Cartoon Fever: The World's Greatest Animated Shorts (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, it seemed like a good idea to salute The Top 20 Animated Feature Films of all time, which opened a Pandora’s Box of possibilities for this week’s obvious follow-up list: the Greatest Animated SHORTS of all time.

And by “short,” of course, we mean anything from seconds to approximately 40 minutes, which is the length of time when (according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) a movie officially becomes a feature (which, I suppose, means 1999’s 75-minute Pokémon: The First Movie wasn’t technically a rip-off).

Anyway, as your post host, I should note that most of this week’s Jumbo Shorts list is the work of Screengrabbers Paul Clark and Phil Nugent, who both clearly have a severe case of Cartoon Fever. The condition is highly contagious and not even Acme has a cure, so don’t say we didn’t warn you!

GERTIE THE DINOSAUR (1914)

This film by Winsor McKay, the creator of the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, is sometimes called the first animated short; it isn't, but it may have been the first to demonstrate that an artist with as much skill and imagination as McKay could create a personable animated character that would charm and captivate audiences as well as any live actor. You can see McKay at the start of the film, and that's supposed to be him talking to Gertie in the intertitles: this is the film version of a live vaudeville act he originally did in which he appeared on stage and played ringmaster to Gertie as the film was projected on a screen behind him.

BAMBI MEETS GODZILLA (1969) and ANIJAM (1984)

Marv Newland was a mere stripling of an animation student when he created Bambi Meets Godzilla, an instant midnight classic and, at a minute and a half in length, one of the all-time great one-joke movies. Fifteen years later, Newland had founded the animation production house International Rocketship Ltd. and used his name and contacts to get twenty-two different filmmakers to contribute their talents to Anijam. The animated equivalent of a comics artists' jam or a game of Exquisite Corpse, the film starred a Newland character called Foska; each animator was given the last frame of the sequence created by whichever animator had preceded him (without knowing anything else about what action had come before or would follow), and the requirement that whatever he did with his thirty seconds of film would end with Foska on-screen; aside from those stipulations, they were allowed to go nuts. The results are a ten-minute film festival that serves as a record of what animators around the world were doing at one fertile moment in the history of their art form.

DUCK AMUCK (1953)

In making this list, we might have selected one of any number of Chuck Jones classics. But honestly, Duck Amuck seems the only suitable choice here. For one thing, it’s funny as all get out, with some of Daffy Duck’s best moments. But what makes it stand out from the rest is the way it carries the self-referentiality that’s present in many of Jones’ Looney Tunes shorts to brilliant extremes. From almost the very beginning, the Warner Bros. animators positioned themselves as the irreverent alternative to the Disney juggernaut. And cartoons like Duck Amuck are the reason why: instead of bowling the audience over with virtuoso artistry and emotional appeal, they won our hearts with wit and no small amount of mischief. And nowhere is this more evident than Duck Amuck, which doesn’t simply break the fourth wall, but has the fourth wall reach out and exact brutally funny revenge on the star.

REJECTED (2000)

Nearly half a century after Duck Amuck, big-budget animation has become more popular than ever, with the style perfected by Uncle Walt remaining the dominant formula. But on the fringes of the medium, there are a number of independent animators keeping the old Chuck Jones spirit alive, and foremost among them is Don Hertzfeldt. Combining absurdist humor, low-fi doodles, and occasionally profound insights, Hertzfeldt (still only 32 years old) has amassed a sizable and extremely vocal cult following. Some of us (okay, it was Paul) proposed the idea of including Hertzfeldt’s most recent masterpiece Everything Will Be OK on this list, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to snub Rejected, the film that remains the animator’s most popular and even garnered him an Oscar nomination, quite possibly the coolest move the Academy has made this century. In a way, it’s Duck Amuck in reverse -- whereas Jones’ film was predicated on the idea of the animator subjecting the cartoon to his every whim, Rejected is about the animator losing all control of his creation. Only it’s way funnier than that. Don’t believe us? Once you’ve seen it, we defy you to watch a baby uneasily walk around without thinking of the convulsively hilarious fate that awaits the tyke in Rejected.

STREET OF CROCODILES (1986)

The accepted masterpiece by stop-motion masters the Brothers Quay takes on the task of adapting Bruno Schulz's unadaptable, surreal writing to the screen, pulls it off, and then keeps going until it turns into its own special, unclassifiable thing. To say that it helped create the look we associate with cyberpunk would be to reduce it to a mere style; it'll still be alive and kicking when the hundreds (thousands?) of music videos and TV commercials and God knows what else that have plundered it for its looks have been reduced to period pieces and covered with dust.

Click Here For Part Two, Part Three, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark

The Screengrab : rejected

Cartoon Fever: The World's Greatest Animated Shorts (Part One)