Canada / 1981

Telling the story of the life of a rocking chair through the years from its construction in 1850, the Oscar winning Crac! uses humour, imaginary sequences and traditional music to show life and change in Quebec, Canada. The film is an early example of the pastel- shaded look that became popular in animation in the 1980s in films such as The Snowman (1982) and is possibly one of the greatest furniture films ever made.

A loose impressionistic style can often be an excuse for sketchy undisciplined animation but here the characters, simplified and stylised but strongly drawn, are animated with beautiful fluidity, including a terrific dance sequence and some of the best tree chopping animation Ive seen (an obscure category admittedly).

The name Crac refers to the sound of the wood being felled, the chair creaking and rocking and eventually breaking, in a story that manages to be epic as it stretches over decades but also retains a warm intimate touch, with many little gags and human moments. In many of of these the rocking chair becomes like another character in the family, to an extent where it creates Toy Story type trauma in the audience when it is finally discarded.

The design is also simple but well balanced and the colour palettes of the big set pieces are often lovely, including several fantasy sequences (recommended for any animated story of course) including the ever reliable device of visualizing a child’s imagination at play.

The traditional music sounds to me like the Canadian version of Cajun folk songs, which kind of makes sense, as I seem to remember the Cajun communities of rural USA are descended from French speaking Canadians.

As the story reaches the inevitable conclusion of all furniture based stories, i.e. it breaks, our mood is allowed to lift again as our rocking hero is rescued for nostalgic use in the world of contemporary Canada, lighting up the sterile modern environment with its story, charm and heritage. Which is a bit like how I see myself these days.

Frédéric Back won a second Academy Award in 1987 for his film L’homme qui plantait des arbres (The Man Who Planted Trees). Based on the Jean Gino’s story of the same name, this beautiful pencil shaded follow up tells of a man who lives in a barren area and tries to restore it to life by planting one tree at a time.

Although a German by birth, many of Back’s films are examinations of the culture of Canada, his adopted homeland, where he had a long career creating titles for with Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s French language station Radio-Canada. As a child his family had moved to Paris at the start of World War 2, where he studied art and became fluent in French, before moving to Canada in 1948 at the bequest of his pen pal Ghylaine Paquin, who would become his wife the next year. He began his short film career with Abracadabra in 1970 and shot to international fame with his sixth short Crac! a decade later. As a director he was nominated for Academy Awards four times, also including Tout Rien (1980), and Le Fleuve Aux Grande Eaux (1984).

In a sad update to his entries in my book, since its publication Frédéric Back has died, on Christmas Eve 2013 at the age of 89, leaving behind him undoubtedly one of the finest bodies of work of any director of animated shorts.

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

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USA / 1979

When a film starts off with a woman defecating asparagus into a toilet and ends up with her performing what is sometimes referred to as a “sex act” on another asparagus you know you are experiencing images pulled straight from some kind of Freudian deep subconscious.

Far from being just a visualisation of somebody’s psychotherapy session however, the film is a rich and sumptuous visual treat, a psychedelic Art Deco pop art candy coloured fever dream drifting through through some unbridled impulses of female sexuality. Like rapidly gorging on a box of brightly coloured sweets, dreamlike environs drift before our eyes, places in in which every detail seems to be fighting to excite and stimulate, the projections of a character so full of longing that everything is overpoweringly stimulating.

Pitt, who teaches Experimental Animation at Cal Arts when she isn’t film making, grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. A creepy doll house that she found was an early inspiration which would later show up several of her shorts, more of that later.

As a painter experimenting with her brand of psychological surrealist work in the 1960s at modernist college Cranbrook Academy of Art, she started playing with an 8mm camera and discovered the potential of animation to turn her still work into moving narratives.

Pitt later became involved in the Expanded Cinema movement which led her to merge performance art with animation. In 1976, teaching at Harvard University, she continued to merge animation with other forms as she had her students Loops. a live film theatre performance combining film, actors and music.. Her films are often similarly multimedia, combining her trademark elaborate painted style with stop frame animation and video.

After making her a number of shorter films her breakthrough came with Asparagus, created between 1974 to 1978 while teaching at Harvard The film won many festival awards and achieved a cult profile after Pitts met film exhibitor and producer Ben Barenholtz, known as the father of the midnight movie event, still popular today. Asparagus was twinned with David Lynches similarly brain drilling ‘Eraserhead’, a double-bill that ended up screening for the 18 months at New York City’s Waverly Theater, and a similar spell at the Nuart Theater in Santa Monica, California.

In Asparagus we first see a lush intro and shots of a richly detailed household environment which seem to relate to that somewhat forgotten period of 1970s style where the soft free flowing psychedelic hippie imagery of the sixties was combined with a harder Art Deco aesthetic and pre war glamour, a look that has been best preserved in the artwork and costumes of bands from the era such as Roxy Music, ELO, T Rex and Bowie.

Many of the household objects seem to take on an organic quality, often phallic, or the female version of phallic, of which apparently there isn’t a direct equivalent, the closest word being the little used “yonic”,(which is further evidence of a patriarchal society I would have thought ). To be honest I don’ t think Ill ever look at a sofa or a handbag in the same way again.

Everything in the rooms seems luxurious as the woman wanders aimlessly through her world, a sexually frustrated rich bored trophy wife perhaps? Spoiler alert: the woman hasn’t got a face. Is she in some sense not human, through being treated as just another precious object, a doll in this exotic collection ?

We see her straddle the toilet, some asparagus falls into the water underneath her. She then moves in front of a window where giant vivid plants scroll past as if she is a small doll in a toy train. She sees a giant woman, to scale with the plants (her true natural self? ) walk around nakedly, caressing the asparagus stalks.

The woman inside looks into a dolls house, a miniature version of her house, in which there is another dolls house and inside that another one and so on.

The woman puts on a female mask , (her make up?), packs her handbag which seems to be from the same yonic designer as the armchairs, and goes to a theatre, which is a tremendously detailed stop motion set featuring hundreds of moving figures in the audience. The crowd are all viewing a huge organically pulsating tunnel onstage, the woman sneaks backstage and opens her handbag releasing her sexually charged objects into the atmosphere to float into the auditorium, like some kind of act of sexual terrorism it seems to stimulate excitement in the audience.

She returns home and takes an asparagus erotically into her mouth, it emits a worm glow of life and turns into fireworks, a furry caterpiller and a curly living strip of something or other which was probably chosen , like a lot of other things in the films, as it was difficult and interesting to animate.

Like the work of David Lynch, with a deliberate lack of any easily digestible straightforward narrative , Pitts films are deliberately opaque and hard to read, falling somewhere between dream and reality and playful and disturbing, and instead aim to provoke a deeper subconscious response. For some viewers this lack of spoon feeding can create a kind of fear and discomfort with something that can never be fully understood on a simple level or logically analysed on a more academic level. Such bombardments of surrealism, deliberate anti logic and deep unfiltered fears and desires can provoke a retreat into simplistic dismissals. In the case of this film traditional feminist theory is an obvious reaction to project on it , accusations that for instance the imagery reinforces patriarchal and phallocentric values and a suggestion that this particular box of chocolates should perhaps carry a warning : “May Contain Penis Envy”.

Pitt is quoted as explaining her angle on this; “I am basically a heterosexual woman and that’s my experience: a man with a woman and my being a woman. That’s what I see. Someone with a different sexual experience would say it in a different way perhaps. I’ve always felt that I was a mixture of masculine/feminine traits. A lot of artists do… I always felt I was third sex. “

Pitt further explains the asparagus motif which appears throughout the film , “ I don’t see an asparagus as purely phallic. I love the way it looks when its coming out of the ground because it’s completely formed, it stands up, looks ancient and yet fresh at the same time. But as it goes through its metamorphosis it grows up to become this beautiful, ethereal, wafting-in-the-wind fern, which is more feminine “ and that the character ‘wants so much to touch it, to embrace it, to make contact with it, to understand it’.

She has also described Asparagus as “a visual poem that is an erotic allegory of the creative process, in which a woman views and performs the passages of artistic discovery.”

After Asparagus, Pitt went on to a career as an animator and painter that is still going strong, highlights included further award winning films Joy St (1995, 24 mins) , El Doctor (2006, 23 mins) and a number of shorter pieces. Perhaps the main reason Pitt has produced relatively few films in these decades is the long running times combined with the amount of work involved in the richness of the content. Other works of note were sequences for the music video of Peter Gabriel’s Big Time (1987 ) ( at that time a Peter Gabriel video was a high accolade for an independent animator) and stage design and animation for the operas Damnation of Faust and The Magic Flute in Germany. She has had major exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of Art, the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York, and the Stedlijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Short documentary about Pitt and her working methods :

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

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Portugal / 1995

This little gem is an atmospheric Latin visualization of a feline love poem. Rendered in stark black and white the visuals start with line drawings of cat prowling over a wonderfully uneven poetic visualization of Porto, the monotone constantly shifting between black cat against white sky and white cat against black sea, until we aren’t sure if the cat is white or black and what’s a dream and what’s real. Leaping from rooftops, gazing upwards, sailing around the sky in a boat, the pursuit goes on far into the blackness of night.

As director Pedro Serrazina himself describes it:

A poem. A tale made of silence and complicity. Light and shadows, the charm of the night, the moon as a passion… This is a tale about someone who tried to make the dream come true. This is the tale about the cat and the moon.

The environmental atmospherics of this film was for Serrazina the beginning of a career investigating his area of interest, “animated space”. Born in Lisbon, he grew up fascinated by animation and comics (he names the black and white designs of Pratt’s Corto Maltese as a main reference here).
Moving to Porto to study architecture Serrazina discovered that he was more in love with drawing non-rigorous spaces and small comics than following the structural necessities demanded by his course and so left to start work at a small animation studio , where his early study of drawing spaces rather than characters would become crucial to his approach to animation and film making.
Estória do Gato e da Lua (Tale About the Cat and the Moon)‘s opening “dive” into the city was the first animated sequence Serrazina ever attempted. Totally hand-drawn (remember computers were unavailable at this time), his work on this film and his background in architecture led to his career-long exploration of the aforementioned “animated space”, which he defines as “the ways a film can be told or constructed ‘spatially’, without being character-centered and without the customary reliance on the cause-effect chain”.
After completing Tale About the Cat and the Moon, Serrazina moved to the UK to study at the Royal College of Art where he made his film Within concerning “a house, full of memories; in which the characters are ‘spacially-coded’ into the narrative”.

Serrazina then became course leader at Maidstone College, before moving back to Lisbon where he is now Assistant Professor at Universidade Lusofona, completing a practice-based PhD on the creation and use of Animated Space as narrative tool. Serrazina has created installations in Tunisia and in Portugal, as part of his further exploration of his subject area and has written essays on the subject, which he presented at the Society for Animation Studies (SAS), one of which you can read here.”

Tale About the Cat and the Moon could be about many aspects of the human condition, ambition, love, desire, and like many of the best short films is a poem open to personal interpretation. As well as its obvious aesthetic values It does capture well the feeling of someone obsessively chasing a dream, with the cat always yearning for the moon, that logically it can never have, apart from the possibility of some piece of magic happening, which is what sometimes happens when you keep of wishing and trying, the only way to realize many dreams.

The feline subject, the town, the sea and music by Tentugal create the languid and liquid ambience of a cat who’s got the cream and like all the best and most original creations, twenty years on this cream tastes as fresh as when it was made.

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

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USA / 1963

Stan Brakhage was an American abstract filmmaker and perhaps someone who could fall into that modern day category for the uncategorisable – ‘outsider artist’. He had a long and varied career, making films right through from the 1940s to his death in 2003. Largely ignored or dismissed in his heyday, like many true originals he only gained wide recognition years later and is now considered one of the most important and influential figures in 20th century experimental film making.

After attending art college in San Francisco, Brakhage moved to New York in the mid 1950s where he associated and collaborated with renowned avant garde film makers and musicians such as Maya Derrin, Jonas Mekas and John Cage around the underground beatnik scene. After spending a few years in increasing depression as his early films met with little recognition or reward, he moved to Denver where he met his first wife, the writer Jane Wodening.

The following years were spent largely penniless and ‘off grid’ in an isolated log cabin with his new family, and his films from this period developed into widely acclaimed and influential works. Engaging with powerful primal forces of nature, love, grief, birth, sexuality, relationships, family life and his deep introspective examination of his own humanity and emotons, Brakhage’s work also contains psychedelic and mystical aspects in that it relates to ideas of mythology and altered states of consciousness between sleep and waking.

Jane insisted that Brakhage be present at the birth of their first daughter Myrrenna. In a coping mechanism to avoid fainting, the nervous and squeamish Brakhage decided to film the event, the result of which became Brakhage’s perhaps other best-known film Window Water Baby Moving (1959). Most of this was filmed by Brakhage but Jane, initially very shy about the idea, also took the camera to capture her husband’s reactions. The resulting film is one of the greatest portraits of the intensity of this intimate and profound experience, the joy, fear, pain, love, beauty, physicality and lifechanging primal spirituality of childbirth laid bare.

Like a lot of the films of Len Lye and Norman McLaren, Brakhage’s 1963 film Mothlight used a form of ‘direct cinema’, in that no camera was used. Where Lye and McLaren scratched and painted images directly to onto the film stock, Mothlight differed in that it used the technique that Brakhage created and was perhaps best known for, which was a form of cinematic collage, pressing natural objects and gluing them between two strips of film. The objects chosen had to be thin and translucent, to allow the passage of light, such as here, moth and insect wings, beetle legs and leaves. This resulting film stock collage was then contact printed at a lab to allow operation through a cinema projector. Brakhage later reused the technique to produce The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981)

Years later in 2002 in an interview with Bruce Kawin, for By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume 1, Brakhage explained the inspiration for Mothlight coming to him while observing and being saddened by moths burning to death in a candle.

Here is a film that I made out of a deep grief. The grief is my business in a way, but the grief was helpful in squeezing the little film out of me, that I said “these crazy moths are flying into the cande light, and burning themselves to death, and that’s what’s happening to me. I don’t have enough money to make these films, and … I’m not feeding my children properly, because of these damn films, you know. And I’m burning up here… What can I do? I’m feeling the full horror of some kind of immolation, in a way.

After spending some time unsuccessfully following live moths with a camera, Brakhage instead focused on the dead moths:

Over the lightbulbs there’s all these dead moth wings, and I … hate that. Such a sadness; there must surely be something to do with that. I tenderly picked them out and start pasting them onto a strip of film, to try to… give them life again, to animate them again, to try to put them into some sort of life through the motion picture machine.

James Peterson, in his (1994) book Dreams of chaos, visions of order: Understanding the American Avante-Garde Cinema, states of Mothlight that it belongs “to a new class of films, those that direction attention away from the screen and to the physical object in the projector”.

Mothlight is an original experiment for sure, winning many awards at festivals, and somehow transcending its primitive technique to powerfully communicate a creepy sense of horror, sadness and fear in its depiction of the moths wings thrashing around as they flail themselves to death in the candle heat. In many ways years ahead of its time and like no other film before or since, this ultra short short has a strange hypnotic fascination and unique beauty, and we have all seen many cutting edge contemporary title sequences for horror films etc influenced by its strange scratchy ragged beauty.

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

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Germany / 1922

The Chinese and southeast Asian tradition of shadow puppets was brought to Europe as the far corners of the world were explored and culturally plundered in the last few centuries and this became a popular theatrical attraction, particularly in France, at end of 19th century. This tradition, combined with the Victorian skill of creating cutout likenesses of people, was probably an influence on the beautiful films of legendary German animator Lotte Reiniger.

Reiniger’s unique style and technique means that her work—unlike that of some of the other great animators—is instantly recognizable as her own. Her delicate cutout silhouette method, developed during childhood, carried her through a long and productive career that spanned 60 years and many different countries, and enabled her to work simultaneously within the mainstream and avant-garde sectors of animation. Her passion for producing animated versions of fairy tales has probably influenced the course of mainstream animation and its association with stories of this type.

Lotte led the kind of fascinating life common to many of the early animators, in which she met and collaborated with many of the great artists of European film of her era and traveled the world making her unique films. A pioneer in techniques such as multi-plane camera, she was using them years before the mainstream industrialists like Walt Disney discovered their advantages, as well as probably influencing Disney to use fairy tales as the basis for many of his great commercial features. Reiniger was responsible for the oldest surviving animated feature film, (The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926 ), also the first animated feature to be directed by a woman. Incredibly it wasn’t until sixty two years later with Dreamworks’ The Prince of Egypt that a woman would even co-direct an animated feature film in the USA.

Born in Berlin in 1899, as a child Reiniger developed the seemingly self-taught technique of cutting out freehand paper silhouettes, often producing portraits of people and animals which she used in her own homemade shadow theatre productions. Later she developed a keen interest in cinema, firstly in the stage-magic-style special effects films of Georges Méliès and then in the work of Paul Wegener, the German expressionist director of The Student of Prague (1913) and Der Golem (1915, also remade in 1920). After attending a lecture by Wegener in 1915 about “trick” films (or special effects, as we now call them), she knew that was what she wanted to be involved in.

Beginning her career as part of the group of ambitious and influential animators working in pre-World War II Germany, Reiniger was a central figure in the avant-garde movement, despite being distinct from the others in the group due to her generally more accessible figurative style and more traditionally narrative-led subject matter.

In 1916 Reiniger persuaded her parents to let her enroll in Max Reinhardt’s theatre school in Berlin as she knew Wegener was a member of the acting troupe there. In an attempt to get to know him, she made cutout silhouette portraits of the school’s actors in their most famous roles. Due to her skill at creating these silhouettes, this plan worked splendidly and she was soon creating captions and title cards for Wegener, animating wooden rats in his Der Rattenfänger von Hameln (The Pied Piper of Hamelin, 1918), and even taking small roles in his films.

Wegener introduced her to a group who were setting up a new experimental animation studio, the Institut für Kulturforschung (The Institute for Cultural Discovery). In this group were animator Berthold Bartosch and Reiniger’s future husband, the writer and director Carl Koch. Wegener suggested that Reiniger’s silhouettes might have potential for interesting animation and, after learning the techniques from Bartosch, she started to produce her own films. The first of these was Das Ornament des Verliebten Herzen (The Ornament of the Lovestruck Heart, 1919) about two lovers and an ornament which changed according to their moods. Her attraction to fairy tales soon became apparent as she produced Aschenputtel (Cinderella, 1922) and Dornröschen (Sleeping Beauty, 1922). She was also known for creating, along with avant-garde animator Walther Ruttman, a dream sequence featuring a silhouetted falcon in Fritz Lang’s movie Die Nibelungen (1924).

Cinderella, “a fairy film in shadow show” as we are told in a caption at the start, typifies Reiniger’s work, combining the simple and elegant silhouette storytelling style with the intricate delicacy and precision of the cut out character animation, where despite these simple techniques and lack of dialogue, characters seem to have has an individual distinct personality which is is distinct and recognisable.

Paradoxically, this same simplicity, rather than dating the films, seems to give them a timeless quality and they still seem amazingly fresh today to both adults and children. In fact if someone made a film like this now (and some contemporary films aren’t actually a million miles away), I’m sure it would still be accepted and admired in film festivals (and then of course probably ripped off – sorry, I mean ‘paid homage to’ – by the advertising industry).

Visual highlights are the graceful figure of Cinderella, who seems to capture the essence of feminine beauty despite being a simple cut out , her elaborate and exotic wedding dress made for her by her friends the birds and mice, and the stylised marching animation of the soldiers. As well as these cutout methods, other techniques are tried by Reiniger, and remember this was made in 1922 so these were probably developed and invented by her own experimentation, and with her colleagues in the group. Replacement animation can be seen as a pumpkin grows to a full sized coach and horses and also the jagged vignette outlines which expand, reveal and window the scenes through the black background. More conventional vignettes are also used, as often in silent film, where the image fades away in a circular gradient around it, adding texture and softness to the stark black and white.

The slightly sinister spiky vignette shapes, designed around the theme of the scissor cut paper but also looking a bit like sharks teeth, give the film a bit of the expressionist feel of Wegener’s work and an ominous feeling of underlying darkness, encouraging the suspicion that the ‘shadow show’ we were promised, as with the contrast between darkness and light in the overall design, is as much of a psychological reference as about the visual technique. This dark element to the the story is confirmed later in quite shocking scenes, which also sit well with the scissor cut theme, where one of the cruel ‘ugly step sisters’ cuts off part of her foot in order to squeeze into Cinderellas slipper and drips blood all the way to the castle and then their mother is literally ripped apart by the pain of learning that Cinderella has been chosen by the Prince instead of her real daughter.

This horror element to the story was something that most original fairy tales contained. but which were jettisoned by later 20^th Century book and film versions, such as the sanitised Disney version of Cinderella, as the company reacted to criticisms of frightening kids with scary scenes in its early masterpieces Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, Bambi, Fantasia and Dumbo.

The various sequences of the film are framed with written texts, which appear in the same jagged shaped vignettes, and appear a bit superfluous to modern audiences, outlining the familiar narrative which is then told perfectly well cinematically in the animation. These captions were reportedly added later at the advice of a producer when Reiniger was working in England, where she also remade the story in a more TV friendly version thirty two years later.

The highlight for me is the beginning of the film, when unusually for early cinema, the illusion is revealed before it is even established, as after the caption tells us the story is “told by a pair of scissors on a screen” we see (presumably) Reiniger’s hands cutting out the character of Cinderella, which then gracefully comes to life, and the whole magic of animation is crystallised in those few seconds.

A few years after Cinderella and a number of other beautiful shorts, after a chance meeting with wealthy investor Louis Hagen, Reiniger was presented with an opportunity to make a feature film. The result was Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926), the oldest surviving animated feature film and was the first to use multiplane camera effects. Other animators working with her on this ambitious enterprise included Berthold Bartosch, Walther Ruttman, and Carl Koch, who by this point was her husband, producer, and camera operator.

Helped by movie director and actor Jean Renoir, Prince Achmed achieved international commercial and critical success. Renoir described Reiniger’s work as “a visual interpretation of Mozart,” an apt description as music and operas, along with fairy tales, were favorite themes of hers, producing versions of Carmen (1933), Papageno (1935), based on Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, and then Helen La Belle (1957) from Offenbach’s music, and A Night in a Harem (1958), again from Mozart. She also contributed a silhouette animation to Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1938).

Further films made in Germany were the animated Doktor Dolittle und seine Tiere (Doctor Dolittle and His Animals, 1928) and the live-action Die Jagd nach dem Glück (Running After Luck, 1929). The latter, co-directed with Rochus Gliese and starring Jean Renoir and Berthold Bartosch, featured a 20-minute silhouette sequence. This film was unfortunately completed just before the advent of sound and was then hastily and unsuccessfully dubbed into sound before its release.

Like fellow animator Oskar Fischinger and many other artists, Reiniger and Koch fled their native country when the Nazis came to power in the 1930s. As no country would take them as refugees or asylum seekers, they were forced to keep traveling round the world for six years, returning to Germany several times. Nevertheless they carried on working in Germany, Italy, France, and Great Britain during the prewar and war years, until they settled in London in 1948.

During their many years in England, Reiniger and Koch produced a huge volume of work including films for the BBC and the GPO film unit, such as The King’s Breakfast (1936). They also established a company called Primrose Productions and created a series of fairy tales for producer Louis Hagen Jr. (son of the financier of Prince Achmed), including The Gallant Little Tailor (1954), Jack and the Beanstalk (1955) and the remake of Cinderella (1954).

After Carl Koch’s death in 1963, Reiniger took a break from making films and spent a number of years as a near recluse. In the late 1960s there was a revival of interest in her work and she was invited to visit Germany for the first time since her move to London. She was presented with several awards honoring her career. Later she was also invited to lecture in the USA, during which time she described herself as “a primitive caveman artist.” Despite this rather deprecating view of her art, the enthusiastic reception she received persuaded her to start work once again.

In 1976 Reiniger went to Canada where she made Aucassin et Nicolette and later The Rose and the Ring (1979) for the National Film Board. In her last decade she spent time lecturing and teaching around the world. Her final film was Die vier Jahreszeiten (The Four Seasons, 1980), made for the Filmmuseum Düsseldorf the year before she died.

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

The post 100 Greatest Animated Shorts / Cinderella / Lotte Reiniger appeared first on Skwigly Animation Magazine.

UK / 1989

Creature Comforts is a brilliant and hilarious short which richly deserved to win the 1990 Oscar for best short film. Since then the film has unfortunately suffered, like Pizza Express and Star Wars, from over commercialisation and franchise-ation, whereby the idea has been exploited to the point that some tend to just remember the lower grade re-hashings rather than the genius of the original.

Aardman‘s founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton had some early exposure with a clay character called Morph for BBC kids series Vision On and creating animation for the multi award winning, imaginative and iconic stop frame music video for Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’ but like a lot of British animators, and indeed the UK animation industry as a whole, it was with the creation of TV network Channel 4 in the 1980s that allowed them to flourish.

In Channel 4’s formative years the executives had decided to make animation a big part of their cutting edge new network and visited the newly revived Cambridge animation festival, where they were Impressed with some films Aardman had made for the BBC in the preceding years called Animated Conversations.

In these pieces real dialogue was recorded documentary style and to this soundtrack Sproxton created animated stop frame characters in incongruous settings. In Down and Out for instance (1979) the sound was recorded in a Salvation Army hostel for the homeless. Although not a new idea, for instance John Nad Faith Hubley’s Moon Bird (1959) pioneered this technique, it was under explored and Lord and Sproxton created their own mini genre of stop frame animated pseudo documentary, a kind of clay reality TV before reality TV was even invented.

Channel 4 execs, impressed with Animated Conversations commissioned some series of films from Aardman in a similar style entitled Conversation Pieces and then Lip Synch. One of the Lip Synch films was Creature Comforts (1989) directed by Aardman’s new director Nick Park.

In the short, the quality of Aardman’s stop frame animation seemed to take a leap forward and move to the forefront of its genre, and this was several years before Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, for example. In the film we see a series of zoo animals being ‘interviewed’ vox-pop style about their cages and conditions. The most memorable for me was the brilliantly animated Brazilian puma languidly lying in his tree and bemoaning the lack of space and the quantity of meat on offer. Other highlights are the family of polar bears taking about the pros and cons of the zoo in terms of welfare and an armadillo who is enjoying the comfort its cage brings. In reality the audio interviews were real people from the neighborhood talking about their surroundings, for instance the polar bears were a family of local shopkeepers and the puma was a homesick Brazilian student.

Creature Comforts was turned into a series of TV ads for Heat Electric, a UK TV series directed by Richard Starzak and a US series directed by Merlin Crossingham and David Osmond. All were good, but by the law of diminishing returns they moved increasingly away from the charm of the original. Nick Park became Aardman’s star director and, with his characters Wallace and Gromit, the company translated the critical success of Creature Comforts into commercial success with a series of much loved and celebrated films. Park’s eccentric English inventor and his long suffering dog featured in A Grand Day Out (1989) , The Wrong Trousers (1993), A Close Shave (1995), A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008) and Park’s masterwork, the Dreamworks funded feature film The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005).

You can learn more about Lip Synch and the production of Creature Comforts in our interview with directors Nick Park and Peter Lord.
Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

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USA / 1951

The MGM Cartoon Studio studio began in 1930 by releasing Ub Iwerks creation Flip the Frog after the Disney star animator had been tempted away, but neither this series or Iwerks later Willie Whopper was a huge success and in 1933 MGM turned to directors Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, who had recently split from producer Leon Schlesinger at Warner Bros due budgetary disagreements. This was seemingly the catalyst to MGM becoming a major player in animation, and later in the 1940s when Disney lost interest in shorts to concentrate on features and Fleischer studios went bankrupt, MGM became Warners’ main rivals.

Harman and Ising poached artists like William Hanna and Robert and Tom McKimson from Warners and so began a merry go round of personnel (and sometimes cartoon stars) between the studios. In 1937 Harman/Ising walked out again after more budget disputes and MGM hired novice producer Fred Quimby to replace them. Quimby raided more studios for experienced artists but, still unable to establish hit characters, he re-hired Harman and Ising. Soon after this Harman, in a moment of what turned out to be pure genius, teamed storyboard artist and character designer Joseph Barbera with director William Hanna to make their first cartoon, Puss Gets the Boot.

The short concerned a cat called Jasper trying to catch a mouse, nothing radical there and no one thought it was anything special until it unexpectedly turned out to become a huge hit. After that not only did Puss gets the Boot go on to get nominated for an Academy Award but it gave birth to several of animation’s most successful and best loved partnerships; Hanna and Barbara, one of the most successful creative teams in animation history and Tom and Jerry, two of the most popular cartoon characters of all time.

The stories were almost entirely the work of Barbara, one of the most creative forces in animation history, of whom Hanna said, “He has the ability to capture mood and expression in a quick sketch better than anyone I’ve ever known.” The animator Michael Lah said, “Hanna loved cutesie stuff . . . Joe was the other way, wild as hell.” Barbara’s ability to conceive inventive gags, plus his animation skills, complemented Hanna’s flair for timing and story construction, and putting a team of artists together, and the pair struck up a working relationship that would last most of their careers.

In Puss Gets the Boot Jasper’s design is quite different from what would later become the look for Tom. Jasper’s body is more kitten-like, with a rounder face, fluffier fur, and bigger feet, although, somewhat contradictorily, Jasper’s face is also more aggressive and adult. The design of the unnamed mouse in the cartoon is virtually unchanged from the later look of Jerry however. One difference is that we hear the mouse saying a prayer in a squeaky little voice, whereas a familiar characteristic of the pair in future years was their speechlessness ( although occasionally voices are heard, such as Tom singing Spike the bulldog to sleep in Quiet Please (1945). The Puss Gets the Boot story follows the now-familiar path of the mouse managing to turn the tables on the bullying cat, this time by breaking, or threatening to break, the glass and crockery in the house after the cat is told (by Mammy Two-Shoes , the maid whose feet are all we ever see of her) that he will be evicted if there are any more breakages.

After the success of Puss Gets the Boot, Hanna and Barbara were set to work making more shorts about the cat and mouse. A competition was held among MGM staff to choose a new name for the duo, and Tom and Jerry was selected. They became MGM’s most popular characters and are among the most famous and popular of all cartoon personalities. Tom and Jerry cartoons are considered to have been at their peak in the mid-forties, when story ideas, gags and personality all came together in a string of miniature masterpieces. The theatre shorts were made right up until 1967 and after that were created for television, with the TV production ongoing, although sporadically for specials and commercials, to the present day.

The quality of Tom and Jerry cartoons makes it very difficult to choose just one for a list like this, so I’m going through a few stand outs before I choose my favourite.

In 1941, The Night Before Christmas was released, a cartoon in which the Rudolf Ising’s influence of sentimentality on William Hanna is more to the fore as Tom softens when Jerry kisses him under the mistletoe, but it still proved a hit and won the team a second Oscar nomination. 1942 produced the stunning Bowling Alley Cat, which not only had great sight gags but some of the most beautiful visuals, with the reflections of the characters seen racing round the gleaming bowling alleys. Tom and Jerry’s first Oscar came with Yankee Doodle Mouse (1943), using the winning idea of combining Tom and Jerry’s ultra violence with army weaponry. The arrival of Tex Avery at the studio in 1941 encouraged a further increase in pace and aggression and in Fine Feathered Friend (1942), Jerry twice nearly decapitates Tom’s with hedge clippers, the kind of antics that would cause censorship on TV in later decades due to parental concerns about subjecting their little ones to small screen mayhem.

Quiet Please (1945) won the team their second Oscar and the same year bought Mouse in Manhattan; Scott Bradley’s excellent musical scoring for Tom and Jerry is often overlooked but it reached new heights here as Jerry leaves the country to try his luck in New York, with predictably mixed results. A third Oscar and more musical excellence was awarded for Cat Concerto (1947), one of the team’s most fondly remembered works, in which Tom is a hilariously pompous concert pianist whose performance of one of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies is sabotaged by Jerry, who had been sleeping inside the piano, the battle brilliantly timed to the music as they chase around the piano keys. Mouse Cleaning (1948), a reworking of Puss Gets the Boot with some excellent gags won another Oscar for the series, and two more came for Two Mouseketeers (1952) and Johann Mouse (1953).

The team had also worked on feature films, starting with their collaboration with Gene Kelly for George Sidney’s musical Anchors Aweigh, in which Kelly performed a brilliantly joyous and innovative dance duet with cartoon Jerry – ironically, though Hanna and Barbera were “house” animators at MGM, Kelly had first requested the services of Disney, who declined. George Sidney then asked the team to provide an animated opening for his musical, Holiday in Mexico (1945), and later Tom and Jerry swam alongside Esther Williams in Charles Walters’s Dangerous When Wet (1953). The team worked with Kelly again when they created a whole segment of his portmanteau movie Invitation to the Dance (made in 1952 but released in 1957), later released on its own as a short feature titled The Magic Lamp.

My personal favourite Jerry’s Cousin (1951) seems a slightly controversial choice as it was made outside what is considered the forties heyday and doesn’t feature in most of the best of Tom and Jerry lists you’ll find online. It also doesn’t feature the often seen third characters of Mammy Two-Shoes or Spike the dog, who are always welcome additions, but it is mainly set within the house, where I think the best Tom and Jerry battles are located and it does introduce a new funny character, Muscles.

Jerry’s Cousin is the 57^th Tom and Jerry short and was again nominated for the Academy Award, which it lost to UPA’s Gerald McBoing Boing, perhaps a factor in Hanna and Barbaras later adaptation of many of UPA’s methods. We first see a tough guy mouse (Muscles) in the big city, mercilessly dispatching a gang of alleycats. He receives a letter asking for help from his cousin Jerry and sets of for the country where Jerry is being terrorised by Tom. There follows an excellent series of gags where Tom is beaten up in a multitude of surreally violent ways, his body often ending up twisted into the shapes relating to his instruments of torture, a vase or a bowling ball and at one point having live bullets shoved in his eyes and then detonated, an act deemed too much for it’s Cartoon Network screenings of the 1990s where it was censored out. The short ends with Tom subdued into kissing Muscles feet and when Muscles sets off back to the city he leaves Jerry an identical costume so that the mouse worship continues. Ray Paterson, animator on many of the best Tom and Jerry’s, provided many of the key visual moments.

By the mid-fifties, budget restrictions caused a distressing reduction in quality. In 1955 MGM put Hanna and Barbera in charge of their own cartoon division, but it closed in 1957 (the last Tom and Jerry cartoon, released that year, was Tot Watchers) and the pair cashed in their MGM pensions in order to start their own company and make cartoons for television.

As for their working method from which magic was born, Gus Arriola, a gag man for their team, said: “Barbera came up with about 75 per cent of the gags. He would inspire the rest of us to come up with material, because he was so fast.” Animator Jack Hannah added “Bill Hanna wrote the exposure sheets…Joe could sit with a pencil and ideas would come off the end of his pencil as quickly as he could move it”. Another animator Irven Spence told Leonard Maltin, author of ‘Of Mice and Magic’ (1980),“Bill and Joe had it all planned out, with Joe’s thumbnail sketches and Bill’s timing, before the animators ever got it. When they would hand out the work to the animators, they would act out the entire picture, in a very hammy fashion, which seemed exaggerated when they would do it, but it was just right for animation.” As Maltin wrote “Tom chasing Jerry is the ritual of the series. But somehow the audience realises that when all is said and done, the cat doesn’t want to eat the mouse; it’s the thrill of the chase that counts. There is an underlying bond between Tom and Jerry that gives these cartoons tremendous strength and likeability.”

Hanna and Barbera spent 15 years working for MGM on Tom and Jerry cartoons, in thier time at the forefront for technical skill and quality of gags, winning seven Oscars and 14 nominations. After MGM’s animation unit closed down in 1957, Hanna and Barbara formed their own production company with the intention of creating animation for the new medium of television. With an eye on the modest success of the first television cartoon series, Crusader Rabbit, they first produced The Ruff & Reddy Show (1957), an idea they had developed at MGM but had been turned down. A year later they hit the jackpot with The Huckleberry Hound Show.

Taking the UPA stripped-down, limited animation model but dispensing with the high style, Hanna-Barbera productions became an animation factory that dominated television animation for the next few decades. Hanna-Barbera’s television budgets were a fraction of the average budgets for theatrical shorts that they’d had at MGM and the adaptation to this meant that they became known as the kings of ‘limited animation’, leading Warner Bros. legend Chuck Jones somewhat unkindly to describe their work as “illustrated radio.”

After Huckleberry Hound, Hanna-Barbera Productions produced many more hit shows, which will be, along with their catchy theme tunes, instantly familiar to anyone alive in that era. Yogi Bear was a support act from The Huckleberry Hound Show, but soon became stars in their own right, even spawning a feature film Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear (1964) (and the inevitable CGI ‘realistic’ abomination in 2010, which is best not dwelled on). The Flintstones (1960) and then The Jetsons (1963) were basically the first animated sitcoms, set in the prehistoric era and the space age.

In the late 1960s, the company produced more notable hits such as Scooby Doo, Wacky Races, and the live-action/animation psychedelic experience The Banana Splits And Friends Show. These are just a few of the many Hanna-Barbera hit shows that, while based on cheap and limited animation, managed to maintain a funny and memorable watchability due to the writing, characters, and the catchy tunes that created a bubblegum pop culture freshness with every new flavour that came off the production line.

As for Tom and Jerry, the series was revived by MGM in 1961 and briefly farmed out for a year to ex UPA director Gene Deitch, then based in in Czechoslovakia, with mixed results, and then later taken over by Chuck Jones from 1963-67 at his own Sib Tower 12 Productions company, with another not altogether welcome change of style. None of these later attempts managed to recapture the magic of the Hanna-Barbera shorts, although to be fair the budgets were much reduced.

William Hanna died in 2001 and Joseph Barbara in 2006 but their legacy in animation and popular culture is immense; in fact its hard to imagine anyone in modern society who isn’t familiar with the cartoon characters they created.

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

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Hungary / 1980

Ferenc Rófusz’s followed his 1974 short A Ko (The Stone) with his masterpiece A Légy (The Fly). Told from the fly’s point of view, the film seemingly utilises rotoscoping in a realistically-drawn style, from presumably photographs or film taken through a fish eye lens. Through the insect’s eyes, we experience flying around a garden, before going inside a house where the fly is pursued and then swatted by the owner.

The film is quite unique in being from an insect’s point of view, the only other instance I can think of in fact is in the Vincent Price 1958 sci-fi/horror The Fly where they use the (schlocky but fascinating to me as a twelve year old ) technique of multiple circular images to represent the many eyes. But the difference here is it also succeeds in making you actually feel like a fly (rather than a scientist trapped in the body of a fly screamimg “heeeelp meee” in a creepy voice as per 1958 horror film). The jerkily fast camera movements (possibly a result of using many photographs as reference rather than the smoothness of cine film ) feel like the sickeningly fast darting flights of a fly, everything is seen in a kind of lo-fi/lo spectrum muddy palette and the scratchily jarring buzz of the soundtrack starts to quickly get under your skin until you are actually relieved when your/the fly’s nasty little existence comes to an end. And that’s without the film showing you the worst aspects of a fly’s existence, a deep physical relationship with dog turds.

The Fly won the Oscar in 1981 for best animated short although due to Hungary’s totalitarian communist regime, Rófusz wasnt allowed to leave the country to collect his award and unknown to him, someone else received it for him.

Rófusz followed the film with two others showing a death from the first person perspective; Dead Point (Deadlock) (1982) concerns the victim of a firing squad and Gravitation (1984) is about an apple falling from a tree.

These shorts were released by Hungary’s Pannonia Studio, located in Budapest and until 1990 (with the fall of communism) the communist regime’s state owned and controlled animation studio. Although these type of studios restricted freedom of political expression this was somewhat compensated with (as in most government funded films ) more artistic freedom, in the sense that the artistic value and prestige of winning international prizes was more important than commercial success and popularity. So while on one hand you have political censorship, on the other hand you have a liberation from the fear of what large audiences might or might not choose to consume. As Robert Hughes book ‘The Shock of the New’ describes in detail, when governments pay for art galleries and commission art, the motivation is prestige (much the same as when many rich people buy art) and the intention is to be seen as enlightened, intelligent, tasteful, sophisticated and progressive. Which means to an extent that the government funded artists, curators and film makers are actively encouraged to be more experimental and cutting edge and obscure, and less mainstream.

Another famous Pannonia product reflecting this freedom of of artistic expression was William Feigenbaum and József Gémes Hugó, a víziló (Hugo the Hippo) (1973). Supposedly a children’s film , it was so psychedelic, at times dark and strange, and in fact “phantasmagorical,” as it quite rightly says on the poster, that it has become a cult favourite with adults. This was a strange tale of Hippos hired by a Sultan to fight sharks, only for then to go on a wild rampage except for the hero Hugo, who saves the day. Hugo the Hippo was the first international release of a Hungarian feature-length animation and was a far from unique example of a 1970’s film in which seemingly the “turned-on” mindset of its creators was allowed to flow unrestricted onto the screen. Robert Morley and Burl Ives provided voices for the English-language version, while perhaps the most strange and disturbing thing of all was the songs that Marie and Donny Osmond provided for the soundtrack.

Anyway , back to Ferenc Rófusz, who in 1988 moved to Canada to work for Nelvana in commercial animation. He returned to Hungary however in 2002 where he continued his work in the less financially compensated but perhaps more spiritually rewarding genre of short films, producing Cease Fire (2003), A Dog’s Life (2005) and Ticket (2010).

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

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USA / 2010

Bottle is a charming and unique short film made with limited resources, proving that it’s great ideas and not big budgets that really count.

Inspired by Lepore’s impulse to animate a real snowman, Bottle uses mainly natural resources to tell a story about a long distance love affair between a character made of sand on a warm beach and a character made of snow on an icy coastline. After exchanging messages in a bottle across the sea they arrange to meet, with disastrous consequences, a theme which seems to obliquely refer to fantasy relationships built with online strangers and how these fragile constructs can melt and dissolve when they attempt to enter reality.

Made, like most contemporary stop frame, on a still digital camera (a Canon 7D Lepore told me), in deliberate stark contrast to most digital animation where everything you see exists (or rather doesn’t exist) inside an unreal world of pixels inside software inside a computer, this film is shot mainly outside a computer, outside a studio, outside a city, in the outdoors real world with real elements in real daylight. As if the practical logistics of this weren’t enough of a nightmare, Lepore actually shot most of the film out there alone in what sounds like some sort of animation equivalent of a Bear Grylls survivalist escapade.

Like most great short films this is a simple and entertaining story built on deeper themes, as by entering this relationship and moving into another person’s world the characters identities are eroded away with destructive consequences. This bittersweet love story between elements was made single handedly by Lepore while studying experimental animation at CalArts, by painstakingly animating snow and sand frame by frame on location. The relatively rapid movement of the sun and shadows, often a problem in outdoor stop frame animation, here adds a believable dimension as the elemental characters seem to move at slower pace to human time.

New Jersey native Lepore has made other award winning films, her ambitious 2013 Move Mountain used multiple characters and a huge set of a blood gushing psychedelic mountain to tell a somewhat obscure story of “illness, perseverance and our connection to everything around us” and contains probably the greatest stop motion rave sequence ever committed to film. Her 2008 cupcake story Sweet Dreams was baked in the hipster trend of ‘artisan’ foods (artisan as in smaller batches with larger price tags) and in a way ‘Bottle’ floats on another similar current fashion for some illusionary escape back to nature and crafting of raw materials (while sharing news of it via ancient heritage publishing method Instagram) although this trend is nothing new and ran through for example the hippie and beatnik movements and way back beyond that.

Her ability to capture the Zeitgeist and combine it with great stories that plug into deeper human feelings plus the charming interviews she has given have made Lepore a darling of the animation scene and in 2015 she was awarded the ultimate accolade, an invitation to direct an episode of Adventure Time.

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

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UK / NEW ZEALAND / 1936

There’s a certain type of abstract animated film that really appeals to me, that I can watch over and over again, because they seem to be overflowing with energy, joie de vivre, artistic spirit, lust for life…whatever you want to call it, the result is that they make me feel happy to be alive.

These films often take the form of ‘visual music’ or ‘moving paintings’ and often look similar to a painting, or more accurately a thousand paintings, vaguely of the abstract impressionist genre, from which you feel you could stop the film at random and see something you could hang on your wall. A Colour Box is a prime example of this.

An experimental artist and animation pioneer, Len Lye spent his long career attempting to “compose motion,” a theme he explored through many different media, including film, painting, drawing and sculpture. Born in New Zealand in 1901, Lye had a tremendously varied life. Before moving to London in 1926, he spent much time with Aboriginal and Samoan peoples studying their art, which had a great influence on his later work.

In London he joined the Seven and Five Society, an art group that also contained abstract painters and sculptors like Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, and Barbara Hepworth, and exhibited in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition.

Through this He began making experimental films. His first films Tusalava (1929), Kaleidescope (1935), and A Colour Box (1936) were animation landmarks of huge influence. Tusalava, made with cel animation and inspired by the native aborigine art of his homeland (similar to Harry Smiths later films inspired by American Indian Art, one of many other artists who Lye clearly influenced), was funded by the London Film Society and apparently took him 10 hours a day for two years to complete.

With the reaction to Tusalava somewhat underwhelming, Lye found himself without any funding. Unable to afford a camera, he started making a film by drawing, scratching, and painting directly onto some discarded film stock he had found at Ealing Studios. He edited it together and persuaded John Grierson, head of the Greater Post Office Film Unit, to buy the resulting film. Grierson paid for a soundtrack to be added, as well as some totally out-of-context graphics advertising the Post Office’s new parcel service. The result was one of the most beautiful abstract films ever made.

The Colour Box was the first “direct film” (a term for film created with images rendered in any way directly onto the film stock) to be shown to a general cinema audience. Not only a milestone in the popularity of abstract film, A Colour Box has been voted one of the top 10 most significant animation films of all time by a panel of experts at the 2005 Annecy Film Festival. The film also inspired Lye’s contemporary Norman McLaren, who was experimenting with similar techniques at the time, to take up animation as his main work and established the style for which Len Lye would be associated and would return to many times over his long and varied career.

In 1944 Lye left London for New York where he met, and found great similarities with, many of the famous abstract expressionist artists of the day, who would show his films at their parties. Lye also created kinetic sculptures (a lifelong passion that began in 1918 when he was 17 years old) believing them to be closely linked with his animation in creating a new art of motion. Years after his death, the Len Lye Foundation in New Zealand is still building the many huge kinetic sculptures that he left detailed designs for before his death in 1980. Eleven years later Lye was included as one of the 100 great innovators of the twentieth century in a major exhibition in Germany along with artists like Duchamp and Picasso.

Len Lye urged all animators to be “free radicals,” considered that no film was ever great unless it was made in the spirit of the experimental filmmaker and was described as the “least boring person who ever lived” by the Scottish poet and film director Alistair Reid.

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

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USA / 1943

I was recently asked to contribute to a Walt Disney article a magazine was producing. Typing something up for this one evening my thirteen year old son approached and asked me what I was doing. “Walt Disney?” he replied when I told him, “He was friends with Hitler you know”

The idea that Disney was some racist or antisemitic Nazi has somehow penetrated the popular consciousness to such an extent that its almost accepted fact. And I’m not just saying this because of the daft utterances of a thirteen year old, just type it into google and witness the discussions where its treated as gospel by grown adults. Whether this comes from discredited books such as Marc Eliot’s Walt Disney: Hollywoods Dark Prince or from lazy Family Guy writers who apparently include knowing jibes about Disney being a racist in every mention of his name or just from urban mythology I don’t know, but like most conspiracy theories the whole argument pretty much collapses on any examination of any actual facts , historical documents or personal testimonies.

In direct contrast to the idea of supporting Hitler and the Nazis, during World War II, like many other animators and animation companies worldwide, the Disney Studios produced a number of anti-Nazi propaganda films for the US government in order to help the war effort and also to help the company survive this time of economic hardship. Although another motive was to try and recoup the losses suffered from Pinocchio and Fantasia, the profit margins that Disney charged on many of the government films were small or nonexistent as part of his contribution to the war effort.

Disney was contracted to make 32 propaganda, training, and educational shorts from 1941–1945; this kind of volume multiplied the studio’s usual output many times over and was achieved by producing the films in a simpler style. The best-known of these propaganda films was the Donald Duck short Der Fuehrer’s Face, winner of the 1943 Oscar for best animated short and one propaganda film that was produced to the full Disney quality of other Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse shorts.

In this satirical cartoon directed by Jack Kinney, Donald is a rather unwilling citizen of Hitler’s Germany, a totalitarian regime in which every surface and item is plastered with swastikas and images of Hitler’s face, each of which Donald is expected to salute, even when working an intensive 48-hour shift on a production line and a lot of the humor rests on the volatile duck’s increasing rage at the ridiculous and increasingly surreal demands put on him by the Nazi state. The film is a typical beautifully animated Donald short from this era, also featuring an excellently realised caricature idiotic marching band puffed up with mindless nationalism and annoying everyone with their pompous music and salutes. The title of the film was changed from Donald Duck in Nutzi Land in order to relate to a hit novelty tune “Der Fuerhers Face” by Spike Jones and his City Slickers, which voiced contempt toward the Nazi leader and his delusional master race egotism.

Other Disney wartime propaganda films included the distinctly non-Disney-sounding Education for Death; the Raising of a Nazi (1943), the story of how a German child called Hans is brainwashed from birth to be a good Nazi and a cold killer. The film is as strange as it sounds; its Disney stylings and gags are at odds with the rather disturbing subject matter and depictions of a sinister fascist state. Reason and Emotion (1943) is an interesting short with an adult psychological theme, again not something usually associated with Disney, concerning the struggle between our sense of reason and our emotions, and how Hitler used the rabble-rousing potential of the latter. This film is a good example of how these projects allowed the animators to experiment with different styles from the usual Disney house style; the characters here are often more caricatured, simplified and stylized, at times going toward the kind of designs that UPA would become known for in the 1950s.

Victory Through Air Power (1943) is a feature-length PR push for Major Alexander de Seversky’s proposal of more resources to be concentrated on building war planes. Disney felt strongly enough about this issue to devote his own resources to making the film. The realistic designs and the lovely 1940s-style special effects details recall the Fleischers’ popular Superman series. Reportedly, it was not until Franklin D. Roosevelt had watched Victory Through Air Power that he decided that the long-range bombing strategy would be part of the USA’s battle plan.

Similar to the way I have heard Der Fuehrer’s Face used by the hopelessly uninformed as evidence for Disney’s ‘Nazism’ (“Yeah and he made this Donald Duck cartoon where he salutes the swastika and stuff !”) the 1946 film Song of the South is used as evidence of Disney’s racism when in fact it had the opposite intention, if anything.

Now justifiably seen as tainted by its dated racial stereotyping, Song of the South presents several of the Uncle Remus stories from the books of Joel Chandler Harris. The animated stories are linked by scenes featuring live-action actors portraying Uncle Remus and two children. As Uncle Remus tells his stories, the film dissolves in and out of animation. Animation and live action would not be mixed together as successfully as this until Disney’s Mary Poppins in 1964 and yet Song of the South has never been released on video or DVD in the USA because of racial sensitivity to the portrayed image of the ‘happy slave’, although it has been re-released theatrically and released in all formats in other areas of the world.

We have to remember that his was a time when segregation between black and whites was absolutely normal and acceptable in public places, transport and schools in many southern states of the USA, with black people treated as second class citizens. In this way racism was not only common and acceptable at this time it was actually enshrined in law. Reflecting the attitudes of the era, some of the attitudes in Disney’s work could be seen as racist by today’s standards but than again so could any other work that reflected the attitudes of the era. You see these attitudes in many films and books from that time. In Song of the South Disney was making a genuine (if now seemingly-misguided) attempt to have a likable charismatic warm and funny African American central character in an era when this was extremely rare. If Uncle Remus is portrayed as uneducated and living in a wooden shack, unpalatable as it may be now, that was the second class reality many American blacks were forced to accept.

According to writer Neal Gabler in his book Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (2006), in contrast to having racist intentions, Walt Disney was actually sensitive to the potential for racial stereotyping or “Uncle Tom” accusations in Song of the South and assigned Jewish left-wing writer Maurice Rapf to work on the script with southern writer Dalton Raymond. Disney hoped this would counteract any tendencies in that area, a detail of history which, along with providing more evidence that contradicts the image of his racism, also also shows a different perspective on the accusations of Disney’s antisemitism and intolerance of left wing views.

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

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UK / 2002

Any psychologist would tell you that true psychopaths are very (sexually) attractive. They will charm your pants off. They learn to mimic emotions and manipulate even the smartest and most aware individuals while not seeing them as human but around for their amusement only. They also abuse animals.

– From HBO’s The Jinx

There are some animated films that it just feels wrong to describe as a ‘cartoon’.  For most animated films you can let this description pass, even if it seems a bit dismissive. Even grown up films like When The Wind Blows can just about be described as a ‘cartoon’, as it’s animation that uses humour and a stylised version of reality (even if the humour is very black) but for some animated films – Grave of the Fireflies, for instance – the term ‘cartoon’ just seems wrong. Chris Shepherd’s Dad’s Dead is one of these.

For a start, as with several other films on this list (Neighbours and The Wizard of Speed and Time) it could be debated whether Dad’s Dead is, strictly speaking, an animated film or not. It’s probably only about 25% ‘proper’ animation but outside that a lot of it has had the the video manipulated the hell out of it frame by frame (or the hell into it, in this case), so it probably just about qualifies as animation.

Secondly, it’s just way too dark to be a ‘cartoon’. Like with Don Hertzfeld’s Everything Will Be OK on this list, Dad’s Dead uses animation to draw us into a false sense of security before punching us in the face (a bit like what happens to the narrator in the film). Starting off similar to one of those cute, ironic retro pieces, using lots of animated shots of children’s books, toys and cartoon characters, we quickly realise it isn’t really cute at all as the animated characters are those cheap grotesque badly drawn versions of Disney imagery you see at playgrounds and on ice cream vans, combined with rude graffiti. And then the narrator talks about stuff like the daft haircuts people had when we were kids and the mischief we all got up to, like er.. drawing obscene graffiti and throwing cats off high buildings and ..wait.. “throwing cats of high buildings”??? NO. Stop right there, we didn’t do that. Who the hell did that? And that’s just the start of it. That’s why you couldn’t call this a cartoon, it’s way way too dark. And the world and the detail it contains make it feel way way too real.

‘British Realism’ is a persistent tradition in UK cinema, stretching back to the pre-war documentaries of John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit reflecting peoples real lives back at them from the screen for possibly the first time and the positive Post War optimism of Ealing Studios films like This Happy Breed. The 1950’s documentaries of the Free Cinema movement showed the toughness of a lot of British lives and carried through to the 1960s where the ‘Kitchen Sink’ films of the British New Wave (eg. Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night Sunday Morning and Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner) reflected a cynicism born from Nye Bevan’s post war dream of a ‘we’re all in it together’ meritocratic society crashing up against traditional class barriers.

Today this strand of filmmaking lives on with the gritty social conscience films of Ken Loach and the many contemporary film makers he has inspired, spotlighting the widening inequalities that decades of neo-liberal government have brought. In the work of most contemporary film makers of this type, the overt political aspects of many of Loach’s films are replaced by stories in which the hopelessness created by this marginalisation twists and corrupts behaviour to create drama in different ways. For example in the films of Shane Meadows we see characters torn between good influences and crime or violence, in the work of Andrea Arnold and Lyne Ramsey the focus is a more on a kind of subtle poetic and spiritual (feminine?) aspects, finding lyrical qualities in broken lives while Mike Leigh’s films are often looking for the black humour in the cringingly uncomfortable situations that desire and ambition pushes people into, revealing the extraordinary and grotesque in ordinary suburban lives.

Dad’s Dead can be interpreted as another mutation of this tradition, a touch of British Realism combined with a junior version of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer perhaps. A disturbing and uncomfortable story of a kid with a potentially decent ‘moral compass’ getting sucked in to hanging round with the wrong crowd, or in this case a teenage sociopath. The narrator (Ian Hart) is slowly drawn into darkly funny and then increasingly nasty situations, a ‘friendship’ ruthlessly corrupted and viciously exploited by someone who surrounds himself with a cloak of lies.

An amalgam of real stories and characters from Shepherd’s working class childhood in Liverpool, the film blends and overlays live action and drawn animation styles to create a both gritty and painterly surreal texture. This multi award winning film was made for the UK’s Animate! experimental animation scheme, for which Shepherd would later also collaborate with surrealist cartoon artist David Shrigley on the short Who I Am and What I Want (2005) . Shepherd’s next short Silence is Golden (2006) explored similar themes of childhood fantasy and mixed techniques of live action and animation and he has gone on to make further interesting and award winning shorts.

Perhaps the most disturbing stories are the ones about the ‘banality of evil’, about the real monsters that live amongst us as regular people, acting like ordinary neighbours, ingratiating themselves with our vulnerable elderly relatives and kids. Don’t watch this if you want a ‘cartoon’ with a few easy laughs, this is a real world horror story for our era.

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

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USA / 1979

Normally in this list of animated shorts, story is high on my list of qualifying criteria, and myself being a part time writer it’s possibly higher up than it would be for most animators. I make an exception to this in the case of a few films as they seem to transcend the normal rules of cinema and the The Wizard of Speed and Time is one of these. It basically has very little story but it makes up for this with an insane enthusiasm and a gripping and unrelenting blur of pixilation, stop frame and other real world single frame manipulation with some nice some old school optical effects thrown in for good measure, doubly impressive as it’s the work of one man.
What story there is in this film is pretty easily explained. In the first half (entitled ‘Speed’) a young man in a green wizard costume tears around America at superfast speed like a live action pixilated Speedy Gonzales. He gives a pretty female hitch hiker a lift to Hollywood where her unconventional arrival causes a sensation and she is mobbed by photographers, causing a bunch of other attractive young women to hitch lifts with him themselves, for whom he provides golden stars instead.

In ‘Time’ the second half of the short, the ‘Wizard of Speed and Time’ (a title presumably also referring modestly to the real life SFX maestro Jittlov, who plays the main character) slips on a banana peel and flies through the air into an empty sound stage which he brings props and equipment to life in many magical and ingenious ways in a riot of intricate and dense stop frame action while singing us a song explaining who he is. As I say, its all pretty mental, in a wholesome healthy suntanned blowdried 1970s manner.
Director Mike Jittlov starred, wrote, produced and created all of the hundreds of effects himself in the film, which became a cult hit at festivals and screenings. Ten years later he released a remade, expanded feature length version with the same name (also now viewable on youtube). The equally ideas, tricks and effects packed feature also incorporated portions of some of his other short films (such as Time Tripper and Animato), this time the story going behind the scenes of the film making to relate the exploits of a special effects technician (again played by Jittlov) trying to make his own feature in Hollywood. Amongst the many problems in his path are devious scheming Hollywood producer types, an aspect that was mirrored in real life when apparently the films co producer Richard Kaye ran off with the films completion budget. Like the seeming wish fulfillment aspects of the short (ie being mobbed by screaming girls) the feature film created a fantasised comic dramatisation of Jittlov chasing his dream of making a feature film.

Jittlov had started out as a Maths/Language student at University of California in the early 1970’s when he joined an animation module to satisfy an art requirement of his course.From that moment on he was hooked and began making short films, first on Super 8 mm film, then 16mm to enter festivals, then he entered them into the Academy Awards, where several of his shorts made it to the finals. This brought him to the attention of Disney (you may have realised by now from reading this list that any animator possessing any talent and commercial potential ends up working for Disney at some point) who commissioned him to create sequences for their TV specials and short films for people to watch while waiting in the queues at Disneyland. The Wizard of Speed and Time short was made with a view to selling it to Disney producers, and they first used it as part of a 1979 TV special called “Major Effects”

Disney had a policy of not crediting animators in such films so Jittlov hid his own name and his film making partner Deven Chierighino’s name in the animation of his films, a habit that he would maintain. For instance subliminal messages are hidden in the animation and special effects of the Wizard of Speed and Time short and feature , including plugs for cult 1980’s subversive cult pseudo religion The Church of the Sub-Genius (which was very un Disney).

Like a lot of films on this list, this film is the result of one man’s obsessive creativity and single minded drive, self funded and made without the help of any big studio, which tends to give a film a better chance of feeling individual and unique. Somehow however The Wizard of Speed and Time feels like even more unique and even more of an impressive achievement than most other truly independent short films. Not just in terms of its originality and tremendous enthusiasm for the possibilities of cinema, which translates as an infectious ‘just go for it’ spirit and inspirational joie de vivre, but also something about its incredible scope feels quite awe inspiring. Unlike most animated shorts this wasn’t made by someone locked away in a bedroom or studio for years, a lot of this was made out there traveling through the world, along busy freeways and densely populated city streets. The immense problems of a one man band production like this, interacting with, disrupting and manipulating the world around must have been truly not a project for the feint hearted and taken immense powers of charm and persuasion in addition to the fantastic animation, visual fx and film making technical skills on show.

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

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United Kingdom / 1992

This week’s film is also in honour of the recent first Manchester Animation Festival, at which Barry Purves presented the prizes.

Former animator at Manchester’s Cosgrove Hall (on their classic version of Wind in the Willows), Purves produced Screenplay, a minor classic of stop frame animation in what appears to be an epic, obsessive labour of love (not uncommon in this list of great animation). Apparently it was (until the end) all done in one take, although punctuated by breaks for sleep and eating I would imagine, or Barry may not be still here to give out any prizes.

As well as his other award winning shorts, Purves has taught animation, made documentaries and written the books Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance (Focal Press, 2007) and Basics Animation: Stop Motion (AVA, 2010). He has held workshops about animation in many colleges worldwide as well as major studios such as DreamWorks, Pacific Data Images, Pixar and Laika.

Amongst Purves’ other acclaimed films was Next (1989), also made for Channel 4 and also on a theatrical theme, in which William Shakespeare auditions and pitches his plays to an unimpressed director. It was while visiting Japan with this film that Purves was able to experience traditional Japanese theatre.

In the style of a ‘Kabuki’ play this story of doomed love is told by a visible narrator, using sign language and voiceover (Michael Maloney). Behind him on a revolving stage other characters act out the fable, fading in and out of shadow on an elaborate oriental set that hides and reveals characters and scenarios, until it all reaches its genuinely shocking finale.

The beautifully poised animation is immaculately staged and the stylised special effects are achieved by unfolding fans and tapestries in a ‘real world’ theatrical style, as animated stage assistants manipulate the set as in a real theatre.

The story is a simple one told in a complex way, full of ambiguities that keep you guessing. Like the ingenious revolving stage within a revolving stage with screens of animated Japanese illustrations that slot in and out like an intricate Chinese puzzle, the story also contains many puzzle like elements. What enfolds is a tale of a daughter forbidden from being with her lover, a gardener, as her evil and greedy father wants to sell her hand in marriage for a rich dowry.

We see graphic scenarios on the rotating stages, of the lovers happy together and then people being put to death at her fathers bidding (staged as in a stylised theatre production with red ribbons of material unfolding out of wounds) but how many of these events represent the desires of the various characters and how many are ‘real’ events is sometimes unclear. The narrator also slips in and out of his identity, unmasking himself and joining the action in various roles. Shadowy black clad characters act as stage hands manipulating the environment as well as playing guards at the bidding of the father, at the start they even manipulate the other characters like puppets, ‘animating’ the action themselves, adding yet another layer of visible faux mechanics.

Like everything else, the animation is realistic but also stylised, like real stage actors putting on a mannered performance. These semi realistic figures move and adopt poses with the grace of dancers or mime artists, informed by Purves background as a stage actor and designer.

Eventually the lovers are betrayed by a spiteful old maid and the daughters sweetheart is captured by the father, in her desperation to save her lover she pushes her father into a sea of waving blue sheets over which they then sail away to an idyllic happy ending on a remote Japanese island.

Except it’s not a happy ending at all. Suddenly the narrator reveals his true identity and the play is replaced by a different, darker reality. The stage is gone, there are different shots and editing and the camera is now moving in a sinister, John Carpenter way so we know something bad is going to happen – and when it does the blood is no longer theatrical ribbons. We are now out of the play and in a film; a very horrible film that ends badly for all concerned. The fact that its stopped being a stylised play seems to make it all the more disturbing as this causes us to think of the terrifying events now unfolding as being somehow more ‘real’.

In a final sequence that once again breaks through walls of audience expectation, the film ends with a moment of light relief as the camera pulls back away from the ‘stage’ exposing the stage equipment and props and carries pulling out through the animators work desk revealing Purves’ hands, the ultimate manipulators in this kaleidoscope of manipulation, and a rich clutter of notes, references, articles, tea and biscuits.

All these layers of narrative and reality make the film rich material for articles like this to analyse and is recommended for any students seeking essay subject matter for endless word-count filling pontification where even Purves preferred type of biscuits could contain some hidden significance.

Like Purves’ other films, Screenplay won many prizes worldwide and it has achieved cult status amongst animators. Although a solo project born from one persons drive, the film was, like other films on this list, funded by the UK’s Channel4 in their heyday of investing in animation. Without that injection of investment and energy in the 1980s/90s, films like this wouldn’t exist and this list, the animation world and the UK animation industry in particular would all be poorer entities.

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

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Czech Republic / 1948

To coincide with the first Manchester Animation Festival and its screening of the new documentary Film Adventurer Karel Zeman, this week’s short is Inspiration, a fascinating and ingenious work, and therefore a fitting representation of this extraordinary director.

Like a psychedelic, eastern European Ray Harryhausen, Karel Zeman’s unique films create super-stylised environments and vivid fantasy worlds, using stop frame animation or combining stop frame creatures and live action actors. Not so much attempting to create a Harryhausen type effect of realism as invent whole new phantasmagorical universes, Zeman’s films are acknowledged as influential on groundbreaking contemporary directors such as Terry Gilliam, Jan Švankmajer, Tim Burton and many more. But the difference is that far from trying to create an impression of uniqueness, Zeman didn’t seem to think he was doing anything that weird at all, and the type of eccentricity and whimsy that seemed to come naturally to Zeman from within himself was perhaps adapted more as a self conscious, stylistic decision by others.

Born in Moravia, Zeman worked as a window dresser and poster designer and studying at business school. Following an early interest in Czech puppet theatre he moved to Paris to study commercial art and work in advertising. Returning to Czechoslovakia, Zeman continued in commercials until offered a job in the animation studio run by Hermina Tyrlova, one of the rare breed of leading early 20th century female animators and often called the ‘Mother of Czech Animation’. Zeman and Tyrlova then collaborated on Vanocni Sen (Christmas Dream, 1946) which won the award for best animated film at Cannes.

Soon after this in Zeman started his series of popular short children’s comic films featuring the character Mr Prokouk, but it was this extraordinary 1948 short Insparace (Inspiration), an ‘art film’ using miniature posed glass models and sets, which more defined his desire to push the envelope of stop frame and special effects to create unique dreamlike imaginary universes.

Later Zeman created his first feature Kral Lavra (King Lavra) in 1950 followed by his first live action/ animation film, Cesta du Praveku (Journey into History), a genre for which he would become world renowned. It was Zeman’s next film Vynalez Zkaky (The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, 1958) which brought wide international acclaim and which many consider his masterpiece. Based on Verne’s novel Facing the Flag and designed to look like the kind of illustrations that would have featured in the original publication, the sets and backgrounds in this Victorian style give the feel of a toy cardboard puppet show from that era except in this case containing real actors. A favourite on television in the 1960s the film is now rarely seen, and like the rest of Zeman’s beautiful work, is criminally neglected

Zeman followed this with other Jules Verne adaptations such as Na Komete (Journey by Comet) and the whimsical fantasy Baron Prasil (The Fabulous Baron Munchausen), seemingly influencial on Terry Gilliam’s later version of the tale; indeed, a lot of Zeman’s work seemed to influence Gilliam’s whimsical style. His later work includes a version of Sinbad (Pohadky Tisice A Jedne Noci, 1974) and the fantasy story of love conquering evil, Krabat (1977).

Apparently made as the result of a wager Zeman accepted that he wouldn’t be able to make a stop motion film using glass, most of the figures in Inspiration are seemingly reheated and reshaped for every frame of movement to create remarkably fluid figures in a unique stop frame world.

Bookended by live action sequences, Inspiration is mainly a series of animated vignettes set inside a universe contained within a drop of water. Beginning with lovingly filmed semi abstract technicolour images of light and colours refracting, reflecting and blurring through glass and water, (putting me in mind of a music video director I worked with who used to move pieces of broken glass about right in front of the camera lens for that trippy psychedelic effect) we see an artist who’s gaze settles of raindrops on his window as he stares out in search of inspiration. Whether the artists (or indeed Zeman’s) mind has been expanded by some particularly potent Czech absinthe or such like we can only speculate but he seems to achieve a moment of enlightenment as, in a series of films within films, he imagines worlds within worlds contained in the water droplets.

As we focus on a particular raindrop on a leaf we see a series of interlinking miniature scenarios within the tiny watery world. A clam opens and releases some bubbles, droplets of air within the drop of water, which rise to the surface and become flowers, one of which mutates into a glass ballerina figure, who dances and pirouettes on the water as if on ice. A dandelion seed blows into the droplet and becomes a clown figure who is transfixed by the dancer. When the clown approaches the dancer a thick opaque glass sheet blocks him off and, breaking through the barrier, he finds himself in an eerie glass forest where he is mesmerised once more by a crystalline woman riding a chariot pulled by a team of glass horses.

The droplet rolls off the leaf and is gone forever while back behind the window the artist, having found his inspiration, seems to begin work heating some glass.

I’m not sure what all this means exactly but it is captivating and fascinating to watch. The idea of these miniature transitory worlds, rich and intricate and full of emotion one minute and then gone the next, seems to give the artist and the audience a godlike perspective. The worlds within droplets within droplets within worlds reminded me of quantum type ideas of the universe being constructed by solar systems, planets then right down to atoms and molecules, which when opened up are like more solar systems and planets themselves, or of fractal patterns which repeat themselves with ever tinier detail the more you zoom in.

Whatever Inspiration makes you think about, the point is it should at least inspire your mind into action driven by curiosity, as like a lot of Zeman’s best work, it’s probably quite unlike anything you have seen before, from the insanely intricate craftsmanship of the remelted and reposed glass figures (an ornate carriage pulled by a team of horses!) or the rich, shimmering and glinting fantasy world of glass, ice and water he creates using these difficult materials, his skill and his imagination.

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

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Japan / USA / 2003

Influenced by anime, kung fu films and cyberpunk fiction, the hugely successful live action feature The Matrix (1999) and its further episodes Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions (both 2003) were the ultimate in comic book style cinema at the time.

The Animatrix were nine animated shorts connected with the Matrix universe, mostly produced at the Madhouse and Studio 4C at the time of the second two features of the Matrix trilogy. They were commissioned (and partly written) by Matrix creators the Wachowski siblings who hired some of the anime creators who had inspired them to create this series of shorts

All of these shorts boast high production values and the best ones show innovative approaches to the neo gothic dystopian vision of The Matrix universe. My favourite is Beyond, written and directed by Koji Morimoto, whose previous track record as director includes the Magnetic Rose episode of the 1995 anthology feature Memories (also probably the best episode of that collection) and the excellent 1995 short Noiseman Sound Insect. He was also key animator on anime classics Neo Tokyo (1987), Robot Carnival (1987), Akira (1988) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) and would later be animation director of bizzarro cult favorite Mind Game (2004).

Beyond is a smaller story than all the other Matrix films, with their bombastic vision of a reality whereby we are all puppets manipulated by ninja digital fascists who keep us in line by controlling our illusionary world perception where in actual fact we are little more than farm animals bred for their exploitation. Instead this is about a girl who loses her cat.

The central character Yoko (played by Hedy Burress of TV shows ER, CSI, video game Final Fantasy X and also featured in the Animatrix film Program) is told by some local street urchins that her cat is maybe in the ‘haunted house’, which although a prohibited space is also the kid’s favourite hang out. Inside the walled off derelict building she finds a forbidden zone where the rules of physics are subtly warped, gravity can be defied, the weather differs to the world outside and fleetingly glimpsed cracks seem to appear in reality itself. As she plays with the kids and chases her cat through this mysterious magical ruined and rubbish strewn secret garden, an ominous looking armoured truck is seen making its way towards the compound.

The film works well standing alone removed from its Matrix context, as a mysterious story where the surreal bleeds into the real. Much in the style of Satoshi Kon it also perhaps contains refererences to Andre Tartovsky’s 1979 art house live action sci-fi classic Stalker, with its mysterious forbidden zone.

Beyond‘s beautiful looks seem somewhere between the stylised urban drawn 3D of Michael Arias arthouse classic Tekkon Kinkreet and the lovely organic worlds and precisely drafted characters of Hiyao Miyazaki. This all kind of makes sense as director Morimoto’s contribution to Memories was written by Kon , he had also worked with Miyazaki on the stunning Kiki’s Delivery Service and Arias was credited for the computer graphics here in Beyond (presumably the 3D rendered artwork of the city).

The realistic character animation is heavily referenced, perhaps even what you would call rotoscoped, from key scenes and movements shot on video and the score features muisc from UK cult band Death in Vegas.

The film features some anime characteristics like some futuristic looking vehicles and a sexy cyber punky heroine who likes spending lots of time in her underwear, but it differs from most anime and the other Matrix films with its lightness of touch and warm humanistic approach to the characters, who feel a lot more three dimensional and anchored in reality than usual comic strip style sketchy avatar type versions. In this slice of the Matrix universe ordinary people are treated with a degree of affection and sympathy rather than being seen as mindless drones too stupid to see the truth, an aspect of the film franchise which seemed to encourage the alienated view of humanity adapted by many of its ‘goth’ type teenage fans. Whether the Tartovsky reference is deliberate or imagined, Beyond gives the viewer the space to use their own mind and shows a heart and sophistication above the usual teenage bedroom techno sci-fi mainstream.

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

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USA / 1941

Following Disney’s stratospheric success with their first feature film Snow White, the Fleischer brothers response Gulliver’s Travels had met with contrasting fortunes. Visually lush but emotionally stagnant and excitement free it was bogged down by the blandness of its rotoscoped animation, unlike the rotoscoping in Snow White which was expertly blended into beautiful stylised movements (modern day motion capture producers take note).

With the financial disappointment from this on their hands and the demise of their popular series of cinema shorts Betty Boop, Fleischer Brothers were looking for new material and sources of income. When their financiers Paramount suggested an animated version of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s popular Superman comics, Dave Fleischer was reluctant, saying it would be too expensive. Paramount were willing to pay, however, and the resulting series was one of the Fleischers’ finest hours.

With larger budgets the animators were able to spend time designing, animating, and creating rich special effects for the series. Unlike in previous Fleischer productions, they were able to pencil test the animation, and after they were animated, the figures were often hand rendered with a three-dimensional look. The stylization of the camera angles and the design also gave the series a film noir feel.

As in the comic, plucky journalist Lois Lane pursues her story into dangerous situations and uncovers evil plots with photographer Clark Kent trailing behind. But when trouble looms, Superman appears to save the day. The Fleischers appear to have learned the lesson from Gulliver’s Travels and here they did not avoid the scary stuff—giant robots, mad scientists, escaped gorillas, and mummies on the loose are all seen off by the caped crusader in splendid fashion.

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in a publicity event for the Superman shorts.

The Fleischer brothers made eight of the Superman cartoons before they lost control over their studio following Paramount’s takeover in 1941. Paramount renamed the company Famous Studios and made nine more Superman episodes. The Famous Studios episodes differed from the first eight in that they were more concerned with gung-ho patriotic stories, no doubt relating to America’s war effort, rather than the classic, giant-robot-type science fiction of the Fleischer’s episodes.

As is often the case with films from this era, Superman now can seem rather slow-paced and the stories pretty corny to modern audiences who have been bombarded with sophisticated twists on the superhero idea, but don’t forget the Superman comics themselves had only been around three years since first publication in 1938 so this was all new exciting stuff at the time, and Superman’s power of flight was invented for this animated series, in the original comics he could only leap “over the tallest building”.

The Fleischer’s Superman series is still regarded as one of the best animated superhero adaptations. Its strong 1940s noir style was a big influence on such creations as Bruce Timm’s acclaimed 1990s TV superhero revivals Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series (both produced by DC Comics and Warner Bros.), as well as the award-winning graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller.

As with Tom and Jerry and, to a lesser extent, Warner Brothers/MGM shorts, even though the standard is excellent it’s hard to pick the ‘best’ one, as they follow a similar formula. I have chosen the second in the series ‘The Mechanical Monsters’ as the robots are super cool, the villain is super dastardly and it doesn’t have the rather cheesy origins sequence of the first episode.

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

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USA / 1933

Of the seventy five Silly Symphonies animated shorts produced by the Walt Disney company from 1929 to 1939, Three Little Pigs was by far the most successful.

The original Silly Symphonies concept was, as the name suggests, a series of cinema shorts which were accompaniments to pieces of music, almost like the music videos of the day. As the intention here wasn’t to sell records however, the music wasn’t necessarily contemporary popular hits, it could be old standards or classical pieces or anything else that inspired the animators. The films were mainly one-offs, with no continuing characters or themes, unlike the Mickey Mouse shorts which were also being made by Disney Studios at the time.

As the Silly Symphonies series progressed however it became less about the music and more about the company experimenting in pushing the art and techniques of animation, and in doing so, developed (not necessarily invented) many of the building blocks of animated films we take for granted today; advanced character animation, multi plane camera, special effects animation (see also The Old Mill article in this list), emotional storytelling and even full-colour film all emanated from this avenue of intense experimentation from the studios.

Whereas films like The Old Mill pushed the envelope of special effects, realism and multi plane photography, Three Little Pigs represents a big step forward in the sophistication of character animation, pushing Disney way ahead of the competition. The three pigs, although sharing almost identical character design, have very distinct personalities, which are defined by brilliantly expressive animation.

The lead animator Fred Moore, one of the great animators of the Disney Studios’ golden years, was known for his appealing drawing style and was credited for the classic redesign of Micky Mouse for Fantasia. Moore was tragically killed in a car accident in 1952.

Three Little Pigs is typically Disney in that it redesigns an old fable for a new audience. It became one of the most successful short films of all time, a cinema attraction in its own right rather than just a supporting film, and won that year’s Oscar for short film. Its theme song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” became a huge hit in the depression years, as the song, and therefore the film, came to express and symbolize the hope and resilience of the American people during harsh economic times. During the early years of World War II it was also used to refer to Hitler’s expansion in Europe. This made it, whether by accident or intention, almost unique among Disney cartoons in that it could be considered a political allegory (another candidate would be the 1943 Donald Duck short, Der Fuehrer’s Face).

One sequence in Three Little Pigs was self-censored; originally showing the Big Bad Wolf dressed up as a stereotypical Jewish peddler, this was quickly removed and changed to have the character dressed as a brush salesman. This was used by Walt Disney’s critics as evidence of anti-Semitism, but this charge was refuted by everyone close to him and is perhaps best seen in context of the aforementioned Der Fuehrer’s Face which was an unambiguous attack on the rise of Fascism. In actual fact this kind of gag was typical of the unfortunate casual stereotyping common at the time in much popular entertainment. At least Disney realised it was offensive and cut the scene.

Disney followed Three Little Pigs with three sequels, failing, however, to achieve the success of the original. This is believed to have convinced him of the value of moving forwards with new ideas and taking risks, rather than adopting the cautious and short-sighted policy of sequels, an approach which reaped rewards for his company. His slogan after this was “You can’t top pigs with pigs!”

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is a list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

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