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Thursday, April 10, 2008
What are your favorite short cartoons?
Yesterday I looked into the future of animation, and a few weeks ago I asked what your favorite Disney animated movies were.
Today I look back at the past of animation and shorten the lengths of the movies quite a bit, by asking you: What are your favorite short cartoons?
Long before they were the domain of Saturday morning TV (which itself is fading into history), short cartoons played in cinemas, usually as part of a package with a newsreel, a live action short subject, trailers and the feature. I wish they would play in cinemas more often than they do today.
Failing that, however, it’s fun to look back at the shorts that delighted us when we were kids, and still delight us now. Here are some of mine, complete with clips, if not entire cartoons.
The Skeleton Dance (1929): When animation was still a fairly new medium, the black and white shorts had an amazing fluidity and freedom of movement as animators were seeing just what their drawings could do. This 1929 Disney Silly Symphony is still amazing almost 80 (!) years later, thanks to the sheer brilliance of animator Ub Iwerks, who also worked on the earliest Mickey Mouse shorts.
Mickey’s Trailer (1938): What could be better than the cartoons with just Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, or Goofy? How about cartoons with all three? Far and away my favorite Disney short with the classic characters. Love the two close calls with the train.
Tin Toy (1988): It was tough to pick a CGI entry, what with the brilliant work Pixar has done, but I chose this one because of its beautiful simplicity and hilarious truths. The animation is pretty crude by today’s standards, but this is what gave rise to Toy Story seven years later.
More to come after the jump, including my all-time favorite.
The Wrong Trousers (1993): It wasn’t so hard to pick a stop-motion entry. Nick Park at Aardman Animation has done a lot of ingenious work, but this Wallace and Gromit short - an homage to early Hitchcock films like The 39 Steps - is easily his best.
One Froggy Evening (1955)
My favorite authors of short cartoons are still the gang from Termite Terrace at Warner Bros. Disney did some great shorts, but its strength was features. Warner Bros. was clearly the kings of seven-minute cartoons. That’s why two of theirs populate this list, and both are by the late, great Chuck Jones. Steven Spielberg has called this dialog-less masterpiece “the Citizen Kane of cartoons,” and it’s not hard to see why. Everybody loves the stylings of the frog (“Hello, my baby, hello my honey”), but my favorite bit is the “WHAT the?” look the producer gets when the man tries to make the frog dance manually. Cracks me up every time.
But my absolute favorite is …
Duck Amuck (1951): This is my favorite because of the way it not only breaks the fourth wall, but demolishes it. This is Exhibit A of of the limitless possibilities of animation, and oh yeah - it’s as funny as all get-out too.
Comment back and tell me your favorite seven minutes (or thereabouts) of animation
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What’s opening Friday, April 11? Not much.
The say that August has the dog days, but then, so does April, when it comes to movies. This week’s slate is mildly interesting - at best.
Prom Night: When we last saw Brittany Snow, she showed she had talent in Hairspray. Now I’m thinking she must have inhaled too much of the stuff, since she agreed to topline a PG-13 horror flick. SO six years ago.
Smart People: This quirky indie comedy will get most of its attention because it’s Ellen Page’s follow-up to Juno, though if it does one-tenth of Juno’s box office, color me surprised. Here, she plays a female Alex Keaton young Republican type in the midst of a reunion between Sarah Jessica Parker and Dennis Quaid.
Street Kings: Keanu Reeves takes another turn playing an LA cop, who’s much more surly than the one he played in Speed. Directed by David Ayer, the writer of Training Day, and co-written by James Ellroy, author of LA Confidential. Review planned for Friday.
Hang in there, folks. Iron Man comes out in three weeks ….
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