A to Z of Animation Studios: F Is for Filmation
The studio that made He-Man, She-Ra and the same transformation sequence you've seen a thousand times.
F is for Filmation
Founded: 1962, in California, by Lou Scheimer, Hal Sutherland and Norm Prescott.
The approach: Filmation found a way to make a lot of TV animation on a small budget. The secret: reuse. A great transformation scene, a dramatic walk cycle or a background could appear again and again, across a whole season.
Greatest hits
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids (1972). One of the first Saturday-morning cartoons built around lessons kids could use in real life.
Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973). REAL: it won a Daytime Emmy, the first Emmy ever won by a Star Trek series.
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983). "By the power of Grayskull!" Every episode ended with a short life lesson.
She-Ra: Princess of Power (1985). He-Man's twin sister got her own show, and later a hit reboot on Netflix.
Ghostbusters (1986). REAL: not the movie version. This was based on Filmation's own 1975 live-action show The Ghost Busters, which had a gorilla named Tracy. That's why the movie-based cartoon was called The Real Ghostbusters.
BraveStarr (1987). A space cowboy with animal powers.
The Filmation formula
Reuse smart. Filmation built a library of animation and drew from it constantly.
End with a lesson. Many Filmation shows closed with a character talking directly to kids about what they learned.
Big, simple heroes. Easy to draw, easy to remember.
The struggle
The reuse was easy to spot. Characters talked with barely moving mouths. Backgrounds repeated. Skeletor escaped every week so nobody had to animate a new villain.
REAL: Filmation was one of the last big TV animation studios to keep most of its work in the United States instead of sending it overseas. In 1989, after the company was sold, it closed.
Honorable mention: Fleischer Studios
The opposite of Filmation. REAL: Max Fleischer patented the rotoscope in 1917, a device for tracing over live-action film to make animation move realistically. Fleischer gave us Betty Boop, Popeye and the gorgeous 1940s Superman shorts, which still look amazing today.
The lesson
Reuse isn't a crime. Every animator saves work. Filmation's lesson is about balance: save where the audience won't notice, and spend where they will. He-Man's transformation was reused because it was the moment kids waited for. That's a smart place to put your best animation.
Up next
G is for Studio Ghibli.
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