Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Poor Little Animated Shorts: Epilogue

Of the handful of mini-projects I’ve launched for the Film Walrus, Poor Little Animated Shorts has been one of the most fun. I learned a lot in a fairly brief period, gotten to see a couple hundred interesting shorts (it helps when the average run-time is only 7 minutes) and discovered more than a dozen new directors to follow up on. I hope it has been good reading/viewing for all of you (chase down some of those links/DVDs if you haven’t already). I may continue to present more sets in the future, but for now I’m taking a break.

My apologies to any artist or movement that I’ve grossly overlooked (including most foreign countries). Sorry that for all my CS love, I didn't include any machinima. I'm personally pretty fond of speedruns, but I that might have been a little too nerdy.

Although I’m familiar with their work, for reasons of personal taste I intentionally omitted Tomasz Beginski (recent, technically impressive CG), Bill Melendez (Peanuts specials), David Fleischer (Popeye), Terrytoons (Mighty Mouse) and anything related to Christmas (think stop-motion Rudolphs, Chipmunks outwitting Pluto and so on).

Oscar Fischinger (pre-Fantasia musical visualization) was skipped over because I couldn’t find a spot for him. Norman McLaren definitely deserved a spot on the list (I did plug two of his shorts in the “Cat Came Back” review), but I couldn’t choose. Many great sources of animated shorts were relegated to a single entry when they deserved more, including Tex Avery, Disney, Pixar and the whole of Soviet/Russian output (I really wanted to include “The Old Man and the Sea”). Many shorts were left out because of my own ignorance or lack of time in a field that is almost impossible to keep up with.

1 comment:

Mad Dog said...

I also wish I'd had the means to pursue other animated shorts. So little get released, even illegitimately over the Internet. If I'd had my druthers, I would've tried to watch Kakurenbo, the new anime omnibus that came out last year called Genius Party, and some other miscellaneous shorts from the studio that did Magnetic Rose and Noiseman Sound Insect, Studio 4C. They're sort of the Japanese avant-garde animated short powerhouse.