Category: Animated Short

Porky in Wackyland (1938)

Porky in Wackyland (1938). 7 minutes. Directed by Bob Clampett. Starring Mel Blanc (as Porky Pig and the Dodo). Animated by Norman McCabe, I. Ellis, Vive Risto, John Carey, and Robert Cannon. Layouts by Bob Clampett. Backgrounds by Elmer Plummer. Music by Carl W. Stalling. Produced by Leon Schlesinger.

Porky in Wackyland is one of only a handful of Warner Bros. cartoons that the U.S. Library of Congress has designated as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. Its title may make it seem like a bit of a stale joke that is trying too hard; the word “wacky” always sounds like a marketing department’s corny way of exaggerating a movie’s quirky inscrutability in order to sell it as a wild ride that is in reality not so wild. Porky in Wackyland is legitimately zany, yet because it draws on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) among other cultural touchpoints, the cartoon … Read the rest

Three Little Pigs (1933)

Three Little Pigs (1933). 8 minutes. Produced by Walt Disney. Directed by Burt Gillett. Featuring the voices of Dorothy Compton (as the piper pig), Mary Moder (as the fiddler pig), Pinto Colvig (as the bricklayer pig), and Billy Bletcher (as the big bad wolf). Animated by Fred Moore, Jack King, Dick Lundy, Norm Ferguson, and Art Babbitt.

Walt Disney’s Academy Award-winning cartoon short Three Little Pigs was a massive success when it was released in the early 1930s; it earned a tidy sum of money for Disney and was screened continuously for several months. But Three Little Pigs is also an artistic achievement. Drawing on innovations in sound and color technology that the Disney studio had established earlier in Steamboat Willie (1928) and Flowers and Trees (1932), the 1933 cartoon demonstrates further techniques of individuation that would influence Disney’s first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). But perhaps equally important is the way that … Read the rest

The Skeleton Dance (1929)

The Skeleton Dance (1929). 6 minutes. Produced and directed by Walt Disney. Animated by Ub Iwerks, Les Clark, and Wilfred Jackson. Music by Carl W. Stalling.

By 1929, Walt Disney had produced and directed the Mickey Mouse shorts Plane Crazy (1928), Steamboat Willie (1928), The Gallopin’ Gaucho (1929), and The Barn Dance (1929)—all of which chronicled the adventures of the small rodent. While these early exercises may loom especially large in the Disney legend, we should not forget that Disney concurrently launched the Silly Symphonies series as an alternative to the cartoons that were in development with the Mickey Mouse character. Frequently embracing classical music in continuous or near-continuous musical soundtracks, this new line of cartoons consisted mostly of non-recurring characters and scenarios, and represents some of the best, most creative work that Disney’s team produced.

The 75 Silly Symphonies shorts released between 1929 and 1939 included the perky and upbeat Flowers and Trees (1932) and Three Little Pigs… Read the rest

Winsor McCay: The Master Edition (2004)

Winsor McCay: The Master Edition (2004). 105 minutes. Featuring cartoons written, directed, and animated by Winsor McCay: Little Nemo (1911), How a Mosquito Operates (1912), Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), Bug Vaudeville (1921), The Pet (1921), The Flying House (1921), The Centaurs (fragment, 1921), Gertie on Tour (fragment, 1921), and Flip’s Circus (fragment, 1921).

Winsor McCay: The Master Edition is a complete collection of the animated shorts of Winsor McCay, whose groundbreaking work influenced Walt Disney and other early pioneers of the medium. McCay’s output was small compared to Disney’s, in part because McCay animated in an earlier period with more cumbersome technology, continued to work as a full-time newspaper cartoonist while he labored on his animated shorts, and mostly worked alone without a studio system. Although McCay’s films are adventurous, some of them, such as Little Nemo (1911) and Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), will look crude to a modern-day audience with their simple lines, … Read the rest

Betty Boop: The Cab Calloway Cartoons (1932-1933)

From 1932 to 1933, jazz musician, songwriter, and bandleader Cab Calloway was featured in three pre-Code Betty Boop cartoons as a singer and dancer: Minnie the Moocher (1932), Snow-White (1933), and The Old Man of the Mountain (1933). While Calloway was not the only jazz musician to be featured in Fleischer Studios’ Betty Boop cartoons (Louis Armstrong notably appeared in I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You [1932]), his contributions to both the jazz and the animation worlds through his work with the Fleischers was impressive, especially because of the cartoons’ groundbreaking use of rotoscope technology to graph Calloway’s signature dance movements onto the bodies of his cartoon avatars. Of the three cartoons, Snow-White in particular reaches dizzying heights of complexity and coolness, but all three short films are important artifacts of jazz history and are particularly notable for their contributions to the shaping and styling of jazz celebrity in the popular imagination.

Minnie the Moocher (1932). 8

… Read the rest

Steamboat Willie (1928)

Steamboat Willie (1928). 8 minutes. Directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. Voices by Walt Disney. Music by Wilfred Jackson and Bert Lewis.

Steamboat Willie is a black-and-white animated Disney short that was the first cartoon of any kind to use completely synchronized sound. It draws thematically from both the 1911 song “Steamboat Bill” and the 1928 silent Buster Keaton comedy Steamboat Bill, Jr., but it was also inspired by the technological revolution launched by The Jazz Singer (1927), the first feature-length movie to use partially synchronized sound. Steamboat Willie is notable today for its historical achievement and for being the first widely successful cartoon to feature Mickey Mouse, but in addition to these accomplishments, it remains extremely silly and a good example of how charming early animation could be.

The story follows the iconic rodent protagonist as he works on a riverboat. A large cat (Pete) orders Mickey around and banishes him from the ship’s bridge. Mickey … Read the rest

Flowers and Trees (1932)

Flowers and Trees (1932). 8 minutes. Directed by Burt Gillett. Produced by Walt Disney.

Flowers and Trees broke new ground in 1932 as the first animated short to use three-strip Technicolor. Its producer Walt Disney had exclusive rights to the three-strip process until 1935, which meant that during this period, other animators had to use the two-strip process with its more limited color palette or else continue to rely on black-and-white techniques. The use of cutting-edge Technicolor in Flowers and Trees, while perhaps not as revolutionary as the use of sound in Disney’s Steamboat Willie (1928), was nevertheless a considerable achievement and was undoubtedly one of the reasons that Flowers and Trees won the first Academy Award for Animated Short Subjects, the first color production of any kind to win an Academy Award.

The plot is fairly straightforward. Flowers and Trees follows the antics of two leafy green trees, one male and one female. A dried-out stump tries … Read the rest