The Great Oscar Baiter

If there’s one thing I know absolutely nothing about, it’s Canadian folk music. And I’m willing to bet you don’t know much about it either. But today we’re going to learn a little more, as Wade Hemsworth’s popular 1949 song “The Black Fly Song” served as the basis for the less popular 1991 short Blackfly. And I hope you found that fun fact interesting, because that’s about as interesting as it gets with this film. (via TV Tropes) Both the short film and the song it's based on tell the story of a surveyor sent to North Ontario, only to be beset upon by a band of ravenous flies. (In case you couldn't guess from the premise, this is another short produced by the National Film Board of Canada.) Throughout the short we watch the surveyor resort to drastic and desperate measures to avoid them while also watching the flies doing random things one doesn't expect flies to do. (Flies doing a chorus line? Why I never!) All of this is set to a recording of the song (sort of like anoth...

Well, another holiday season has come and gone and it’s time to get ready for the new year. And I thought, as a post-Christmas gift to both myself and you, we would hunker down through the rest of 2021 by looking at seven days at some pretty darn good shorts. And our journey begins with Daniel Greaves’ Oscar-wining short Manipulation. (via IMDb) Unlike some of the recent shorts we've looked at, there's not a whole lot of information out there about Manipulation. Honestly, we're lucky it has a Wikipedia page at all! Released in 1991, Manipulation is a fun little meta film about a cartoon character rebelling against its animator. So basically Duck Amuck without Daffy. And while anything without Daffy Duck is always going to be inferior to anything with him, Manipulation is not much of a step down from that short. Yes, it may lack Chuck Jones's madcap energy and Daffy's classic Daffiness, but it makes up for it in its own way. On a purely technical level, Manipulat...