children. Above is a playlist of ~20 short behind-the-scenes documentaries of some of the greatest animated films from some of the greatest animation studios. I rewatch all these from time to time and reference them frequently, so I thought I’d collect them in a playlist and share.

The obsession started before kids actually, as part of trying to learning how large creative projects are successful. I get a lot of inspiration from seeing how animated films come together. Animated films that take years to make are incredibly different from the work I do but share some principles that I feel apply to large software projects like websites.

There’s tons of gleanable insights from their processes and tools. Processes like “dailies” or a “brain trust” like they talked about in the book Creativity, Inc. seem apt for web development. I often wonder if a Producer/Director-model would be better for websites.

I have some non-YouTube recommendations as well. I’ve posted some them before, but here’s a running list of documentaries and docu-series I’ve come across:

Always up for more YouTube and feature length documentaries, if you have any you liked send them my way.