The Great Oscar Baiter

The mid-2000s was a busy time for Wallace and Gromit. At the 78th Academy Awards, the duo managed to secure their first Oscar win outside the Best Animated Short category when The Curse of the Were-Rabbit became the first (and so far only) stop-motion AND British film to win Best Animated Short. 2007 saw the release of the critically acclaimed Shaun the Sheep spinoff series, which went on to inspire two Oscar-nominated films on its own. And in 2008, Wallace and Gromit would receive one final Oscar nod for their short A Matter of Loaf and Death. (via Wikipedia) In some ways, A Matter of Loaf and Death isn't very different from other Wallace and Gromit films. Aside from once again being directed by Nick Park, the film contains the usual staples we've come to expect from their films- Wallace and Gromit hard at work in a new job (in this case, baking), getting involved in some sort of strangely intense conspiracy, Wallace having an ill-fated romance and the task falling on Grom...

Does anyone really like Foghorn Leghorn? He doesn’t seem to have many fans, and yet he’s remained remarkably popular over the years. Maybe people just love the way he says, “I say, I say”; he’s certainly one of the easier Looney Tunes to imitate. Or perhaps he does have a legion of dedicated followers. Who's to say? Whatever the case, it seems the Academy didn’t care for him too much. Of all the Foghorn Leghorn shorts to get released, only one received a nomination, his 1946 debut, Walky Talky Hawky. (via Wikipedia) Much like the recently covered Tabasco Road , Walky Talky Hawky was directed by Bob McKimson; if I had been a little more careful with my planning, I would have avoided putting two of his shorts so close together, but mapping out an entire year's worth of shorts is difficult, and I've only got so much room to kick a short down the road remaining. Anyway, in addition to featuring the debut of Foghorn Leghorn, Walky Talky Hawky also stars Barnyard Dawg (also ma...

Despite the important position Italy holds in the world of cinema, our Year in Shorts has actually covered surprisingly few Italian films. In fact, the list of Italian short nominees is so sparse that Wikipedia artificially pads the list by including Walter Lantz’s various nominated shorts on the grounds that he’s an Italian-born director, which isn’t even true. Really the only actual Italian short we’ve looked at is Senza parole, although I suppose you can count La Luna as being made by an Italian filmmaker. Why do I bring all this up? Well, because today’s short, Bruno Bozzetto's Grasshoppers (or Cavallette, if you’re fancy) is another Italian short for us to discuss. And frankly, that’s the only thing that’s really interesting about it! (via Wikipedia) Well, I guess that's not entirely fair. The premise, on its own, is certainly promising, if not exactly original. The film seeks to tell the history of the human race, starting with the invention of fire and ending with...

There are many things I will miss about A Year in Shorts, but I can assure you that reviewing World War II propaganda will not be one of them. Oh sure, some of them can be fun to talk about, especially the animated ones, but I’m afraid I never really quite cracked the code on how to properly gauge these things. And while Kokoda Front Line will not be the last propaganda film we’ll be discussing this year, it is, at the very least, the last of the live action ones. And as far as those sorts of shorts go, I feel comfortable saying it’s better than most. (via Wikipedia) As I stated just a few days ago , the 15th Academy Awards were all about propaganda. And nowhere was this more important than with the newly created category of Best Documentary. Kokoda Front Line! is not only one of the four films to be among the first winners in that category, it is also the first Australian film to win an Oscar. Directed by Ken G. Hall, the film is edited together from footage taken by Australian war...

Pixar’s Inside Out was, for my money, one of the best films of 2015, really only edged out for the top spot by Mad Max: Fury Road. Of course, like all films, it had its share of critics, some more serious than theirs. One of the sillier critiques people liked to make was noting the similarities the film shared with the sitcom Herman’s Head, joking that Disney ripped off the concept. Of course, had they known their film history, they would have remembered that Disney properly laid claim to the concept of emotions piloting people’s brains in 1943, with the World War II propaganda cartoon, Reason and Emotion. (via TV Tropes) Directed by Bill Roberts, Reason and Emotion is certainly one of the more interesting propaganda shorts we've looked at. For one thing, it's not even a little racist. For another, it doesn't even seem like a propaganda short at first. Instead, the film begins as an introduction to the concepts of Reason and Emotion (hey, that's the name of the fi...

As we enter the home stretch of our Year in Shorts, we’re going to find ourselves closing out some chapters. Eventually we’ll discuss our final Sylvester and Tweety film, our last Pixar short, and bid a fond farewell to Tom and Jerry. (That last one might get a little emotional.) And while it’s possible that we’ll return to some wells in the inevitable ANOTHER Year in Shorts, some are far more likely to be revisited than others. Sure, there’ll be more Pixar shorts to discuss (like Burrow, for instance), but what are the odds of Speedy Gonzales ever getting an Oscar nod again? Not very likely. So let’s say adios to the fastest mouse in all Mexico with the 1957 short Tabasco Road. (via TV Tropes) In the pantheon of Looney Tunes directors, the name of Bob McKimson is a fairly obscure one. Despite creating iconic characters like the Tasmanian Devil and Foghorn Leghorn (who features in another Bob McKimson short we'll be covering in a few days), he just doesn't have the legacy of ...

The name of Ernest Pintoff may not be a household one, but it’s nevertheless one you might be familiar with. His 1963 short The Critic won him an Oscar, and was a particular favorite of mine. But The Critic was not Pintoff’s first foray with the Academy Awards. No, that was four years earlier with his short The Violinist. Was it as good as The Critic? In a word- no. Absolutely not. But it’s our short for the day, so let’s get into it. (via TV Tropes) The Violinist is another fairly obscure short for us, although in this case I'm not exactly bemoaning its lack of popularity. Regardless, here's a summary- voiced entirely by Carl Reiner (who certainly avails himself well here), The Violinist tells the story of Harry, the titular musician in question. Harry is a technically adept violinist, but everyone who hears him hates hearing him play. Eventually Harry discovers the source of his problem- he plays without feeling. Desperate to fix the problem, Harry goes to some fairly e...

No one loves stories about storytelling more than storytellers. Why do you think so many films about filmmaking do so well at the Oscars? Writers just love to congratulate themselves, and aren’t I so clever for noticing it? But while it can be amusing to poke fun at this phenomenon, at the end of the day it’s just a storytelling device, and like all devices it can be done poorly or done well. Sure, I was rolling my eyes when Ad Astra turned out to be yet another movie about a white guy needing to resolve his daddy issues to save the world, but you didn’t see me making complaints when the same thing happened in Avengers: Endgame. As in all things, it all comes down to execution. And The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is a very well-executed story about stories. (via Wikipedia) The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is a 2011 short from the New Orelans-based Moonbot Studios, directed by illustrators William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg. It follows the peculi...