Viewed December 30, 2006
Well, one last time, I sat down to watch some shorts, since I had waited so long to watch my movie of the day. This time, I watched the shorts available as extras on my DVD of Dumbo, both titles that would seem to have influenced the film about the elephant […]
Viewed December 17, 2006
No Time for Nuts is a 3D animated short included on the DVD release of Ice Age: The Meltdown which, like Gone Nutty before it, stars the “sabre-tooth squirrel” Scrat. This one involves Scrat coming across a time machine and travelling all through time in chase of his constantly-on-the-move one remaining […]
Viewed December 13, 2006
Perhaps Thanksgiving Day would have been a better day for seeing Let’s Talk Turkey, as it is basically a comedic guide to carving a Turkey. I’m told that it a fairly standard comedy short from producer/narrator Pete Smith, who worked on around 200 films from 1931 to 1955.
This mini-epic begins with […]
Viewed December 8, 2006
Good luck finding information on The Wild Goose. If my job hadn’t required me to give tech support to a recent event where the film was shown, I don’t know how I would have ever learned about it and that’s a shame. Writer/Director Bruce Cronin made several low budget films […]
Viewed December 6, 2006
With time winding down and only five shorts left in The Chronological Donald, Volume One, I decided to go ahead and watch the rest and close out my look at the early phases of Donald’s career.
Early to Bed is a simple, formulaic short featuring Donald trying to get to bed early so […]
Viewed December 5, 2006
My Wife’s Relations is classic short-form Buster Keaton. Buster gets hauled into court by a woman who thinks he broke a courthouse window. Thinking they are an engaged couple (and speaking no English), the judge marries them. While the woman’s family is aghast at the shrimp their sister has […]
Viewed December 3, 2006
Now You’re Talking is an instructional short by Max and Dave Fleischer, best known for their later “Betty Boop”, “Popeye” and “Superman” cartoons. Through a combination of live action and animation, it shows the viewer how their telephone works by focusing on a man who dozes off after having a poor […]
Viewed November 26, 2006
Fatty’s Spooning Day aka Mabel, Fatty and the Law is a relatively early entry from Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle that displays all his typical character traits. He womanizes. He gets in trouble with the law. Just about the only thing he doesn’t do is the acrobatics that he was […]
Viewed November 23, 2006
Tina and Frank is a short film made by Oakland filmmaker Erin Gleeson. It follows a young woman named Tina who has befriended an older divorced man named Frank. They have bonded over the odd habit of punching people in the face and much of their time is spent setting […]
Viewed November 22, 2006
Timber finds Donald attempting to steal food from Pierre (a re-named Pete). He gets caught and Pierre puts him to work lumberjacking. From there the wackiness ensues as Donald causes more trouble than gets work done. There’s a lot of to and fro between Donald and Pierre until Donald […]
Viewed November 16, 2006
The Paperhanger’s Helper aka Stick Around is interesting because it is exactly the kind of comedy that Laurel and Hardy would be making history with just a few years later, and yet it doesn’t work here. This is because while Oliver Hardy is present, his sidekick (in a role that would […]
Viewed November 9, 2006
One Week is a classic Buster Keaton short that finds him and his new bride (Sybil Seely) given a build-it-yourself house as a wedding gift. When Buster’s rival changes the numbers on some of the boxes, Buster’s efforts prove to be more comical than effective.
This short is a prime example of […]
Viewed November 6, 2006
Donald’s Vacation is a rather uninspired entry in the Donald Duck canon. There’s lots of Donald mucking about in nature, but there is little focus. I got the sense that the guys at Disney just had a bunch of gags lying around and structured this short in order to use […]
Viewed October 29, 2006
The Paleface is a pretty standard entry from Buster Keaton during his pre-feature days. It’s a funny little short about a white man who is taken for a god by a tribe on American Indians on the verge of losing their land to an oil baron.
There are plenty of Buster’s trademark […]
Viewed October 25, 2006
Vincent is a short animated film by director Tim Burton, made while he was still a working animator with Disney utilizing the stop-motion techiques he would eventually perfect for The Nightmare Before Christmas.
It tells the story of a young boy named Vincent who is fascinated by Vincent Price and imagines his life […]
Viewed October 23, 2006
Donald really starts to hit his stride here, as the animators have obviously begun to really define what works for him and what doesn’t.
Officer Duck is a nifty crime caper short that has Donald disguising himself as a baby to infiltrate the lair of a wanted criminal, Tiny Tom (essentially the eternal […]
Viewed October 12, 2006
Sea Scouts finally fulfills the promise that the “nephews” series had in it all along. Huey, Dewey and Louie have shed most of their “little brat” attitudes and are much more like they were portrayed in the comics. Here, they are truly trying to be helpful to Donald, but their […]
Viewed October 6, 2006
The Little Matchgirl is a straightforward adaptation of the sad story by Han Christian Anderson that tells of a poor girl, unable to sell her matches, who uses them to transport her to a better place.
This short is included on the new “Special Edition” DVD of Disney’s The Little Mermaid and it […]
Viewed September 26, 2006
I’m beginning to understand why I came to like Donald so much. If these cartoons are any indication, he was much put upon. In The Hockey Champ, Huey Dewey and Louie (they’re becoming omnipresent, aren’t they?) once again torment Donald and get the best of him because of his temper. […]
Viewed September 17, 2006
Definitely the most dissapointing day of Donald cartoon watching so far, The Fox Hunt starts things off on the wrong foot with a poorly executed “comedic” fox hunt. Donald is again paired up with Goofy and, again, they spend most of the film apart from each other. Goofy is participating […]
Viewed August 29, 2006
Donald’s Nephews introduced audiences to Huey, Dewey & Louie, Donald’s nephews who would become a Disney fixture from then on. In this one, they are much more true troublemakers than they would later come to be. They seem to really want to cause trouble for Donald, rather than accidently causing […]
Viewed August 26, 2006
Continuing my viewing of the classic Donald Duck Disney cartoons, we come to Modern Inventions, which is a bit too formulaic for my tastes. First of all, it is just a series of wacky interactions between Donald and several “inventions” that inevitably lead to Donald being abused in some way. […]
Viewed August 25, 2006
Okay, so I finally picked up Volume One of “The Chronological Donald”, the special edition 2-disc set that Disney released featuring Donald Duck’s first 36 cartoons (that don’t feature Mickey Mouse). Now, I’ve not seen most of these, so I’m making my way through them slowly, a few at a time. […]
Viewed August 24, 2006
A Dairy Tale: The Three Little Pigs is a short that is included on the Home on the Range DVD and features the characters from that film. The style is much more simplistic than the original film, not much more detailed than typical Flash cartoons found on the web. It […]
Viewed August 17, 2006
Freeze-In is a training movie shot by Sears to help introduce their salesmen to a new sales campaign for the Coldspot Time Bank, a new freezer that Sears introduced in 1968. Apparently, sales had been dropping off, so Sears decided to try and give them a jump start with this new […]
Viewed August 16, 2006
A Is For Atom is a cute little cartoon that explains the nature of nuclear energy and its uses in a post World War II society.
The explanatory sequences are really well done and make the nature of nuclear fission understandable for all. Perhaps understandably, they aren’t too detailed on the negative […]
Viewed August 10, 2006
War Babies is one of a series of short comedy films made by Educational Pictures in the early 30s. The idea behind the series was to parody popular films with small children (about aged 3 - 5) in the roles instead of adults. They are most notable today for being […]
Viewed August 8, 2006
So, I found another proto-Pixar film, thanks to the guys over at Luxo. This one is called Pencil Test and was done by Apple back in 1988 to show the graphic prowess of the MacIntosh II. John Lasseter (or as we know him here, “The Savior of Animation”) served as […]
Viewed August 5, 2006
Alice’s Wonderland is the first in a series of ‘Alice’ films that Walt Disney made in his early days and that marked his first major success (he would make over fifty during the series’ five year run). What made the ‘Alice’ films so unique for their day was the way that […]
Viewed August 2, 2006
Thru The Mirror is an odd short starring Mickey Mouse that takes some of its inspiration from Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. It can be found on the “Masterpiece” edition DVD of Alice In Wonderland and in many ways is more successful than the main film.*
It starts […]
Viewed July 29, 2006
Pony Express Days tells the tale of the brief lifespan of the Pony Express. George Reeves plays Bill Cody and much of the focus of the short is on his desire to ride for the Express. Things come to a head when secession talk in California leads to a desperate […]
Viewed July 27, 2006
The Tree In A Test Tube is one of only two times that Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy appeared in color (the other being 1930’s The Rogue Song, in which they appeared in support). It was made for the U.S. Forestry Service as a way of showing all the uses for […]
Viewed July 24, 2006
In 1991, Pixar created a couple of short short cartoons for Sesame Street. If you’ve watched the show (and who hasn’t), you know the kind of thing; a simple, straightforward demonstration of a concept or idea. Light & Heavy examines the notion of the difference between light and heavy objects […]
Viewed July 22, 2006
The Balloonatic is a rather trite little entry in Bustern Keaton’s series of shorts. A typical series of sight gags, it lacks the more detailed storyline found in Keaton’s better shorts.
Basically, we follow Buster as he finds himself (after a few initial escapades) trapped on a hot air balloon and then […]
Viewed July 21, 2006
In the 1940s RCM Productions began making a series of very short films for projection in jukebox-like machines. These short films were called “soundies” and were, basically, music videos. They would often have a modest storyline, but the main focus was always on whatever song was being performed throughout the […]
Viewed July 18, 2006
What a strange film to have as my 200th. Oh well, it was my decision to watch fanfilms this week. And anyway, James Bond: Killing In The Name, is certainly not the worst one I’ve seen, even if it does fail to live up to its potential.
The biggest problem for […]
Viewed July 18, 2006
So, like, I was totally going to avoid watching the “Pink Five” series, because what little I had seen of it was, like, so stupid but then, I, like, thought that maybe I’d better watch them because they’re, like, really well known and people would wonder why I hadn’t seen them and […]
Viewed July 15, 2006
West of Hot Dog is Stan Laurel’s parody of the 1922 film West of the Pecos. It follows the travails of a young “tenderfoot” who travels to the West to claim his inheritance from a deceased uncle. Along the way, he runs afoul of a group of bandits determined to […]
Viewed July 11, 2006
I don’t care that it’s comedy. I don’t care that he’s a cartoon walking around in the real world. I don’t even care that the material is basically advertising for American Express. The two short films that make up The Adventures of Seinfeld and Superman portray a viable, legitimate […]
Viewed July 8, 2006
The final film in Fatty Arbuckle’s series of shorts, The Garage also marks the end of his official working relationship with Buster Keaton. There would be occasional cameos over the following years as Arbuckle moved to features and Keaton started his own series of shorts, but this is the last time […]
Viewed July 4, 2006
The 1910 silent short The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is, perhaps, the oldest film version of L. Frank Baum’s famous ‘Oz’ stories. It is almost certainly the oldest one extant, as the other two made that year, The Land of Oz and Dorothy and the Scarecrow in Oz, are lost.
The Wizard […]
Viewed June 24, 2006
Kid Speed is another entry featuring Oliver Hardy from his days languishing as a character actor, bouncing from film to film, usually in the role of the heavy. This one revolves around two racecar drivers, The Speed Kid (Larry Semon) and Dangerous Dan McGraw (Hardy). Not only do they compete […]
Viewed June 17, 2006
In the years following his initial entry into films and prior to his successful teaming with Oliver Hardy, Stan Laurel often lent his talents to films for others, either as a bit player or, as in Yes, Yes, Nanette, a director. Laurel co-directs with Clarence Hennecke and is most likely responsible […]
Viewed June 13, 2006
Bunny is a short film from Blue Sky Animation (Ice Age) about an elderly rabbit and her battle with a moth that treads a line somewhere between whimsy and gravitas. It can be found on the Ice Age 2-disc DVD.
Visually, Bunny works quite well, with the animations of the moth particularly […]
Viewed June 11, 2006
In the ever-increasing field of CGI animated films, only Ice Age (2001) from 20th Century Fox and Blue Sky Studios comes close to achieving the quality of the Disney / Pixar pairing. Gone Nutty is Blue Sky’s original DVD short about the crazy little “sabre-tooth squirrel” Scrat from Ice Age and […]
Viewed June 10, 2006
Lucky Dog, filmed in 1919 but released in 1921, marked the first on-screen pairing of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. It couldn’t be more different that the comedies they would become famous for, but it still is good for a few laughs.
The set-up is dead simple: Laurel is a penniless traveler […]
Viewed June 9, 2006
Ahh, what the heck. If I can’t watch an extra movie now and then, what’s the point? So…One Man Band.
This short, released theatrically alongside Cars, is (as far as I’m concerned) a return to form for Pixar. The last two shorts, Boundin’ and Jack-Jack Attack, I found to be […]
Viewed June 8, 2006
Having exhausted my supply of unwatched Pixar material, I decided to turn to their ex-stablemates, Industrial Light & Magic and watch a short film they made called Work In Progress.
It’s kind of a fantasy realization of the nature of ILM. There are three characters, Lux (a tall, thin scientist who comes […]
Viewed June 6, 2006
Red’s Dream is another early Pixar short, this one concerning the aspirations of an unbought red unicycle.
Frankly, this one lacks the polish that features so prominantly in other Pixar shorts, even the early ones. The clown that is central to the dream sequence is rather odd looking and just doesn’t appeal […]
Viewed June 5, 2006
As I continue my quest to watch all the Pixar work I had not yet seen, I finally watched the proto-Pixar film The Adventures of André and Wally B. It was made by the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Project on a computer that Cray let them borrow in hopes that Lucasfilm would […]
Viewed June 4, 2006
Boundin’ is a lightweight cartoon as Pixar shorts go. Created by veteran animator Bud Luckey, it tells the story of a sheep who is very proud of his wool, only to have it shorn off to his humiliation. A fortuitous encounter with a legendary jackalope helps him come to terms […]
Viewed May 27, 2006
In a bit of a change, I decided to watch a film from a star of the silent era that I am not terribly familiar with. I decided to watch Bromo and Juliet, a vehicle for Hal Roach Studio stalwart Charlie Chase. Chase was a relatively big star at the […]
Viewed May 20, 2006
A couple of years into Buster Keaton’s series of shorts, The Electric House finds Buster in strong form visually and athletically. Something does suffer, though, as the story is particularly weak.
The plot of this one has Buster accidentally given an electrical engineer’s diploma instead of the one he was supposed to […]
Viewed May 13, 2006
Convict 13 is one of Buster Keaton’s earliest solo shorts and it’s a fine one. Knocked unconcious during a golf game, Buster has his clothes taken by an escaped convict and finds himself in jail in the convict’s place. He spends the rest of the film trying to get out again, […]
Viewed May 12, 2006
Un Chien Andalou (The Andalusian Dog) is a surrealistic short film from Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali.
The imagry is often disturbing and, honestly, seldom makes any sense at all. Of course, that’s kind of what one expects from a film by Dali. Sliced eyeballs, ants crawling out of a man’s […]
Viewed May 9, 2006
A Few Moments with Eddie Cantor is an early talkie short that basically features Cantor doing his act for the camera.
The real problem is, he obviously is used to interacting with the audience and this is totally lost when recorded in this way. After most of the jokes, he paused for […]
Viewed May 7, 2006
It’s Everybody’s Business is a nice little short from the Department of Commerce that tries to use cartoons and humor to get across fundamental ideas of the free market.
Everything is represented in cartoon terms. The fundamentals of American society are represented as large rocks: the foundation on which the country is […]
Viewed May 6, 2006
Dogs of War is a wonderful entry in the ‘Our Gang’ series of films, this time from the silent era. The ‘Our Gang’ series existed long before Spanky, Alfalfa and the rest who would become more famous as ‘The Little Rascals’ and this one is from their early peak in the […]
Viewed May 5, 2006
Overs and Outs is basically a sketch film, with mostly scripted comedy and the occasional actual blooper or found footage. I’m guessing that this was intended as a purely internal production for the Calvin Company. Calvin specialized in educational and corporate films and most of these sketches seem to have […]
Viewed May 4, 2006
Remarkably Bold Venture of the Rabbit is a strange, psychadelic, stream-of-consciousness animated short by then film student Tim Drage. The visuals are striking and the film pulls you in, but (as Drage admits) there’s no real story here, unless you graft one onto it from your own imagination.
Drage’s style is a […]
Viewed April 29, 2006
The Hayseed has the strongest plot of any of the Roscoe Arbuckle / Buster Keaton films I’ve seen so far. The relatively complex tale involves one of Arbuckles traditional love triangles, and much of the same formula he had used in the past, but this time with more of a spine […]
Viewed April 5, 2006
Not to be confused with the 1989 Martin Scorcese / Francis Ford Coppola / Woody Allen anthology film of the same name, New York Stories is a short film from Donna Karan clothing company. It is basically a collection of loosely connected storylines apparently designed to show off DKNY clothing.
As these […]
Viewed March 11, 2006
Liberty is one of the last silent shorts that Laurel and Hardy did together (they really didn’t do that many) before moving into talkies. It is different from other Laurel & Hardy shorts because of its use of Harold Lloyd-style “high-flying” stunts. Laurel & Hardy tended towards slapstick, but their […]
Viewed February 19, 2006
The Check Up is a short film starring Joe “Joey Pants” Pantoliano and Kevin Connolly (Entourage) made by Volkswagen to promote their 2006 Jetta.
With advertisement/films like this (which due to their increasing presense I have dubbed “Cinéma-Annoncez”), the important issue is whether they are able to rise above the level of being […]
Viewed February 18, 2006
The Finishing Touch is an early entry in the Laurel & Hardy pairing and sets the stage for many more “working man” comedies to follow.
The premise is a simple one: Stan and Oliver are hired to finish the construction of a house. The pressures of finishing quickly, combined with the need […]
Viewed February 4, 2006
The Bell Boy is another case of a Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle short with too little meat on its bones. But the performances are at least strong and the comedy lively.
The basic sructure of The Bell Boy is the wacky goings-on at a hotel. Caught in the middle of it all […]
Viewed January 28, 2006
Out West is a much stronger entry than the last couple of Arbuckle/Keaton shorts. A parody of westerns (naturally), it successfully tells its short tale without letting the jokes fall by the wayside.
Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle still hasn’t recaptured the positive nature that he displayed in The Butcher Boy, but he’s at […]
Viewed January 21, 2006
Coney Island is a much stronger entry in the Arbuckle / Keaton canon than the previous lightweight, The Rough House, but still lacks the cohesion that marked their first collaboration, The Butcher Boy.
For one thing, Arbuckle comes off as less sympathetic here than in the earlier film. In The Butcher Boy, […]