The Great Oscar Baiter

Disney has long had a reputation as a family friendly company, a reputation which they’ve fought tooth and nail to defend. And yet there’s always been darkness and adult content hidden in their films, and sometimes not hidden very well. Case in point- their 1954 short Pigs Is Pigs, a film that’s all about fucking. I know that may be hard to believe, but it’s perfectly true!  (via Wikipedia) Based on a short story by Ellis Parker Butler and directed by Jack Kinney, Pigs Is Pigs tells the story of Flannery, the by-the-book manager of a railway station. When a shipment of guinea pigs arrives, Flannery insists that its owner pay the 48 cent fee for livestock (pigs being pigs after all); the owner refuses, and a stalemate ensues. Already this short earns a lot of goodwill from me by being a satire of bureaucracy, which I admit that I'm biased towards enjoying. (Why no, I haven't resolved my issues with the unemployment office yet, how could you tell?) But the short goes from bein...

The tragic story behind Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie is the stuff of Hollywood legend. Micromanaged to death by the studio, only for them to turn around and leave them out to dry in favor of Barb Wire, it’s no wonder that the cinematic adventures of Mike and the Bots were completely ignored by the Academy. I’m sure that in any other case, the Oscars would have gone nuts for a movie about a snarky Midwestern comedian making fun of an old movie with the help of two robots. It’s classic Oscar Bait! Don’t believe me? Then explain why they awarded Best Animated Short to the proto- MST3K, 1963’s The Critic. (via Wikipedia) The Critic is, strictly speaking, an Ernest Pintoff film. He directed the short, he produced the short, he oversaw the animation done by Bob Heath, and he won the Oscar for it. But at its heart, The Critic is a Mel Brooks film. The film was his idea, and after the animation was completed, he improvised the dialogue which makes the short what it is. And what...

Well gang, in spite of all the odds, our Year in Shorts has reached its two hundredth entry. We’ve certainly come a long way in that time and looked at a wide variety of films. And I think there’s no better way to celebrate this achievement than by taking a look at one of my favorite shorts, Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby’s 2011 short, Wild Life. (via Wikipedia) Yet another short coming to us from the National Film Board of Canada, Wild Life is, I believe, the first Western we've covered here in our Year in Shorts. I am, admittedly, rather picky when it comes to Westerns, and typically like it when they're a little more unconventional. Sure, I like High Noon or The Good, The Bad and the Ugly as much as the next person, but I really love films like 7 Faces of Dr. Lao or Rango too. And while Wild Life isn't QUITE that weird, it's still a very different kind of Western, following a posh Englishman who journeys to Alberta in the early twentieth century. As you can imag...

Judging by the Gene Deitch shorts we’ve looked at (some of them incredibly recently!), you might be forgiven for wondering just how his short tenure with Tom and Jerry turned out so poorly. Was it just a fluke? Or maybe his shorts were all brilliant, and I’ve just been lying to you? Well fear not, loyal reader! While Gene Deitch is indeed responsible for some truly great films, he w as perfectly capable of producing mediocre or subpar crap as well. Case in point- the 1958 short, Sidney’s Family Tree. (via TV Tropes) Unlike the other Gene Deitch films we've looked at, Sidney's Family Tree (which, it should be noted, was actually directed by Art Batch and supervised by Gene Deitch) is a short for kids. This is probably due in part to the fact that the short is a Terrytoon, not a Rembrandt production. It tells the story of Sidney, a lonely forty-four year old elephant looking for a mother. He finds a home with a family of monkeys who agree to adopt him. It might not be the most ...

A while back we discussed Tin Toy, the Oscar-winning Pixar short that was as revolutionary as it was completely terrifying. (Don’t worry, I won’t be forcing you to look at that baby GIF again.) The success of Tin Toy heralded the rapidly approaching era of Pixar domination, and, by extension, computer animation as a whole. But one short dealt with that idea a bit more directly, and it’s the subject of today’s post- 1988’s Technological Threat. (via TV Tropes) Directed by Bill Kroyer, Technological Threat tells the story of a wolf working in an office whose entire staff is slowly replaced by robots. Desperate to keep his job, one lone wolf starts using cartoon hijinks to fight back. It is a very simple, old school kind of formula, and that's absolutely by design. You see, Technological Threat was made in the early days of computer animation; the robots and backgrounds are all CGI, overseen by the film's technical director and cowriter, Bill Jennings. But the animals working ...

While I enjoy the Pete Smith Specialties, they are very much products of their time in ways that can not be ignored. Sometimes the aspects which make them uncomfortable are beyond the filmmaker’s control; other times , they are not. Today’s short, Menu, belongs in the latter camp. While it was no doubt intended to be seen as a bit of goofy fun, it definitely carries some attitudes which would have been best left in 1933. (via Daazo) Menu tells the story of John Xavier Omsk (Franklin Pangborn), a man suffering from an upset stomach, the clear result of bad cooking. Luckily for Omsk, Pete Smith has the solution- no, not learning to cook for him damn self, but berating Mrs. Omsk (Tony Award winner Una Merkel) for her poor cooking skills. She's so hopeless, in fact, that Pete Smith has to bring in outside help in the form of Master Chef Bizetti (Luis Alberni) to teach Mrs. Omsk how to cook while she stands around and generally acts too dumb to live. Yes, it's one of those film...

In these increasingly turbulent times, it can often feel like our society is more divided than ever. So I suppose there can be some level of comfort taken from the fact that politics have always been fairly crazy and controversial. And, by extension, maybe we can take some level of comfort in knowing that there have also, apparently, always been spineless, candy-assed appeals to the vague, non-threatening ideal of centrism which are just blandly inoffensive enough to win a couple of Oscars. Case in point- today’s short, Is It Always Right to Be Right? (via TV Tropes) Released in 1970 and based on an essay by Dr. Warren H. Schmidt, Lee Mishkin's Is It Always Right to Be Right? is a parable about contemporary politics and the need for compromise. Through a mixture of cheap, ugly animation and pointlessly filtered stock footage and narrated by Orson Welles (who should have been far more embarrassed by this film than he was by Transformers: The Movie ), the film tackles, among other i...