The Great Oscar Baiter

Sometimes a film just sticks out from the rest of the pack like a sore thumb. For a great example of this, take a look at the Best Picture lineup at the 40th Academy Awards. Nominated are films like The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, which revolutionized the film industry. Also nominated is Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which (along with that year’s winner, In the Heat of the Night ) tackled race relations in America clearly and directly. Say what you will about those films (I don’t even like two of them), you cannot deny they were important. And then there was the fifth nominee, Doctor Dolittle. In fairness, I haven’t seen that movie so I can’t speak to its quality. (Then again, a three hour musical from the 1960s- possibly the worst decade for movie musicals- starring my sworn enemy Rex Harrison probably doesn’t have a whole lot of promise.) Still, it’s clearly an outlier amongst the rest of the pack. And at first glance, that year’s winner for Best Animated Short, The Box, seem...

Classical music and cartoons are a match made in heaven, like peanut butter and jelly. There are countless Looney Tunes shorts dedicated to proving this. Fantasia was a  whole damn movie about exploring where that relationship could go. And Lord knows we’ve looked at more than enough shorts which showcase that marriage beautifully. But not every pairing is going to create movie magic, of course. And any movie starring Andy Panda is already starting itself off on the wrong foot. But let’s see if The Poet & Peasant can clear that hurdle anyway. (via TV Tropes) The premise of The Poet & Peasant (directed by Dick Lundy and released in 1945) is a pretty simple one- Andy Panda is conducting a concert in which the musicians are all animals. It's such a simple concept, in fact, that it's no surprise that it's been done before, most notably in Disney's The Band Concert, released ten years before this short. The Band Concert, bafflingly, was NOT nominated for an Osc...

Rating movies is an arbitrary and ultimately meaningless task, subject to the whims, biases and personal tastes of the one doing the rating. Nevertheless, I do have some strict rules that I follow. Is Jim Broadbent in your movie? Well, I add half a star. Does something horrible happen to a character’s teeth? Well, I remove half a star. But the most surefire way to get a half star bonus is to make your movie in stop motion animation. Although films like The Great Cognito certainly test that rule to the limit. (via Film Affinity) Regular readers of this blog may remember the name Will Vinton, director of such beloved (?) shorts as Closed Mondays and Creation , as well as the guy responsible for the California Raisins. Unlike those last two shorts, The Great Cognito (released in 1982) isn't quite so high concept. Instead, the film is basically a standup routine set up to animation, with the title character (voiced by John Morrison) showing off his skill as an impersonator doing a ...

Of all the childhood experiences I’m not nostalgic for, sitting around bored while at a gathering of adults ranks high on the list. (Granted, I still get bored at gatherings of adults, it’s just that now I’m expected to be able to hold a conversation with them.) I imagine this is a universal experience for a lot of us, and that certainly seems to be the case with Patrick Doyon, writer and director of today’s short, Sunday. (via Wikipedia) Released in 2011, Sunday (or Dimanche for all you Francophones out there) is another short from our friends at the NFBC. Inspired by Doyon's own childhood, it tells the story of a boy who, in order to keep himself entertained while visiting his grandparents, fills time by flattening pennies on railroad tracks. Luckily for him (and the audience), this is a much more light-hearted Canadian short than our last one , so this rather dangerous hobby doesn't lead to his horrific death. Instead what follows is a cute, if fairly unremarkable, short t...

Last weekend I threw myself a mini- Looney Tunes marathon, watching such classics as Rabbit Seasoning, Hair-Raising Hare, Baseball Bugs and more. And it once again struck me as odd that, for such an iconic character in animation, Bugs Bunny didn’t have much luck with the Academy Awards. Today’s short, 1941's Hiawatha’s Rabbit Hunt, is the second of his three nominations. But at the end of the day, Oscars don’t really matter. What matters is whether or not the shorts were funny. Is this one? Only one way to find out. (via TV Tropes) Directed by Friz Freleng (who seems to come up a lot around here as of late), Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt follows the standard formula you've come to expect from a Bugs Bunny short. Bugs is minding his own business in the forest (in this case, reading The Song of Hiawatha ), when a dim-witted hunter comes along to make trouble for him. However, instead of matching wits with Elmer Fudd this time around, Bugs has to contend with Hiawatha himself. Gr...

Most of the nominees for Best Live Action Short at the 91st Academy Awards had one bizarrely specific thing in common- child endangerment. For whatever reason the Academy couldn’t get enough of that shit in 2018, at least in short form. We’ve already covered one of those shorts in Detainment. Today’s short isn’t quite as good as that one, although it also raises less ethical questions, which is a plus. So let’s take a look at Fauve! (via Wikipedia) Directed by Jeremy Comte, Fauve is something of a rare beast for us in our Year in Shorts- A Canadian short not released by the NFBC! (Are those even allowed? ) It's sort of a difficult film to talk about without getting into spoiler territory, so if that sort of thing is important to you, watch the film here on Vimeo first. (Just a heads-up; the video does not default to English subtitles, and those using Chromecast might have some difficulty getting them to work. But this isn't a dialogue driven short, so I guess it really does...

Dave Fleischer (along with his brother Max) is responsible for producing some of the most beloved animated shorts from the 1920s to the 1940s. But like all great artists, he certainly had his fair share of duds too. And ranking particularly high on that list of flops is Bob Wickersham’s 1943 short, Imagination. (via TV Tropes) Imagination is another one of those shorts where there really isn't a heck of a whole lot to say about it. Oh it's bad, sure. But not in a particularly interesting way. Just in that sort of boring, generic, vaguely annoying way that's common to a lot of bad cartoons from the 30s and 40s. Still, I have a job to do, so let's get on with it. A part of Columbia's Color Rhapsody series (which may sound like a half-assed Silly Symphonies/Merrie Melodies ripoff, but I can assure you is much worse), it tells the story of a poor little girl who imagines a story explaining how her toys got so beat up. What proceeds is an adventure which combines roman...

I’m sure Walter Lantz was responsible for a lot of great cartoons. I haven’t seen any of them, but they must exist. But if we were to solely judge based on his Oscar-nominated works, we’d have to conclude that he was nothing more than a third-rate Walt Disney, a cheap purveyor of subpar Looney Tunes knock-offs, a perpetual “also-ran” in the world of animation. And today’s short, the 1942 film Juke Box Jamboree, does absolutely nothing to change that perception of him. (via The Internet Animation Database) For reasons that I'm sure make sense to someone, Juke Box Jamboree is an incredibly hard short to find. The best I could manage was a slightly incomplete Spanish language dub on Dailymotion . Luckily, this isn't a particularly dialogue heavy short, so I think we'll manage. To be fair, it's not really an anything heavy short. Directed by Alex Lovy, it tells the story of a mouse who lives in a bar, but has trouble sleeping because the jukebox keeps playing. In an att...

When we think of Chuck Jones, we think of his comic genius or the artistic leaps forward he took in the field of animation. Rarely do we ever think of him as an educator or advocate for important social policies. We certainly don’t think of him as the type of guy who'd be working for the United States government. (Well, aside from that time Bugs Bunny told people to buy war bonds, but I guess that was a special case). And yet, in 1949 he was all those things, with his Oscar-winning short documentary, So Much for So Little. (via Wikipedia) Co-written by fellow Looney Tunes regular Friz Freleng, So Much for So Little was commissioned by the United States Public Health Service during the Truman Administration to educate the public on the need for a strong Department of Health. It does so by following the hypothetical life of John E. Jones from birth to adulthood, showing the various health problems he might face and services he might need as he grows up. That might sound like a part...