The old Web is full of sites that are effectively one-person trade schools. Brian Lemay’s Animated Cartoon Factory is one of them.
Visit Brian Lemay’s Animated Cartoon Factory
The homepage describes the site as an educational resource for animation, animated cartoons, cartooning, animation design, layout, storyboarding, computer animation, and training. It is not trying to hide what it is behind a lifestyle brand. It is an animation teacher’s website.
The structure is wonderfully direct. There are learning materials, books, downloadable PDFs, a section on sculpting animation characters with oven-bake clay, an animation-history timeline, and information about video lectures and training.
The current page says it was last updated in January 2022, but much of its visual language belongs to an earlier Internet. That makes the site useful in two directions at once: the subject matter is animation history and technique, while the website itself is a surviving example of how specialists used to package knowledge online.
Lemay’s career also gives the material context. Secondary biographical sources credit him with decades of animation work and teaching, including layout work on television animation. The important point for this site is not celebrity. It is that the pages were built by somebody working in the field and teaching the craft.
A website can be a textbook shelf
The site does something that modern course platforms often make unnecessarily complicated: it exposes the subject directly.
There is no requirement to create an account before discovering what topics are covered. There is no fake scarcity timer. There is no endless funnel of “free masterclass” pages designed mainly to harvest an email address. The visitor can browse the subject, inspect the material, and decide what is useful.
That openness has preservation value too. A page explaining character sculpting or linking an animation-history timeline remains independently discoverable. The knowledge is not buried inside a proprietary course dashboard.
For modern webmasters building educational sites, this is worth remembering. Courses can be products, but the public index itself can still teach something. A good specialist website should leave a trail of useful material even for the person who never buys anything.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many sites created by people who simply knew a subject and decided the Web was a reasonable place to explain it.
Brian Lemay’s Animated Cartoon Factory is a clean example of that model still hanging around.