Fleischer Brothers : USA: 1936

This was the first of three 16-minute-long colour specials, three times as long as the normal Popeye cartoons, made by Max and Dave Fleischer at the height of Popeye’s popularity. The draw these specials had at the box office was such that they were often billed higher than the main feature. This was an era when Popeye was voted by the public as the most popular cartoon character, ahead of Disney’s massively popular Mickey and Donald and ahead of the Warner Brothers Porky Pig.

 The entertaining story features Sinbad declaring that he is the world’s greatest sailor, before Popeye shows up, leading to the hard-bitten New Yorker having to undertake a series of challenges and battles to prove his worth, ending with a battle with Sinbad himself. Lots of scenes include the Fleischer’s ‘tabletop’ technique, in which the character drawings were photographed in front of three dimensional model sets on a revolving tabletop, which produced the fantastic looking illusion of three dimensional scrolling backgrounds.

 The film hinted that the Fleischer’s building up for a feature film, and perhaps shows how colourful and popular that film could have been if they had done something in this raucous Popeye / Betty Boop style with its more grown up appeal. The popularity of Fleischer shorts like this also gave Disney, in the years leading up to ‘Snow White’, a big impetus to produce something special and different, to top the Fleischers growing success and restablish his studio as the ground breaking market leader. After the monumental success of Disney’s ‘Snow White (1937) the Fleischer Brothers seem to have decided (or were pressured by their financiers Paramount) into going down a more traditional fairy tale kind of route.

 The Fleischer features rather paled beside Disney’s bold emotional masterpieces of the era. Instead of producing something wild and exciting like Popeye, Betty Boop or even their later Superman shorts for their own feature, the joyful freedom of their animation wasn’t much apparent in the lacklustre ‘Gullivers Travels’(1939). Opting for rotoscoped realism rather than the tabletop system, the Fleischers were no doubt influenced by Disney’s more subtle use of the technique in Snow White, although Max Fleischer actually invented this system back in the early part of the century. The follow up ‘Mr Bug Goes to Town (1942) showed some improvement, but soon after this the studio collapsed due to financial mismanagement, in fighting between the brothers and interference from Paramount.

 Popeye meets Sinbad is a little gem right from the very first scene and shows what great work the studio could achieve and how with better management they could have maybe rivalled Disney in the long run. The brutish, Bluto-like Sinbad stomps through the lovely 3D island, bellowing out a swaggering song to his menagerie of monsters: “Who's the most remarkable extraordinary kind of fellow..?” The animation is smooth, flowing, and funny and the film remains a treat through to Popeye’s climactic battles at the end.

So anyway, having reached the quarter way mark of these 100 greatest animated shorts, I have about fifty others clear on my list and, assuming anyone is actually reading any of this, I’m still open to suggestions for other entries. Please don’t suggest anything to do with Star Wars, The Smurfs or horrible pointless CGI remakes of earlier cartoons.

Robert Breer, 1957, USA

Robert Breer, who sadly passed away last month, is included here as his work seems to me to be the most spontaneous animation ever created. Spontaneity is not something normally associated with animation. In fact animation is probably the least spontaneous art form imaginable. In most animation, by necessity, every frame is carefully crafted and predicted to work in relation to the surrounding frames in the scene, as each scene is crafted to work in the context of the film. It has to be meticulously planned as its so labour intensive and therefore expensive. Animators as a breed are not accustomed to spontaneity , creating ideas on the fly, having conversations with other live humans, that kind of stuff ( I’m allowed to say that as Im an animator myself). Breer on the other hand liked to make unpredictable films, with his ‘What the hell will this look like’ methods (as he put it).

 More a visual artist more than an animator, in fact due to his highly unorthodox approach Breer has been described as an ‘anti-animator’. He started making the kind of free form animation seen here in the mid fifties by the means of fast sketchy drawings on filing cards. Much influenced by the avant garde; beat poetry, jazz, abstraction, ‘happenings’ and the new performance art, Breer incorporated these things into his films, his wide range of work also included mechanical devices, often used for showing his films in galleries. This was the era of the ‘beat generation’ and its experimentation with free form expressionist ‘stream of consciousness’ prose, poetry and painting, referred to as ‘underground’ due to its usual home in dark smoky cellars, hidden underneath the street level of mainstream life. Breer’s early work

 The idea behind this general philosophy of spontaneity was to tap into the subconscious, break free of the individuals ego and self conscious pretence and reveal an inner truth. Although you could say it often created different forms of pretence and ego, a lot of the work from this era’s artists was interesting, important and influential and set off chain reactions that are still felt today. The work of certain animators at the time seemed to relate to this style and these artists were recognised by and loosely linked with this ‘beat generation’, Harry Smith would be one example and Robert Breer another, attracting the attention of high profile ‘beatnik’ figureheads of the time such as writer Alan Ginsburg. Both of these film makers were of course quick to disassociate themselves with a phase in culture that would quickly become clichéd and unfashionable.

 Breer, like Harry Smith, had a career as a film maker spanning over fifty years, in which he moved through many new styles and influences and transcended the connection with the ‘beat generation’ to become recognised as a great of avant-garde animation. Breer started out as an engineer like his father but soon realised his interest was in art. His first serious work as an artist came, strangely, during a spell in the army, creating educational posters. He then used an Army bursary to travel to Paris where he took up painting and had several exhibitions. Inspired by the work of Man Ray and early abstract animators Oscar Fishinger, Fernand Leger and Walter Ruttman, Breer became frustrated with the static nature of painting and decided to experiment with movement.

 "A Man and His Dog Out for Air" consists of quick sketches, mainly figurative line drawings of simple things encountered on a walk, clouds , birds, houses, until we see the subjects who are seeing all this, a man and dog. The film, similar to the spontaneity of the French ‘New Wave’ movement in live action films from around this time, is full of 'joie de vivre' and the pleasure of being alive in the moment.

Georges Schwizgebel, Canada/Switzerland, 2004

Like many great animated shorts this was produced by the National Film Board of Canada, with Swiss director Shwizgebel, responsible for several other award winning short films. The colours, design and execution are excellent in this acrylic painted film and although the cleverly stylised and fluid transitions between shots are sometimes disorientating, they never totally distract from the story. Based on Adelbert von Chamisso’s moral tale of a man who sells his shadow, representing his soul, to the devil and finds he is only a shadow of a man without it. Although leading a privileged and gold plated lifestyle, he is miserable through being disliked by the people all around him and he decides to get his shadow back.

Ralph Eggleston, USA, 2000

It would be impossible to make such a list as this without a Pixar short and you could probably argue the case for most of them to be in here. The problem is they aren’t readily available to watch free online, and this high quality link I found may be removed sometime soon. Personally I cant see the point in keeping them offline, as they are great publicity for the company, and they aren’t going to make any money out of them. Just an issue of corporate principle I guess.

Going right back to the ‘Adventures of Andre and Wally B’ and ‘Luxo Jr’, Pixar’s policy of producing regular short films serves not only to create accompaniments to the main features (in this case Monsters Inc) but also, as with Lassiter’s role model Walt Disney, to test new technologies (in this case feathers?), techniques and approaches before applying them to the bigger projects. These are the kind of things that may be difficult to quantify on a balance sheet, as a short film will never make a profit, but it is one of the ways Pixar stay ahead of the game. It also helps maintain the image of Pixar as the kind of company that gives new directors a chance to prove themselves and some freedom to run with whatever funny, spontaneous and inspired ideas that may crop up. And ‘For the Birds’ is very funny. A tight social group of little round birds unkindly resent the arrival of a solitary big gawky bird and we see how their unkindness towards a ‘different’ outsider backfires.  Director Eggleston features previously on this list as key animator on ‘Family Dog’. Since those days he has risen to position of art director on many of Pixar’s great features.

Other great Pixar shorts include ‘Geris Game’, ‘Mike’s New Car’, ‘Boundin’ and ‘Night and Day’. Now the Pixar engine is misfiring with ‘Cars 2’ and Dreamworks are roaring into top gear with ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ and ‘Kung Fu Panda’, it might be a good time to push the shorts online as a reminder of Pixar's unique brilliance.

Kunio Kato, Japan, 2008

It sounds French, it looks like a European hand drawn short from the 1970’s, but its a Japanese film from 2008. It’s great though, and it won the Oscar for best animated short. With its hand painted illustration style and loose chunky character design, it tells a clever and affecting story with an ecological theme. An old man lives in a city that has been almost completely submerged in water, having to build further ‘cube’ extensions onto the roof of his home to stay above the rising tide. When one day he drops his pipe into a hole in the floor he swims down through the sections of the underwater tower he has constructed, each layer reminding him of a different phase of his life. The director was previously responsible for ‘The Diary of Tortov Ruddle’ (2003) a series of surreal adventures featuring a man riding a pig like creature through a Dali-esque landscape, which seems to have attracted a small cult following online.

Cosmic Zoom, Eva Szasz, Canada, 1969, 8 mins

A simple map of the known universe easy enough for a child to understand, this is a fascinating science based short which travels to the farthest point in space and back to the smallest particle. Starting with live action film of a boy rowing a boat, the frame freezes and changes to accurate science style drawings as the camera slowly zooms out until we see the lake, North America, planet earth, the moon, the solar system , the milky way and the galaxy. From distant space the camera then moves back in to the boy in the boat again and keeps going closer until we see a mosquito on his hand, then the insects head, down through the skin to the sub atomic level, before coming back out to the boy on the boat who continues rowing across the lake.

The film is made by the awesomely animatastic National Film Board of Canada, who’s government funded films, shown at random moments on TV, were a great inspiration to me (and I’m sure many others) when I was a lad. The animated zoom is pretty smooth and could probably not be much improved by CGI. Based on the 1957 book ‘Cosmic View’ by Kees Boeke (also revised in 1982 and 1994), Cosmic Zoom is one of those shorts that captures the imagination and sticks in the mind of everyone that sees it, especially children and late night student crowds, providing a mindblowing mental map of the entire Universe.

Strangely, another similarly great little film was made from the same subject matter in the same year, ‘Powers of Ten’, directed by designers Ray and Charles Eames. This starts on a picnic scene ten metres square and zooms out, in scales of ten to the power of one, ten to the power of two etc etc. This film is possibly better known than ‘Cosmic Zoom’ as it is made by famous American designers. Another similar film was made for IMAX cinemas in 1996 entitled ‘Cosmic Voyage’, which although made with high definition CGI, lacks the hand crafted charm of the originals.

Everything Will Be Ok, Don Hertzfeldt, 2006 ,USA ,17 minutes

Also a century after Emile Cohl comes Don Hertzfeldt, an animator who’s work seems to carry (unintentional) echoes of the French pioneer, not only in the simple stick figures but in the way that they both delight audiences while subverting the mainstream.

Hertzfeldt is a bit of a phenomenon, his screenings and Q&A’s attracting the fanatical kind of support usually associated with rock bands. He has (somewhat inadvertently) become a sort of figurehead for a kind of ‘lo-fi’ approach, different to most animators working today in the CG dominated industry in that he barely uses any computers in his films. Like indie rock bands using old lo-fi analogue recording technology for its warm wobbly feel, Hertzfeldt reverts to earlier techniques. Not content with going back to before the digital era in his methods he also goes back to before cell animation, animating with pencil on paper and shooting that straight on film on a rostrum camera, all his equipment rescued from the rubbish skips of the big animation studios.  Even the pencil.  Probably.

 This cult outsider position is confirmed by his policy of not making corporate sponsored films or commercials, despite many offers, although he stresses this is a matter of personal artistic choice not some kind of political campaign. Don doesn’t think people should necessarily reject computers (or commercial work), he just doesn’t think they should reject pencils either, believing that we should be free to choose from all the methods of animating that have been developed in the hundred years since animation was born, each method having its own unique strengths.

 Perhaps Hertzfeldt is also an example of way for animators to survive independently in the future; after building an audience on the internet, relying on word of mouth and viral publicity, he now divides his time between the intensive work of making his films and then tours of screenings to encourage DVD sales through his website. In this way Hertzfeldt’s ‘business model’ is much like the strategy many rock bands must embrace to survive the age of internet, with its expectations of free-for-all looting which has carpet bombed the record business and now threatens to do the same for Film and TV (I mean I’m personally doing this for free you know, just think about that for a minute alright, yeah?!).

Maybe we can regard individuals like Hertzfeldt as the best equipped to be the post-corporate film makers, dazed survivors on an apocalyptic cultural landscape, like characters from ‘The Road’ living off scraps salvaged from the media meltdown? Too far fetched? Probably. I mean, that won’t happen, it wont be allowed to …will it? Anywaay…before I start hyperventilating again, back to the film.

Hertzfeldt’s films can contain such bleakness as well as laughs; in the universe he creates often things seem to be in some kind of disintegration. Hertzfeldt likes to focus on uncomfortable subjects, go into dark areas and find black humour in the futilities of life. Which in a funny way is sometimes a refreshing change from the gag filled escapism of a normal cartoon, in the same way that listening to Joy Division is less depressing than listening to Justin Bieber. Or is that just me.

‘Everything Will be OK’, Hertzfeldt’s seventh film, is the first film in a trilogy concerning Bill, who’s life here is summarised through a number of quirky and funny anecdotes, which grow sadder and darker as Bills mental health deteriorates. As well as Hertzfeldt’s trademark primitive black and white stick figure animation, the film’s spilt screen approach includes old photographs, video and many quite beautiful ‘in camera’ special effects creating memorable moments of colour and light (similar to the great effects in his earlier films created by distressing the paper frame by frame). Helping DVD sales was the critical acclaim that this film attracted and the fact that it and his earlier film ‘Rejected’ were nominated for Academy Awards.

Stating his influences as live action directors like Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch, plus comedy like Monty Python and silent film slapstick, Hertzfeldt began making cartoons as a teenager after seeing independent animated shorts such as in the ‘Spike and Mike’ touring animated short film festivals; early Aardman, early Pixar, Bill Plympton and National Film board of Canada. Previous to this, like most people, Hertzfeldt’s only experience of animation had been Disney and Warner Brothers, which he liked, but grew a bit bored of due to the formularised approach. When attending film school to become a live action director, Hertzfeldt continued making cartoons as a way to make cheap films without needing a big team and later shared the love by starting a touring animation festival of his own, ‘The Animation Show’ co-founded with fellow cartoon genius Mike Judge (‘Beavis and Butthead’, ‘King of the Hill’).