The Great Oscar Baiter

Yesterday we covered Norm McLaren’s Pas de deux, a beautiful, trippy, ballet-themed short. Well today we’re talking about Bob Rogers’ Ballet Robotique… a beautiful, trippy, ballet-themed short. Boy am I good at scheduling or what? Still, there is one crucial difference between the shorts- this one’s about robots! (As you no doubt gleaned from the title. Look, let's just get into it!) "There aren't really many good images for this film available online, so you'll just have to make do with me, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky instead. You may recognize me from that one segment in Disney's Fantasia  that isn't as iconic as 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' or 'Night on Bald Mountain', but it secretly the best part of the movie." (via Wikipedia) Thanks for filling in, Pyotr. Anyway- Released in 1982, Ballet Robotique is also like Pas de deux in that it's fairly easy to describe. Filmed inside a GM automobile factory, the short shows the car manuf...

Rating movies is an arbitrary and ultimately meaningless task, subject to the whims, biases and personal tastes of the one doing the rating. Nevertheless, I do have some strict rules that I follow. Is Jim Broadbent in your movie? Well, I add half a star. Does something horrible happen to a character’s teeth? Well, I remove half a star. But the most surefire way to get a half star bonus is to make your movie in stop motion animation. Although films like The Great Cognito certainly test that rule to the limit. (via Film Affinity) Regular readers of this blog may remember the name Will Vinton, director of such beloved (?) shorts as Closed Mondays and Creation , as well as the guy responsible for the California Raisins. Unlike those last two shorts, The Great Cognito (released in 1982) isn't quite so high concept. Instead, the film is basically a standup routine set up to animation, with the title character (voiced by John Morrison) showing off his skill as an impersonator doing a ...

We’ve covered a wide variety of shorts lately, but they’ve all had one thing in common- they’ve been fairly easy to talk about. And where’s the fun in that? Whatever happened to the strange, experimental films that I drive myself nuts trying to come up with clever things to say about? Was that sentence even grammatically correct? Probably not! Who cares? It’s experimental! It’s time to talk about Tango! (via TV Tropes) Tango is a 1981 Polish film from director Zbigniew Rybczynski, and it is... interesting. Unlike a lot of shorts we've covered lately, Tango doesn't really have a story. It's more just like eight minutes of vibes, with Rybczynski utilizing a unique form of pixilation (with cut out photos of people being animated against a background) to show a series of people repeating the same task within the same room, at the same time, without ever running into each other. That's honestly the best way I can describe it; as is always the case with shorts like these, T...

Unlike a great deal of shorts we’ve covered so far, there’s a very good chance that most of you have seen The Snowman. Based on the children’s book by Raymond Brigg’s, 1982’s The Snowman is a universally beloved Christmas classic. BUT IS IT ANY GOOD?! (Spoiler alert- Yes it is, I’m not a heartless monster). Let’s take a look! (via IMDb) Recapping the plot of this film seems fairly pointless, both because it's so popular and because the film isn't really plot-driven. The Snowman first aired on British television December 26, 1982. I believe the rule has since been amended that television specials are ineligible for Oscar nominations, but I could be wrong. Either way, it's not hard to see why the short got so popular. (via IMDb) It's beautifully animated, it's cute, and (like all Christmas classics), it's just depressing enough to stick with you as you grow older. The music is fantastic, especially its haunting and iconic original song "Walking on the Air...