The Great Oscar Baiter

As we conclude the second month of our Year in Shorts, it’s good to take a moment and look back on all that we’ve accomplished thus far. I like to think we’ve looked at a great variety of films. Yes, most of them have been animated, but as you well know, animation is not a genre but a medium, capable of telling all manner of unique and interesting stories. We’ve seen slapstick comedies, thrilling adventures, surreal dramas and heartwarming romances, all through the power of imagination. But I don’t think we’ve covered a short quite so effectively depressing as today’s film, Louise Bagnall’s Late Afternoon. (via Wikipedia) Released in 2017 by Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon, who have made quite a name for themselves over the past decade, Late Afternoon tells the story of Emily (Fionnula Flanagan), an elderly woman suffering from dementia as she tries to reflect on her life. Memory loss is a popular subject in animation, which seems uniquely suited to express the experience of it ...

Despite his undeniably pivotal role in the history of Western Animation, Chuck Jones hasn’t been covered a lot here at The Great Oscar Baiter. As one of the Founding Fathers of Looney Tunes, we’ve discussed Chuck Jones in his relation to films such as Beep Prepared , as well as obliquely referencing his unfortunate tenure with the Tom and Jerry series. But Chuck Jones’ body of work stretches far beyond the classic characters we know and love, and the man certainly had a love for getting a little experimental with his shorts. And while 1960’s High Note may not be quite as out there as his work could get, it’s still a fun and clever short that deserves to be seen by more people. (via TV Tropes) High Note is another entry in the Looney Tunes series, although don't come into this expecting Bugs or Daffy. Instead, the short follows a group of sentient musical notes trying to put on a performance of Strauss's "The Blue Danube" on a piece of sheet music. As you do. But...

As regular readers of this blog have no doubt surmised, I’m not the most “artsy” of people. Oh sure, I can be pretentious with the best of them. I’ll gladly watch Cloud Atlas, Russian Ark or that creepy Czech stop motion version of Alice in Wonderland from the 80s. But at the end of the day, my tastes skew a little more mainstream than avant-garde. Why else would I run a blog dedicated to the Oscars? This is not something I particularly mind about myself, and mostly just serves as an explanation for why I’m not quite able to put into words why a short like The Bead Game is so great. (via IMDb) Released in 1977 by the National Film Board of Canada, Ishu Patel's The Bead Game is another anti-war animated short for us. But unlike Peace on Earth or Good Will to Men, this film does not use cute talking animals to get its point across. Instead it shows a brief history of violence over time as it uses multi-colored beads animated atop a black background to show animals, mythical cr...

Like all reasonable people, we here at The Great Oscar Baiter are great fans of Donald Duck. Across his proud and storied career, everyone’s second favorite irritable waterfowl managed to rack up a respectable nine Oscar nominations for Best Animated Short. And his final film to receive such an honor may very well be one of his finest, with 1955’s No Hunting. (via IMDb) No Hunting is a fairly straightforward short, presenting a satirical look at sports hunting, inspired by director Jack Hannah's own childhood experiences. But despite its simple premise and fairly short run time, the film is packed to the brim with a wonderful anarchic spirit, providing the viewer with more great gags in six minutes than some filmmakers can manage in ninety. (via Wikipedia) A great deal of the credit for this lies at the feet of the animators, who managed to fill the short with frantic slapstick and absurd sight gags while also producing a short that's still beautiful to look at. This might be...

This may be hard to believe, but I don’t have a lot of nostalgia for Popeye. I’ve got nothing against the man, mind you, I just didn’t grow up with him. I remember watching a couple of black-and-white with my grandfather once, but aside from that I have very little experience with the famous sailor. But if the rest of his output is anywhere near as good as the 1936 film Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor , I might have to check it out. (via Wikipedia) The first of three Popeye "Color Specials" released by Fleischer studios, Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor casts Popeye and his recurring cast in a familiar enough adventure. A big, bullying brute (in this case Sindbad the Sailor, designed to look like Popeye's lifelong nemesis, Bluto) kidnaps Olive Oyl and it's up to Popeye to save her. Even a Popeye novice such as myself knows that's the basic formula. But as with all films that stick to a formula, it all comes down to execution. And this short, ...

Well, another holiday season has come and gone and it’s time to get ready for the new year. And I thought, as a post-Christmas gift to both myself and you, we would hunker down through the rest of 2021 by looking at seven days at some pretty darn good shorts. And our journey begins with Daniel Greaves’ Oscar-wining short Manipulation. (via IMDb) Unlike some of the recent shorts we've looked at, there's not a whole lot of information out there about Manipulation. Honestly, we're lucky it has a Wikipedia page at all! Released in 1991, Manipulation is a fun little meta film about a cartoon character rebelling against its animator. So basically Duck Amuck without Daffy. And while anything without Daffy Duck is always going to be inferior to anything with him, Manipulation is not much of a step down from that short. Yes, it may lack Chuck Jones's madcap energy and Daffy's classic Daffiness, but it makes up for it in its own way. On a purely technical level, Manipulat...

Merry Christmas fellow Oscar Baiters! To celebrate the holiday, I’d love to share with you all a beloved Christmas tradition in my household- watching The Muppet Christmas Carol! Unfortunately, The Muppet Christmas Carol isn’t a short, so it doesn’t really fit in with our Year in Shorts. And aside from that, the cowards at the Academy completely ignored The Muppet Christmas Carol in all categories, so it’s pretty unlikely we’ll ever talk about it on this blog… Well, now that Christmas is good and ruined let’s just look at Mickey’s Christmas Carol instead. (via Wikipedia) I am taking it as a given that everyone reading this has seen Mickey's Christmas Carol , or at least one of the thousand and one other adaptations of Charles Dickens' classic, so we'll forgo the plot synopsis. It's also important to note that Mickey's Christmas Carol isn't the first animated adaptation of Charles Dickens' story to get some Oscar love; in 1972, Alistair Sim reprised his ...

Unlike a great deal of shorts we’ve covered so far, there’s a very good chance that most of you have seen The Snowman. Based on the children’s book by Raymond Brigg’s, 1982’s The Snowman is a universally beloved Christmas classic. BUT IS IT ANY GOOD?! (Spoiler alert- Yes it is, I’m not a heartless monster). Let’s take a look! (via IMDb) Recapping the plot of this film seems fairly pointless, both because it's so popular and because the film isn't really plot-driven. The Snowman first aired on British television December 26, 1982. I believe the rule has since been amended that television specials are ineligible for Oscar nominations, but I could be wrong. Either way, it's not hard to see why the short got so popular. (via IMDb) It's beautifully animated, it's cute, and (like all Christmas classics), it's just depressing enough to stick with you as you grow older. The music is fantastic, especially its haunting and iconic original song "Walking on the Air...

It’s the same complaint every year. Doesn’t Hollywood make anything new anymore? Why is everything a remake or adaptation or sequel? Remember when Hollywood was original? And so on this Christmas season, I will give you the greatest gift of all- the realization that Hollywood was always creatively bankrupt! Hell, they used to remake shorts! Case in point- 1955’s Good Will to Men. (via Internet Animation Database) Much like its predecessor , Good Will to Men is another fun Christmas short about animals living in a post-apocalyptic world in which humanity has driven itself to extinction. And while that was undoubtedly a very real concern when Peace on Earth was released in 1939, it was especially pressing to the audiences of 1955, what with the Cold War and the atom bomb and the mutually assured destruction and all that jazz. Such a short could obviously never be made today (when humanity wipes itself with climate change, we'll probably be taking the cute animals with us), but i...

Despite the fact that he wrote incredibly depressing stories about death and despair, the works of Hans Christian Anderson have proven to be incredibly popular with Disney. From features like The Little Mermaid and Frozen to shorts like The Ugly Duckling or The Steadfast Tin Soldier from Fantasia 2000, Disney sure loves to take his stories, bring them to life and throw a nice happy ending in there for good measure. But apparently they decided to break from tradition with today’s short, The Little Matchgirl. (via IMDb) The Little Matchgirl, much like Lorenzo before it, began life as a segment for the canceled project Fantasia 2006, and once again serves as a sad reminder of what could have been. Then again, if Fantasia 2006 had been made, I wouldn't be covering The Little Matchgirl as a part of our Year in Shorts, would I? Whatever the case, the short was developed by director Roger Allers (best known for co-directing The Lion King ) and producers Don Hahn and BAKER BLOODW...