The Great Oscar Baiter

You unlock this door with the key of too much free time on your hands. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of meaningless awards, a dimension of taking said awards far too seriously, a dimension of writing blog posts about how seriously we take these awards in an effort to feel like all the space they’re taking up in our brains hasn’t been for naught. You’re moving into a land of both style and substance, of art and analysis. You’ve just crossed over into… The Great Oscar Baiter. (via IMDb) T oday, a presentation so special and unique that for the first time in four months we've been covering our Year in Shorts, we're talking about a film that some of you may have seen by binge watching The Twilight Zone. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short at the 36th Academy Awards, here is a critical look at a classic work of French cinema. Here is our piece on An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. (via Midnite Review) Setting aside the Twilight Zone connection for ...

While not a household name like Dr. Seuss , the works of William Steig have provided some good fodder for Oscar-nominated films. And by that, I mostly mean Shrek, which won the first ever Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and Shrek 2, which gave us an Oscar-nominated Counting Crows song. But nearly two decades before the release of Shrek there was another award-nominated film based on a book by William Steig- the 1984 short Doctor DeSoto. (via TV Tropes) As far as I can tell, Michael Sporn's animated adaptation of Doctor DeSoto is less of an adaptation of the book and more of a translation, with the text and visuals coming directly from the book. It's sort of like the BBC version of Pride & Prejudice in that way. There's certainly nothing wrong with this style of adaptation, especially not with a picture book; I remember having a VHS as a kid that had cartoon versions of Danny and the Dinosaur, Corduroy and one of the Madeleine books that I watched quite a...

One film I really like despite not really understanding it at all is Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. A bizarre, fractured take on the music biopic, I’m Not There tells the story of Bob Dylan by analyzing six distinct points in his career, casting six distinct actors to play him and shooting in six distinct styles. Knowing far less about music than I do about movies (which regular readers of this blog will know is saying something), a lot of the movie’s subtleties and meanings are lost on me, and it’s just a film I sort of vibe with. And that’s perfectly fine! It’s just that I imagine a Bob Dylan fan would have a much more rewarding experience with it, much as a bigger Beatles fan than myself would probably take a lot more away from today’s short, I Met the Walrus. (via Wikipedia) For a multitude of reasons, Josh Raskin's I Met the Walrus is an odd duck of a film. It consists of an edited interview between producer Jerry Levitan and John Lennon, recorded in 1969 after the fourteen ye...

Classical music and cartoons go together like peanut butter and hot dogs- it sounds wrong at a glance, but in practice it’s amazing. (And before any of you judge me for what I put on a hot dog, I want you to think long and hard about what people put in them). Whether it’s the absurd shenanigans of the Merrie Melodies or the more haunting and contemplative segments in Fantasia, the relationship between great music and animation has long been a fruitful one. But of course, the quality of each individual partnership depends heavily on the quality of the animation. After all, for every delightful Silly Symphony out there you have a Happy Harmony sullying the good name of cartoons. And Musical Moments from Chopin belongs more in the latter category than the former. (via TV Tropes) We haven't discussed the animation of Universal Studios very much in our Year in Shorts, which leads me to believe that I may have given you a somewhat skewed version of film history. Just by reading my...

One of the great things about documentaries is how versatile they are. Not only in terms of form and subject, but in terms of what the filmmakers are hoping they do. Some just seek to inform; others want to entertain. And still some documentaries exist in order to effect social change. 2018’s Period. End of Sentence is one such film. And I’m happy to say that the film definitely succeeded in their mission, at least in my neck of the woods. After that, winning an Oscar almost seems secondary! (via Wikipedia) Directed by Rayka Zehtabchi and released in 2018, Period. End of Sentence. is a "social issue" documentary, with the issue in this case being menstruation and the taboos that often surround it in India. The film specifically focuses on a group of women in Hapur, India, who learn how to make cheap and safe sanitary pads with the help of a machine invented by Arunachalam Muruganantham. On first glance it might sound like a strange subject for a film, but the film manages t...

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I’m a pretty big fan of the animated comedy duo known as Tom and Jerry. (If you haven’t noticed, don’t worry; I’ve been pretty subtle about it.) Still, despite my ever abiding love for the pair, I haven’t yet covered a truly great Tom and Jerry short yet. The closest I’ve come so far was Jerry’s Cousin , and I still managed to find things to nitpick about that one. But there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, of course. You see, when you cover a truly great series, you have to grade each individual entry on a curve. For instance, an average episode of Frasier might be better than a great episode of most other sitcoms, but you still have to acknowledge that it’s an average episode of Frasier. And that leads us to today’s short, Mouse Trouble. It’s a lot better than your average cartoon. But is it better than your average Tom and Jerry short? Let’s find out! (via Wikipedia) Unlike the last Tom and Jerry short we covered ...

We here at The Great Oscar Baiter are great fans of dark comedies, but they’re awfully hard to pull off. Too often will a film purport itself to be a dark comedy without ever actually trying to be funny , instead merely settling for being clever. And while there’s certainly nothing wrong with being clever, it’s always a bit of a disappointment for me. Films like Dr. Strangelove and The Death of Stalin prove that a film can be dark and hilarious, and as such hold a special place for me. Will Even Pigeons Go to Heaven be funny enough to join their company? Let’s find out! (via Wikipedia) Even Pigeons Go to Heaven is yet another French short, this time directed by Samuel Torneux and released in 2007. It tells the story of Mr. Moulin, a French miser who is saved from a near death experience by a greedy priest. The priest, feigning concern for Moulin's immortal soul, tries to sell him his latest invention- a one-way ticket to heaven. Of course, Moulin didn't save himself a soc...

When I think of the heyday of experimental animated shorts, I think of the 1960s. That’s hardly a surprise. What with the drugs and the sexual revolution and the crazy hairstyles, the 1960s were ripe with experimentation. But the 1950s had their fair share of experimental animation too, and the UPA played a big part in that. In one of the very first posts in our Year in Shorts, we discussed 1950’s Gerald McBoing-Boing , which pioneered the use of limited animation in film. Rooty Toot Toot, released a year later and directed by John Hubley, was made in a similar vein, with interesting results, to say the least! (via TV Tropes) A retelling of the popular song "Frankie and Johnny", Rooty Toot Toot earns points from me right away by being a courtroom story. I love those. It's also a musical dark comedy starring Thurl Ravenscroft of "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" fame, so they've got a lot of goodwill coming their way. An in addition to all that, it...

In the early days of our Year in Shorts, we covered Chuck Jones’ Beep Prepared , the only Road Runner and Coyote short to be nominated for an Oscar. But that short also marked the first time Chuck Jones was personally nominated for the award himself. Or at least, it’s tied for first. For in 1961 Chuck Jones directed another animated short which got an Oscar nomination, Nelly’s Folly. Is it as good a film as Beep Prepared? In a word- No. Let’s see why that is! (via Wikipedia) Nelly's Folly tells the story of Nelly, a giraffe with a beautiful singing voice who gets discovered by an agent and brought into a career of show business. Well, I guess we know where The Muppet Movie got its plot from! What follows is seven minutes of your basic rags-to-riches-to-rags-again story, with Nelly becoming a smash hit before being dragged down by scandal. So really it's just like any average music biopic (most of which try to cram in too much story in very little time already, let alone s...