The Great Oscar Baiter

Regular readers of this blog will remember that I have long contested that (with one major exception), the nominees for Best Animated Short at the 72nd Academy Awards is one of the best years in the history of the category. Regular readers will ALSO recall my fondness for the work of Russian animator Aleksandr Petrov, even if I do find some of his films a tad frustrating at times. Well today those throughlines intersect, as we look at Aleksandr Petrov’s The Old Man and the Sea, the animated short which managed to stand above its venerated competition and secure itself a well-deserved Oscar as the best animated short of 1999. Let’s dive in, shall we? (via Wikipedia) The Old Man and the Sea is, rather obviously, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway, which I have not read but have been assured by mother is quite good. As far as I can tell, it follows the events of the story pretty closely, give or take a few artistic diversions here and there. Still, this is a Petrov film; the plot is...

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it again- reference humor is a tricky business. Most of the time, it's a short term gain but a long term loss. Occasionally you’ll get lucky and wind up with something amusing in its own right, but let’s be real- most of the time these films just suck. But what if the reference you build your film around is truly timeless, a legendary actor from classic Hollywood? Well luckily the 1994 short film The Big Story is here to answer that question for us. Turns out it would still suck! (via Film Affinity) At a whopping two minutes long, David Stoten and Tim Watts' The Big Story is another short which will take longer to read about than it will to watch. Although even then, that might be pushing it, because there's really not a lot to say about it. The thing is just one extended reference, with three stop motion versions of Kirk Douglas (representing three different phases of his career) arguing in a newspaper office about the titular big story. I...

Regular readers of this blog know by now that I have a few animated archnemeses. Whether it’s unfunny sex pest Pepe Le Pew, the eternally forgettable Andy Panda or that yellow bastard Tweety, I have no shortage of cartoon characters I’ll take any and all opportunities to mercilessly dunk on. But there are few figures in the medium I find so uniquely unsettling as Mickey’s dog Pluto. That's something of a problem with today's short, The Pointer, which features Pluto pretty heavily. But luckily for us, there's quite a bit more to discuss today than the antics of Mickey Mouse's canine companion. So let's get into it! (via Wikipedia) In many ways, The Pointer seems to be a typical cartoon from the era. Mickey and Pluto are going into the woods to hunt and wind up running into a rather angry bear. Sort of like a Bugs and Elmer short with Elmer as the lead. (Granted, this short was released in 1939, and the best Bugs/Elmer shorts were released in the 50s, so I guess thi...

Space Jam: A New Legacy came out just a few days ago, and by all accounts it’s just the worst. I don’t particularly care to see it (the first Space Jam was terrible enough), and unless it somehow manages to score an Oscar nomination, I never will. Unless it gets a bunch of Razzie nominations and I decide to start The Golden Razz Baiter or something like that, anyway. While we all love the Looney Tunes, sometimes it feels like they don’t particularly love us back. But even in these dark times, there is hope. After all, compared to some of their worst offerings, even mid-level stuff like The Pied Piper of Guadalupe looks downright amazing! (via TV Tropes) I don’t think it’s really a controversial opinion to say that the 1960s were not exactly the Golden Age for the Looney Tunes characters. But it wasn’t really a Golden Age for mainstream animation in general. This was the decade when Tom and Jerry were placed in the care of Gene Deitch and Chuck Jones, Hanna-Barbera was focused more...

The movies are back , folks, and I, for one, couldn’t be happier. There are few things I love in this world more than sitting in a darkened theater to take in a motion picture. But there are few things I hate more than all the rude, entitled jackasses who seem to live to ruin that for other people. Whether it’s teenagers who use their phones, assholes who kick the backs of seats, or those two drunk old ladies who walked into the theater just as Portrait of a Lady on Fire was starting, loudly commenting on how quiet it was (gee, I wonder why???), then inexplicably decided they had to sit in the same row as my mother and me despite the empty rows in front of and behind us, forcing us to stand up, blocking other people’s views during the process, movie pests are a real and persistent issue, and have been for quite some time. Luckily for us, a short film was released in 1944 to teach us how to deal with those menaces to cinema. And luckily for me, Movie Pests just so happens to be a Pe...

There’s an old adage in cinema which states that it’s not what a movie’s about but how it’s about it, and I think that’s certainly true. While I may joke occasionally about how movies about math are terrible, that’s obviously not always going to be the case. It’s just usually the case. The point is that a film can be interesting regardless of subject matter, and that holds especially true for documentaries. Look no further than today’s short for proof of that. A film entitled The Grain That Built a Hemisphere might not seem like the most interesting watch. And yet, thanks to some excellent execution, it manages to be a fun time all the same! I guess that's just part of the Disney Magic! (via Wikipedia) Directed by Bill Justice and Bill Roberts, The Grain That Built a Hemisphere is an animated documentary, which we don't really get a lot of these days. (Check out Waltz with Bashir if you haven't seen it yet!) Released in 1943, it is technically a piece of World War II p...

Pixar is famous for assigning rich emotional lives to things typically not known for having them. Toys. Fish. A lamp. Emotions themselves. Old people. It’s sort of their thing. And today’s short might be one of the more bizarre instances of this. So let’s look at Dave Mullins' 2017 short Lou, in which Pixar asks a very important question- What if a lost and found box had feelings? The answer may surprise you! (via Wikipedia) We've covered a few Pixar shorts which were better than the feature films they accompanied. But I have no idea if that's the case with Lou, as I haven't seen Cars 3, which it played before. I have not, in fact, seen either of the Cars sequels, nor do I feel any need to. Neither of them received an Oscar nomination, and as such seeing them does nothing to further this blog's futile quest. I very rarely feel any great regrets about this, although occasionally I do feel left out when people share their Pixar rankings. Which reminds me, I ...