Encore Records, a record/CD/movie rental store in Austin,
was having a closing down sale, and one of the things I managed to get my hands
on was an out-of-print DVD known as “The World’s Greatest Animation,” containing
independent animated shorts from 1978-1990 that either won the Academy Award or
were nominated for it. I love independent animated shorts, since they offer a
very fascinating glance at animation outside of such big names like Disney,
Warner Bros., Dreamworks, or anything else that has done animation over the
years, even more so in the 70s and 80s, because at that period, from what I
heard, animation was pretty much at a dead zone.
Most of the major animation studios of the Golden Age were
closed down and Disney was struggling since the death of its founder, TVs were
polluted with stale, lifeless cartoons from the likes of Hanna-Barbera and
Filmation, who were using time-saving tactics to animation that often involved outsourcing
to studios in other countries, (not usually a bad thing if they were able to do
animation well enough, especially nowadays, but the overseas studios probably
deserve at least a little more credit than they’re given,) the idiots
responsible for the Action for Children’s Television (ACT) had forced these TV
cartoons to include moralistic messages, even though cartoons really weren’t
meant primarily for children in the first place, and there wasn’t a real place
for an aspiring, innovative cartoonist/animator to go. Well, Ralph Bakshi did
manage somehow, but even then, animation was still suffering a dark age around
this time. Granted, it did get better by the 80s, with the groundbreaking
notion of computer animation and the late 80s helping to start of an animation
renaissance, but even then, it still had a lot of those stereotypical “Saturday
Morning Cartoons” lingering around on TV at that time that were mainly
considered “Half-Hour Toy Commercials” for the kids. Seriously, the music was awesome
in the 70s and 80s, so why couldn’t the animation be as well? (I have nothing
against these “Half-Hour Toy Commercials,” but a little more effort in the
animation and storytelling would be nice for some of them.)
I don’t know what exactly had lead animation in that period
to that state originally, but whatever happened, there was a lot that had to be
done in order to keep interest in this under-appreciated art form alive. And a
lot of independent animators were trying their dead-level best to do so, and
it’s nice that there’s video compilations dedicated to displaying the work of
such talents like this.
I watched this DVD, and since I’m all for showing that
animation isn’t merely kiddie fodder and that it can truly be considered both
art and entertainment for all ages when done really well, as well as supporting
the cultural diversity of animation from other countries, I felt like stating
my opinions and ratings for each short, since some I feel are better than
others and others I feel were weak in comparison, in spite of winning the
Academy Award. So I’m going to watch through them, some a few more times, and
then I’m going to review them, before giving an overall review stating which
shorts I feel are the best and which ones make the collection worth hunting
down. The format will go like this:
Format:
Title (Year) Oscar Winner/Nominee
Creator
Video (if available)
Review Body
Star Rating out of 5
It’s possible that these reviews might contain spoilers,
depending on whether you consider short animation as having spoilers or not, so
I suggest watching the provided shorts before actually reading the reviews. And
when I recommend them in the review, that means that I suggest these for anyone
to watch as well, even if they don’t read the reviews. It might seem confusing
how I’m going about this, but hopefully, you can judge for yourself if you want
to watch the short first and then read the review or vice-versa. And it will be
divided into parts since these reviews tend to get kinda long. Well, anyways,
on with the show!
Creature Comforts (1990) Oscar Winner
Nick Park
Aardman animator and Wallace & Gromit creator Nick Park
made this short as part of a series called “Lip Synch”, and interviewed British
non-actors in a similarity to the “man on the street” Vox Pop interviews. The
basic concept for this short involved interviewing zoo animals about how they
feel living there. Nick used ordinary people of a housing development, an old
people’s home and a family that lived in a local shop as subjects and asking
them about things from a zoo animal’s perspective, and then the clay animation
was done to accompany the recordings. The effect it creates is rather stunning.
It does get hard to understand what they’re saying at times, probably because
of the accents or the age of the interviewees or the actual recordings
themselves, but I guess that’s part of what gives the dialogue a sense of
authenticity.
Some of the animals interviewed include three polar bears, a
gorilla, terrapins, and a mountain lion that complains about the food looking
“more like dog food than food proper for wild animals,” as well as the “lack of
space” and the “grass with pollen that gives me hay fever every day!” The
mountain lion shows up the most in the film, and if what I heard was correct, he
was voiced by a Brazilian student living in Bristol at the time, which is why
the lion mentions Brazil at one point.
I do love the concept of interviewing zoo animals and
learning what they think of their living quarters and their different
perspectives of their life. If only that kind of thing would be capable in real
life, that would probably lead to a greater understanding between man and
animal. And while it’s not laugh-out-loud funny, there are some really amusing
background events, including a bird that pulls on the beak of another one while
the one being interviewed doesn’t notice. And even the subjects being
interviewed look sort of humorous, noticeably this bush baby, whose giant-looking
eyes are actually magnified by the glasses he’s wearing and his actual eyes are
pretty small.
I heard that a “Creature Comforts” series was made recently
built around this premise, but I haven’t seen it yet, so I wouldn’t know if
it’s good or not. The original short is definitely really good, though. It
takes a couple of watches to fully appreciate it or understand it, heck, I’ve
watched it quite a few times and I feel like I haven’t quite understood all of
the dialogue yet, but I still like it enough that I recommend it to fans of
clay animation, Aardman, or Wallace & Gromit. It’s just a really clever,
inventive short.
RATING: ****/***** (4/5)
Balance (1989) Oscar Winner
Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein
Wow, was this one just… weird. It’s a good kind of weird, however, especially given the way this short was made. It excels in its simplicity, using one setting, five silent characters and one object to express a surprisingly heavy theme involving human behavior.
The setting is a very unique one. Five skeletal-looking characters
wearing long coats are standing on this unstable platform that tilts with every
move they make, so they try to prevent themselves from falling into the abyss
by relocating themselves and keeping balance every time one of them moves. They
all go to the edge, pull out fishing rods, and cast them off into the abyss.
One of them pulls up a strange box, which is revealed to play music when a key
is turned. Eventually, this causes conflict that leads to all but one of them
getting knocked over the edge and the last remaining character standing at the
opposite side of the box, unable to go over to the opposite side without the
risk of sending him and the box over the edge.
It is definitely a dark short, but what I really like about
this one is the feel it has. The atmosphere of the whole thing is heavy and
rather haunting. There’s no music aside from the box, just ambient creaking
sounds in the background and it just adds to the overall eeriness. The story is
basic, but it conveys a lot of different themes related to human nature, like
curiosity, jealousy, selfishness, isolation, and so forth, and the setting and
the title fit, since it basically depicts these characters trying to keep the
platform from tilting too far over, and when this object comes in that arouses
their interest, it just throws things out of whack. The ending especially gets
pretty dark, what with one of them actually knocking the others off just so he
can keep the object to himself, but as a consequence of his actions, finds that
he can’t use it once he’s the only one left since they’re at opposite sides and
another move would cause both of them to fall.
These characters themselves are completely identical. They
have no real individuality, no voices, no personalities, and their faces are
completely devoid of emotion. All of their thoughts and feelings are expressed
through their actions, and they’re delivered in an effective manner, often leaving
the viewer uncertain as to what their next move is. The stop motion animation
itself is pretty nice as well, since, as mentioned, the characters express
through their actions rather than their faces, and the actual tilting effect of
the platform is well conveyed.
Dark? Yes. Creepy? Yes. Interesting and worthy of
recommendation? Heck yes! I don’t guarantee that you’ll like it, but I’m sure
you’ll find it interesting nonetheless.
RATING: *****/***** (5/5)
Technological Threat (1988) Oscar Nominee
Bill Kroyer
I really love this short, not only because it’s an
entertaining cartoon that really takes advantage of the medium and some of the
things it’s capable of, but also because it was made as an allegory/commentary on
how computer animation served as a threat to traditional animators at a time
that predated the big CGI boom in the 2000s. And who better to direct it than
Bill Kroyer, who worked on the computer graphics for the original Tron? He and
his wife Sue started Kroyer Films in 1986, a studio that would combine
traditional animation with computer graphics, and this Tex Avery-esque short
demonstrates that brilliantly.
The story involves these cartoon dogs/wolves working at an
office, with all but one getting replaced by robots every time one of them
falters, and it gets to the point where even the boss that is replacing them is
replaced by a robot off-screen. The remaining wolf is nervously trying to avoid
lagging behind in his work, but once the boss leaves, he takes out the robots
in various cartoon fashions, one by one, until he has difficulty with the last
robot. The ruckus the two create winds up causing the boss to bust in and nearly
push the button, only for the wolf and robot to push the trapdoor underneath the
boss, causing the robo-boss to fall through once he presses the button. The
wolf and robot look down the hole before the wolf takes the opportunity and
knocks the robot down the hole as well.
Personally, I think more hand-drawn TV animation in the 80s
should have been like what is shown in this short: stylized, energetic, fast
paced, creative and fun to watch. Tex Avery is one of my favorite animators,
Golden Age or otherwise, so it’s easy to see how this is sort of a homage to
his work, through the gags, the animation, the design and the tone.
The robots and all the backgrounds in the film were encoded,
animated, and rendered as drawings on a computer known as the Silicon Graphics
IRIS 3120 workstation, according to the end credits, and as dated as the CGI
may be, it combines with the traditional animation brilliantly when
incorporating hand drawn design onto the computer graphic framework, and the
cartoon characters and objects that were done in the traditional 2D style fit
equally well with the three dimensional objects in the background. Heck, it’s
hard to tell that the backgrounds are in computer graphics!
The synthesizer music is totally 80s, and I still love it
because of that. It helps add to the “computerized” feel of the cartoon, and I
find it interesting to set quirky 80s synths, heck, 80s music in general, to
wild, cartoony Golden-Age influenced animation. If I were allowed to animate
music videos for 80s pop/rock, I’d definitely choose some wild Golden Age
Animation influences for the style.
Overall, this is a really funny cartoon with a great point
that isn’t shoved in your face, although it’s surprising to think this same guy
would go on to direct the animated film with an obvious environmental message,
Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest. Needless to say, however, I feel this short
should be re-released, even if animation technology has really advanced since
then, and I feel it should be recognized as the thought-provoking insight to the
modern computerized industry, animation or otherwise, that it is.
RATING: *****/***** (5/5)
The Cat Came Back (1988) Oscar Nominee
Cordell Barker
The National Film Board Of Canada is very prominent when it
comes to independently animated short films, as several of them are on this
DVD. The first one of those on the video, as well as the first one I had seen of
their shorts, is “The Cat Came Back,” ranked #32 on animation historian Jerry
Beck’s list of the 50 Greatest Cartoons (I currently own a copy of the book,)
and for good reason, as it is a hilarious cartoon that demonstrates how wild
things can get when you employ the right amount of creativity. And needless to
say, I freakin’ love this one. It’s one of my personal favorites.
Directed by Cordell Barker and produced with fellow
award-winning Winnipeg animator Richard Condie (who will show up later on in the
list,) and based on the song of the same name, it involves the character of Old
Mr. Johnson trying to get rid of an obnoxiously destructive little cat, with
each attempt leaving him as the one to suffer for it, as he gets increasingly
desperate to remove it from the premises to the point of descending into
insanity and the cat keeps on returning to destroy more of the house. The
highlight for me is probably the railroad scene where he winds up grabbing the
cat and taking off on a rail car, probably to abandon it somewhere or at least
find a good place to tie it to the tracks, since he keeps running over various
women tied to the tracks while operating the thing along the way. But when a
cow tied to the tracks suddenly interrupts him, his reaction is priceless:
“WHAT THE FFFFF…?!!?”
The ending is morbid animation hilarity and irony at some of
its finest. After one last ditch attempt to get rid of the cat winds up killing
Old Mr. Johnson and sending him into the air, his ghost returns to torment and
taunt the demonic feline, but then his lifeless body falls back down to the
earth and crushes the cat, creating nine little cat ghosts that chase after Mr.
Johnson’s ghost as he flies off into the distance. It’s pretty obvious that
this cat is a curse for Old Mr. Johnson, and that scene just clenches it.
Everything about this short works incredibly, the animation,
the music, the color styling, the timing, the energy, the pacing, the humor,
and even the actual style of animation itself adds to the deranged feel of the
cartoon. It’s just really fun to watch. This is one that I feel deserves
multiple re-watches since it’s so fast paced and zany that sometimes you might
not always catch everything at once. That, or because it’s so freakin’
enjoyable that it’s hard not to resist its insanity. It’s totally hysterical,
totally outlandish, and totally worth watching. Like the cat in the short, it’s
possible that you’ll keep coming back to it.
RATING: *****/***** (5/5)
Coming next, a shape-shifting face, a strange Greek tragedy, two sisters' lives, and a scrabble-playing couple.
nice blog with some nice picsanimated intro
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