About The Big Cartoon DataBase
A reference to animated cartoons, features, television series and shorts, and to the people who made them.
The short version
The Big Cartoon DataBase, BCDB for short, began in 1997 as a list of Disney animated features on Dave Koch's own computer. Dave owned and ran The Cartoon Factory, an animation art gallery in Salt Lake City, so cartoons were already part of his daily life.
Clients would come in, and sooner or later the conversation almost always turned to which Disney animated films were the "classics". Tired of answering the same question again and again, Dave made a list.
People kept asking for it, so in 1998 it went online as a searchable database: titles, release dates, studios, voice actors, directors, producers, synopses and reviews from visitors.
It kept growing. In 2003 BCDB became a nonprofit corporation. By 2009 it held 100,000 titles. Today the archive lists more than 165,000 cartoons and the credits of more than 160,000 people.
Updates stopped in late 2019 and the site went offline in January 2024. Dave began rebuilding it in 2026, and BCDB came back online on November 11, 2026. The cartoon data currently runs through October 2019; the aim is to add the missing years over the next six months.
A note from Dave
I opened BCDB and it was a labor of love. It was fun, and then it became an addiction. It grew to be too much and took over all my time: twelve hours a day, seven days a week. I burned out. I had to step away. I did not even want to see it for a year or two. But I kept seeing it.
And that love continued.
So I played around with it. I looked at it, and it looked back and said: do something.
So I did.
Over the summer and into the fall of 2026 I started playing with the data. Remembering passwords. Reactivating AWS paths. But most of all, remembering how much fun this was to make.
So BCDB came back, from Perl into Laravel. I think it is a lot more useful, powerful and configurable, but I'll leave it to you to decide if it's an improvement. (TL;DR: it is!)
When the site went live again for the first time in years, I was so happy. I was proud of all the work we had all done as a community, and how well it held up. And I was very happy to be sharing it again, and to be part of this community again.
But there is a long way to go. I pretty much stopped entering data in 2019 because I was so burnt out. I stopped answering emails and posts in the forum, because I just did not want to see those four letters any more at all. (Surprise: the forum WILL be back, too!) I just could not do it. Doing it now will have to be within limits I set for myself.
My goal is to add the last eight years of animation over the next six months. That is an achievable goal, I think. It's also a lot of work.
And this is a lot to ask of one person. In the past I have had a lot of help, but ultimately it was me who built this. So I throw it out to you, the users, to help make BCDB back into what it once was: the BEST animation resource on the Internet.
Dave Koch, founder
Away from cartoons, Dave is an aviation photographer. His aircraft photography is at AeroMedia Aviation Photography.
What others have said
- The San Diego Union-Tribune named BCDB a "top site" in 2002, when it listed some 42,000 cartoons.
- The Reference and User Services Association put BCDB on its 2006 list of best free reference web sites, calling it "the definitive Web compendium for anyone interested in the history of animation."
- Apple Hot News recommended it in 2005 as the place to look up in-depth information on cartoons.
- BCDB has been cited as a reference by USA Today, the Hartford Courant, the Oakland Tribune and Animation World Network, among others.
Help make it better
BCDB has always depended on people who know and love these films. If you spot a mistake or can add something, use "Submit additional info about this cartoon" on any cartoon page, or get in touch.