by ·Comments Off on Shorts Month 2026: B (II)

The Cat Came Back (1988, Cordell Barker)
Runaway (2009, Cordell Barker)

Another good batch: two movies where a cow is on the railroad tracks. The cow makes a quick appearance in The Cat, while cow vs. train is the whole show in Runaway. The train engineer runs off with a passenger leaving the coal boy in charge as the train goes out of control after hitting the cow (which survives, unlike the engineer who gets incinerated). The Cat I’d seen ages ago and was afraid to rewatch lest the song get stuck in my head, but it gets stuck in my head just thinking about rewatching it, so what’s the harm. My recollection was that the guy keeps getting rid of the cat, it keeps returning and wrecking his house, but actually he keeps failing every attempt to get rid of it, until the perfect ending when it haunts him into his afterlife. Canadian animation #1 forever, I must find Barker’s latest, Good Luck to You All.

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Love and the Zeppelin (1948, Jiri Brdecka)
Prince Copperslick (1980, Jiri Brdecka)

My first by Brdecka, here’s a very early and a very late one. The first is about flying machine invention mania, pretty girl likes the inventor and not the important rich man she’s set to marry, animation recalls the Khitruk Winnie-the-Pooh movies. The late one is about a prince who only eats meat in a happy marriage with a princess who only eats fruits and veg, hiding from her that he’s a carnivore until he’s discovered in his secret meat room (his 13th chamber, so a Bluebeard parody) and promptly chokes to death. More limited animation here, using that style where still images are crossfaded.

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The Three Sisters (2025, Konstantin Bronzit)

At least this guy’s second movie about people living in a house on a steep hill. The sisters compete for the attention of their new sailor tenant. Cute, wordless.

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Venice Pier (1976, Gary Beydler)

Camera faces down a pier from the shore end, then jump ahead to a different time of day or another day, jump again and again, each time our position moves a little further down the pier, until it gets to the end and we get a timelapse shot out to sea. Lovely work, would be greatly improved if I had a decent quality copy.

Canyon: “Shot spatially out of order over the course of a year, Gary recomposed the footage in editing to make it proceed consistently forward in space, resulting in an intricate mixing up of chronology, so some cuts could represent a jump of months either forward or backward in time.”

Gary had a short filmmaking career, giving up after getting no interest for this film.

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Pigs! (1965, Carroll Ballard)

Nicely edited wordless piece about pigs, with little montages showcasing their terrible snouts, then their horrible tails, then their awful feet, and so on. Ballard shows us cuter animals (sparrows, geese, sheep) looking disdainfully at the pigs, even the film music mocking the beasts. They do have their moments.

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Naughty Nurse (1969, Paul Bartel)

Nurse Dorothy cries about being so besotted with a doctor that she nearly killed her patient, then we instead follow a naughtier nurse to a hotel where she torments a blindfolded man. A cop comes to “arrest” them, but is really in on the game – all three are having a semi-scripted, sexy romp on their lunch break.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts Month 2026: A

The Artificial Humors (2016, Gabriel Abrantes)

Half-hour short about a soccer ball-shaped floating robot, its AI programmer, and the girl it’s in love with. The three of them leave the village where it’s been training and go to Sao Paolo, where it’s reprogrammed to be a successful stand-up comedian. Big movie music, seamless effects, cool parrots.

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The Marvelous Misadventures of the Stone Lady (2019, Gabriel Abrantes)

Another very slick-looking half-hour short that ultimately feels simpler and less interesting than his best work. An obvious comparison would be Night at the Museum, if I’d seen that.

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Lupo the Butcher (1987, Danny Antonucci)

“Sonamabeetch I keel you” says the butcher as he accidentally chops himself to death. Good animation – this got the director a string of MTV gigs, then he created Ed, Edd n Eddy. Marv Newland was involved in this somehow.

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She Puppet (2001, Peggy Ahwesh)

Someone is playing Tomb Raider, not very well. Feminist(?) machinima, Lara Croft dies over and over, with the exact same sound effect, and sometimes different narrators reflect on the nature of humanity. Made me wish I was watching the one Spaced episode where he feels like drowning things. Sun Ra and Michael Snow both appear in the credits.

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Il Capo (2010, Yuri Ancarani)

Wordless HD close-up on the guy on the ground who directs the heavy machinery tearing up a marble quarry. I learned that they shovel sand and rubble under the slab to give it a cushion to land on. Closeup on the guy’s hand with missing fingertip was a nice callback to Lupo the Butcher. Played True/False the same year as The Interrupters, The Arbor, and Fake It So Real.

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Aliens (1993, Michael Almereyda)

“David Fincher didn’t know what the hell he was doing.” Cameraman films two kids playing an Aliens video game under an Aliens poster. They have a distracted, casual conversation about massive box office hits and Sam Raimi movies, making UHF references.

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To The Unknown (2017, Michael Almereyda)

That’s more like it – piano and poetry (by Kenneth Koch) as Almereyda films a crippled cat on different days.

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Moonshine (1918, Roscoe Arbuckle)

A strange one, with meta intertitles, referring to the actors and stunts and extras. Our guys are lawmen after a gang of underground bootleggers. Arbuckle keeps getting captured, and does a quick pillsbury-doughboy giggle whenever they poke him in the belly with a rifle, then fakes his own death and is immediately recaptured. Alice Lake gets into the stunts as well, Al St. John is a reliable foil.

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Swing Shift Cinderella (1945, Tex Avery)
The Screwy Truant (1945, Tex Avery)
The Shooting of Dan McGoo (1945, Tex Avery)

A good batch to watch together, since they all reference each other. Wolf & Hotgirl are main characters in Cinderella and McGoo, and she does a wolfy song and dance in both. Wolf appears with Bugs Bunny knockoff Screwy Squirrel in Truant, which borrows the opening title gag from Cinderella, Droopy plays Dan McGoo, and a lotta wolves and dogs get hit with a lotta hammers.

by ·Comments Off on Yellow Submarine (1968, George Dunning)

What a movie to watch as a sober adult. Obviously I needed to see this as a Beatles completist, but also it came up indirectly (about a thousand times) in the last novel I read. Unfunny Monty Python outtakes mixed with a childrens adventure story voiced by Beatle impersonators, it’s not bad.

Meanies:

But oh, the designs! There’s some really wild animation and character design in this. And the story pauses six or ten times to play an illustrated Beatles song, nothing wrong with that. I thought maybe “Only a Northern Song” would make some kind of sense in the movie’s context, but no, it’s just a weird song.

The Beatles are known to be witty, so the movie’s writers (known for childrens shows and also Love Story) are in “witty” mode. Jeremy Hillary Boob turns out to be a blue-faced brown and pink puffball, who I’ve never noticed on the front of a sweatshirt or anywhere else.

Fake John was really called John, Ringo and George were Paul, and Paul was Geoff – besides this movie, the gang’s most prominent role was when Geoff played “drinking villager” in Blood on Satan’s Claw. I’ve seen shorts by Dunning and by animators Paul Driessen and Alison De Vere.

Everyone’s got World Cup fever:

by ·Comments Off on Paper Trail and animated shorts

Paper Trail (2026, Don Hertzfeldt)

Following the life of a guy named Steven through marks he has made on paper, all kid drawings then love letters then lease agreements then forty years of signing off on bland work documents. Subtle! Will revisit it at a later date (haha).

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Duck Pimples (1945, Jack Kinney)

Hoped from the title this would be a Daffy, but it’s a Donald – fortunately one of his more insane ones. Home alone and easily scared, he’s attacked by scary stories from inside radio and books, culminating in an imagined crime story between himself, a thug, and Jessica Rabbit.

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Joy Street (1995, Suzan Pitt)

Depressed woman kills herself… loopy balloon creature comes alive from her ashtray and dances whimsically around the house before discovering her. Then I honestly don’t know what happens, but the animation is top-notch as per Pitt’s usual, and the woman’s alive at the end as Debbie Harry sings over the closing credits.

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Fun on Mars (1971, Sally Cruikshank)

Absolute anarchic dance-party nonsense. If I’d known what this would be like, I would not have watched it right after Joy Street since it out-wackies that movie’s whimsy. This 1971 movie set to an early 1930s song would be the equivalent of someone now making a short to a song from… oh no, a mid-80s song.

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The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins (1943, George Pal)

Bart is cursed with a seemingly infinite supply of hats until he trades with the dickhead king. A “Madcap Model,” not a Puppetoon. I like that it’s full of light and shadow.

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Praise Be To Small Ills (1973, Tadanari Okamoto)

A rare Katy pick, this was a musical story about two men who lived with demons: one a sickly father of many children who managed to get by for forty years despite being weakened by a demon, the other a big strong manly man whose entire family was exploded by 13 demons on the night their first baby was born. We chose to ignore the life lesson you’re supposed to learn from all this (??) and focus on the music and cool paper-diorama animation.

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Gorilla My Dreams (1948, Robert McKimson)

Also not a Daffy but a bugs, who washes up on an ape island and gets adopted by a baby-crazy ape mom then gets attempted-murdered by her husband. Fortunately no cannibals here, just quick a Tarzan cameo.

by ·Comments Off on All You Need Is Kill (2025, Kenichiro Akimoto)

Remake of Edge of Tomorrow. The lines and colors are all neat, and especially Rita’s hair – her overall character design is better than Tom Cruise’s. It’s anime, which means angsty teens are saving the world while wearing battle armor, but first Rita has to figure out why she’s caught in a time loop, getting killed by Jim Woodring creatures every day. Halfway through she meets fellow looper Kenji (was Russian Doll based on this?), who will eventually absorb the enemy alien and sacrifice himself. Everything magically works out in the end, because this was a kids movie and I had no business watching it.

by ·Comments Off on Everybody Rides the Carousel (1976, John & Faith Hubley)

Wasn’t expecting this to start with a baby’s-eye-view of being born. Movie is like “human values for beginners” – a highlight is a date on a rowboat where the participants’ apparent age changes with each line they say. The Hubleys are good at using natural dialogue and finding unusual angles and perspectives, and great at body and facial poses. Based on the work of a famed psychologist, this was the feature film debut of both Georgia Hubley and Meryl Streep.

by ·Comments Off on Some Cartoons watched in late November

Plane Crazy (1928, Ub Iwerks)

The whole barnyard pitches in to build Mickey a rubber-dog-powered airplane, but it explodes immediately, so he sticks a propeller and a turkey tail on a jalopy to get some real power. After terrorizing everyone during takeoff, including some sweet first-person views that might account for this movie being on Jerry Beck’s list, he gets Minnie in the air in order to sexually harass her, but she ditches him mid-flight.

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Balloon Land (1935, Ub Iwerks)

No spoken words in the Mickey, this one’s got singing. In a world where everyone/thing is made out of balloons except for the dreaded Pincushion Man, who threatens to pop our dim heroes who wander into the woods. He follows them into town and goes on a mass murder frenzy until the armed forces fight back with tree sap and knock him off the edge of the world. The young couple gets away with bringing grave peril into town since the only witness who could’ve fingered them was killed.

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Music Land (1935, Wilfred Jackson)

Princess Violin of Symphony island and Prince Alto Sax of Jazz island have a tryst which starts a war, until the opposing sides chill out and hold a wedding instead. Great character design in this one, with the voice of each character “spoken” by the instrument it represents.

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Mother Goose Goes Hollywood (1938, Wilfred Jackson)

Just a string of parodies of movie actors ending in a full-cast dance-off. Gross Katharine Hepburn blackface gag, good Marx Bros and Cab Calloway.

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A Wild Hare (1940, Tex Avery)

The original Elmer vs. Bugs mind-game cartoon. Lost an oscar to The Milky Way.

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Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid (1942, Robert Clampett)

Now a well-established character, Bugs faces off against a dim vulture (condor?), the bird version of Elmer. The buzzard’s voice was a parody of a well-known ventriloquist dummy, created by Edgar “father of Candice” Bergen, whose other well-known ventriloquist dummy was parodied in Mother Goose Goes Hollywood.

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Screwball Squirrel (1944, Tex Avery)

Having co-created Bugs, Daffy and Porky, Tex fell out with the Looney producers and moved to MGM, where he appears to have created new versions of Bugs/Daffy (squirrel) and Elmer/Buzzard (dog) to torment with even wilder gags. Full of fun meta jokes, far beyond Screwy talking to the audience – the action hitches when a turntable playing the music score skips, he pulls back the screen to see what happens in the next scene, he interrupts the iris-out to extend the action. Has the same ending as The Palm Beach Story.

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Baseball Bugs (1946, Friz Freleng)

Bugs in invincible trickster mode plays every position at once, singlehandedly takes on an entire baseball team – some good gags and frantic energy.

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The Big Snooze (1946, Arthur Davis)

Fed up with being tormented, Elmer rips up his contract with the cartoons and goes off to take a peaceful nap under a tree. Bugsy Krueger takes sleeping pills and invades Elmer’s dreams, feminizing him and setting wolves after him, terrifying him into rejoining the chase. One of the shorts Bob Clampett left unfinished when he quit the studio and moved to Screen Gems, where he created Beany and Cecil.

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Tweetie Pie (1947, Friz Freleng)

Another Clampett castoff, redesigned by Freleng. Sylvester (here named Thomas) is chasing an bird outside in the snow, which is then adopted by the cat’s owner. Dig the rube goldberg contraption. Ends with the bird just pummeling the cat with a shovel. The first Warner short to win an oscar (vs. a George Pal puppetoon).

by ·Comments Off on Glass Life Shorts

Glass Life (2021, Sara Cwynar)

Photo-studio collage scroll with extreme digital compositing, music and voiceover tracks reinforcing or canceling each other, choice quotes from every modern philosopher, many objects and alphabets recognized from the gallery exhibit we saw, this 20-minute film itself refactored from a different exhibit. Daniel Gorman gets it.

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Neighbours (1952, Norman McLaren)

Two guys get along until a sweet-smelling flower grows on their property line and they ultimately murder each other’s families and each other to gain possession of it. It’s bad politics, say both Alex and McLaren’s studio boss, but terrific live-action stop-motion, and the source of the Mr. Show knees-levitation effect.

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Oz: The Tin Woodman’s Dream (1967, Harry Smith)

Smith loves transformative destruction, so the woodman whacks a tree with his ax, turning it into a pile of furniture and creatures, which eventually whirl around to form mystical fountain patterns. Psychedelic kaleidoscope setup starts with a Suspiria dance and leads to his most magickal images yet. Hoping to see this again next year with a live John Zorn performance, so instead of being obvious and playing Zorn with it now, I put on the middle third of Prefuse 73 One Word Extinguisher, which worked great during the dance scenes.

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Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928, Hans Richter)

When Tom Regan said “Nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat,” he had probably just watched this, a silly movie about flying hats and the men who chase them. Fun to see stop-motion with live actors 24 years before the McLaren short. My version has a new Sosin score since the original sound version was burned by nazis.

Lost hat:

Lost head:

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Cosmic Ray (1962, Bruce Conner)

Nude dancing and fireworks set to a boogie-woogie Ray Charles song, after an excessive amount of countdown leader. It’s Conner, so there are quick shots of nationalism, Mickey Mouse, the atom bomb.

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Walking (1968, Ryan Larkin)

More and less abstractly-rendered people and their walk cycles. Now that I’ve seen the Hubley short and the Disney doc about birds, that’s all the 1969 oscar nominees, and I’m gonna say they are all winners.

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The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1954, Ted Parmelee)

Speaking of Hubley, here’s a UPA short. Talentless loser’s girl Fifi runs away with the circus to be with the handsome and graceful trapezeist Alonzo, turns out she’s a gold digger who leaves every man after they’ve showered her with gifts. Maybe the Popeye or W.C. Fields versions are better.

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The Daughters of Fire (2023, Pedro Costa)

A Costa musical: after six minutes of split-screen, three women singing about their suffering, the last two minutes is landscapes. Paired at Cannes with Wang Bing’s Man in Black.

Giovanni Marchini Camia:

Continuing in the ever-darker visual trajectory of his previous films, in Daughters of Fire Costa pushes even further towards an obsidian palette … Over a string quartet rendition of 17th-century violinist and composer Biagio Marini’s Passacaglia (Op. 22), the three women, all professional singers, intone a hymn-like song whose lyrics speak of solitude and suffering, toil and exhaustion, and fortitude in the face of neglect. Given that the women are Black and singing in Creole, and that the themes they invoke are familiar from Costa’s films about Cape Verdean immigrants, it’s a surprise to learn from the end credits that the lyrics belong to a traditional Ukrainian lullaby.

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Bleu Shut (1971, Robert Nelson)

Goofy prank film with structuralist tendencies – a no-stakes boat-name guessing game punctuated by half-minutes of weirdness (naked man in mirror chamber, dog gets Martin Arnolded, scenes from classic films, porn with intertitles). After minute three, a woman explains the rules of the movie and gives some coming attractions. I once saw about a third of this from one room away at an art gallery, maybe the same day we watched The Clock, and have wondered about it ever since.

It’s 19 minutes before either guy gets a single name right. The game show is abandoned towards the end for three minutes of people sticking their tongues out, then Nelson explains what the movie has been about, or he starts to before he’s interrupted by technical difficulties. Chuck Stephens did a Cinema Scope writeup, but I feel I’ve covered things pretty well.

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The Garage (1920, Roscoe Arbuckle)

Our guys work at a garage, managing to get every thing and everyone covered in black oil without making any racist jokes, nice. The boss (a White Zombie witch doctor) has a cute daughter whose annoying beau manages to burn the place down, and it becomes a rescue operation. I got a good laugh from the ending of the Buster-has-no-pants segment.

by ·Comments Off on 1975 Shorts

Firing Range aka Polygon (Anatoliy Petrov)

Professor’s son died in colonial wars, the prof invents an autonomous tank that can detect fear and sets it loose on his own army in revenge. Nice little sci-fi war drama, too bad about the grotesque rotoscoping. Not the Old Man and the Sea guy, this is a different Petrov, and okay it’s from 1977 not ’75, sometimes my dates are off.

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Great (Bob Godfrey)

Comic attack on the British empire, very good illustrations with Monty Python-style motion gives way to slightly more traditional animation full of newspaper-caricature characters, and settles into focus on Brunel, a builder of very large bridges and ships, with photographed segments and musical numbers. Not one of my favorite things, but I also believe there should be more farcical musical bio-pics of obscure historical figures. Won the oscar over Sisyphus and a Bafta over Caroline Leaf. A very naughty Brit, Bob is also known for Instant Sex and Kama Sutra Rides Again.

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Perspectives (Georges Schwizgebel)

Roughly drawn figures keep changing form and direction over nice colored backgrounds and oppressive piano music.

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Ventana (Claudio Caldini)

Thin rectangles flit past over some ambient music. Made me sleepy.

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Sincerity II (Stan Brakhage)

Playing with the dog in the yard, playing with the wife in bed. I thought my copy was faded and orange with exposure problems, but sometimes you’ll get a clear, balanced shot or a strong blue-green, so who knows. Sincerity was Stan’s multi-part “autobiography” composed of footage shot by himself and friends. With ten minutes left we start seeing Stan himself, and the editing goes haywire. Naked children, a family train vacation, some trick photography play with the kids, a visit to Canyon Cinema. Silent; I listened to the latest Mary Halvorson album since her group is playing Roulette tonight.

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The Seasons (Artavazd Peleshian)

Opens alarmingly with a man and a sheep going over a waterfall. Then the frame is taken over by clouds, then a mountain – maybe the title was mistranslated from The Elements. Cattle and sheep drive, men and horses getting a truck unstuck from rainy mud, a hay-sledding party, a sheep-sledding party. After all the hard work, everyone (even the sheep) get fancied up for the wedding of the man from the waterfall scene. No narration, but a couple of intertitles – postsync sound and nice orchestral score. Ah, this is Armenia, the title refers to the Vivaldi music, and it’s shot by The Color of Armenian Land director Vartanov.