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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
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Ask the Audience
Comments
By Rich
April 10, 2008 4:54 PM | Link to this
Ditto to all the comments so far. I’ll add the early Marvin the Martian cartoons from Warner to the others already mentioned.By rollins
April 10, 2008 3:29 PM | Link to this
“Bambi Meets Godzilla.” hands down.By SRCputt
April 10, 2008 2:51 PM | Link to this
My favorite short is The Wrong Trousers, and I love all three Wallace and Gromit shorts, as well as Park’s other Oscar winning short, Creature Comforts. My favorite Warner Brothers short would be What’s Opera, Doc! Everyone sing now: “Kill de wabbit! Kill de wabbit!”By Sir Critic
April 10, 2008 12:13 PM | Link to this
Allie: That Pixar short you are referring to is “Boundin’,” written, directed and narrated by Bud Luckey, who also plays the laconic agency chief in “The Incredibles” - the one who erases the memory in “Jack-Jack Attack.” And here’s a bonus for you. On the “Cars” DVD, there’s a great little Easter Egg: After a few cycles of the Main Menu, the Dinoco logo shows up in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. Highlight it and press Enter. You are treated to a 45-second clip of Mater and Lightning watching a “Cars” version of “Boundin’”By Allie D.
April 10, 2008 11:57 AM | Link to this
I loooove all of the Pixar shorts, first of all. My favorite one, however, is the Jackelope one that I believe plays before The Incredibles. It is just delightful. My favorite cartoon altogether though has to be the Rabbit Fire episode from Looney Tunes. The Duck Season/Rabbit Season pronoun confusion makes me cackle with glee to this very day.