Cartoon Fever: The World’s Greatest Animated Shorts (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

QUASI AT THE QUACKADERO (1975)

I can't say for certain whether or not I first encountered the work of Sally Cruikshank in general (or Quasi at the Quackadero in particular) on the USA Network's 1980s stoner staple Night Flight, but either way, I'm pretty sure I wasn't entirely in a legal frame of mind at the time. Not that psychedelic substances are required to appreciate Quasi's dreamy, stream-of-consciousness groove: Cruikshank's anarchic style is a mind-altering substance all by itself, a subterranean version of the (relatively) clean, orderly mainstream Disney/Looney Tune style of animation with all the color, personality, wisecracking animals and fairy tale fancy reflected in a funhouse mirror of surrealistic Id.

NEIGHBOURS (1952)

You wouldn’t get very far in a discussion of great animated shorts without mentioning the National Film Board of Canada. Since 1941, the NFB has supported and funded important and groundbreaking works from some of Canada’s most important animators, beginning with the great Norman McLaren. McLaren experimented with a number of animation techniques throughout his career including pixellation and even scratching and painting on the film stock itself. But today, his most famous work is Neighbours, a hybrid of stop motion animation and live action photography. The film -- an allegory for the Cold War -- finds McLaren using his human subjects not as actors, but as mannequins to be literally manipulated in the service of his story (somewhere, Robert Bresson must have swooned). Stylistically playful yet thematically serious, Neighbours became one of the most feted animated shorts of its day, yet it’s a testament to its topicality that it ended up taking home not the Best Animated Short Oscar, but rather the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.

MIRACLE OF FLIGHT (1974)

Terry Gilliam made this five minute film after the original Monty Python's Flying Circus TV series had completed its final season but before Python caught on in the United States, a development that, along with the success of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, made it clear that the troupe would remain a going concern for years to come. Gilliam would later develop his own voice as a live-action filmmaker, but this cartoon is basically a stray Python skit that's developed at greater length than most of the animated bits that Gilliam contributed to the TV shows. Not that there's a goddamn thing wrong with that.

CREATURE COMFORTS (1989)

Nick Park, the co-founder of Aardman Animation (and the creator of Wallace and Gromit) had a weirdly accomplished triumph with this award-winning short, which attaches the thoughts expressed by man-on-the-street interview subjects to animals doing time in a zoo. The success of the film led to a series of TV commercials in a similar style and then, in 2003, to a brilliant TV series that ran for two seasons in Britain. (CBS commissioned an American version for a summer series last year but pulled the plug after broadcasting three of seven completed episodes.)

THE CRITIC (1963)

Pauline Kael once wrote that "the best way" that Mel Brooks "could be employed on any movie" would be for him to "hang around on a cloud" during shooting, "with permission to replace any actor at any point." Nice image, Pauline, but Ernest Pintoff trumped you when he made this parody of an arty animated short, and then put the icing on the gravy by asking Brooks to assume the persona of an old Jewish man -- this was back when Brooks was still a young Jewish man -- and record this worthy's baffled responses to what the hell his eyeballs were being subjected to as punishment for having dared to venture into a movie theater with an expectation of being entertained. It's too bad that Brooks doesn't still have a way of getting in touch with that cranky old guy; we'd love to sit next to him at Young Frankenstein on Broadway.

FRANK FILM (1973)

Frank Mouris wrote, directed, edited, and narrates this autobiographical collage, which aims to sum up the artist's life as best he can through nine minutes of words and images. Mouris talks about his experiences and impressions on the soundtrack while pictures of things important or just pleasing to him crowd onto the frame. The total effect is of an amazingly cool, elegant fever dream.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

Forgotten Films: "Suspicious Circumstances" (1984) and "Face Like a Frog" (1987)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In recent weeks, packages of the short films nominated in the twin categories of Academy Awards (Best Live Action Short and Best Animated Short) devoted to such work have had some play in a few major movie markets, just as they do every year. Because of the hook that an Academy Award nomination provides, Oscar season is one of the rare times when short films can get any attention from theatrical distributors and theater programmers. Now, thanks to DVD and the Internet and such specialty cable channels as IFC and the Sundance Channel, things are a little better for makers of short films than they used to be; if a short gets a lot of attention on the festival circuit, it may turn up on TV, often jammed together with an hour's worth of other shorts and used to plug a hole in the schedule. Or if a director breaks into features and develops a name, his or her early shorts may be recycled as "bonus features" on the DVD of a bigger movie, as Lynne Ramsay's early shorts are used in the Criterion Collection DVD for her debut feature Ratcatcher. At least it's a way to keep the films alive and in circulation. Other short filmmakers — those who don't "graduate" to features, maybe because their talents are more naturally suited to the short form — may get a lot of attention for awhile and then slip through the cracks. This may be especially true in the case of independent animators, who have to work long and hard to produce a ten-minute masterpiece, and who lost a means of getting their work seen when such annual showcases as the Tournee of Animation began drying up several years ago.

Jim Blashfield's Suspicious Circumstances, which was made in 1984 and barnstormed the country via cable TV and animation festivals in the mid-to-late '80s, is a remarkable specimen of homegrown, handmade American surrealism. The film has its own xerox-stop-motion look, which is less startling now only because Blashfield capitalized on the attention he got from the movie by accepting jobs to apply the same style to music videos for Talking Heads ("And She Was"), Joni Mitchell ("Good Friends"), Michael Jackson ("Leave Me Alone"), Paul Simon ("Boy in the Bubble"), and many others. Blashfield has a new short film, Bunnyheads, which, according to his website, is "currently infesting film festivals internationally."

Sally Cruikshank's work goes back to the seventies, when she made her classic Quasi at the Quackadero, but like Blashfield, she experienced a bump of attention in the 1980s, when she made the throbbing, mutating Face Like a Frog. It's a choice example of Cruikshank's style, which is more devoted to outright cartoonishness than many independent animators of her generation, but which has a slightly sinister, contemporary edge to it; trying to recapture the anything-goes spirit of early animated cartoons, she makes films that sometimes suggest what it might have been like if the Fleischer brothers had experienced an acid flashback. (Cruikshank worked on "It's a Good Life", the Joe Dante-directed segment of the 1983 Twilight Zone — The Movie.) Cruikshank suffered a career setback when she lost her funding for an attempt to complete a feature, but like Blashfield, she offers some of her films on DVD for sale at her website.

The Screengrab : quasi at the quackadero

Cartoon Fever: The World’s Greatest Animated Shorts (Part Three)

Forgotten Films: "Suspicious Circumstances" (1984) and "Face Like a Frog" (1987)