Smiling Friends season 3 (2025)
Animation-wise episode six is the greatest, one of multiple agency origin stories.
Beef House (2020)
Pretty good fake sitcom. The People’s Joker director worked on this.
Tag: animation
Shorts Month 2026: Toons
I intended for “shorts month” to be a single month, but it has jumped the fences, and now we have Infinite Shorts Month.
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Hittin’ the Trail for Hallelujah Land (1931, Rudulf Ising)
Some Steamboat Willie action, Black-coded animal creatures sing and dance, but either there’s nothing in here worth banning this cartoon for 100 years, or my version is edited. Finds time in its seven minutes for multiple overboard rescues, a girl’s Uncle Tom getting spooked by graveyard skeletons, and a dastardly kidnapper.
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Sunday Go to Meetin’ Time (1936, Friz Freleng)
Okay this one is significantly worse, all chickens and dice, with at least three Fetchits in the cast. Guy named Nicodemus conks his head, dreams himself in hell for skipping church, awakening after a Satan serenade. Fun fact: the very evil GoToMeeting app was named after this film.
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Uncle Tom’s Bungalow (1937, Tex Avery)
Long metafilm setup and some good Tex body-deforming animation can’t save this one, about a slave dealer trying to repo Uncle Tom after a couple of four year-olds buy him then fall behind on their payments.
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Isle of Pingo Pongo (1938, Tex Avery)
Pretty good, as far as rubbery character animation goes, but mostly in service of dumb puns and boring stereotypes. Stars a pre-Porky stuttering guitarist.
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Porky’s Building (1937, Frank Tashlin)
Porky and his competing contractor bid the same amount for the new city hall, so the city awards them both the contract. This is a new loophole I wasn’t aware of! It’s man rabbit vs. machine, but the other guy gets greedy and his equipment explodes.
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Porky’s Railroad (1937, Frank Tashlin)
Porky’s old steam engine is being retired in favor of a sleek new model, so he challenges the new guy to a race. Second one of these in a row to remind me of the John Henry steel-drivin’ man. A bull speaks in a Popeye voice. Animation by Bob Bentley, of the Philadelphia Bentleys.
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Scaredy Cat (1948, Chuck Jones)
Late Porky, with Sylvester afraid of their new mouse-haunted house.
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Beep, Beep (1952, Chuck Jones)
Timely: Coyote’s back in theaters this week. Second Road Runner cartoon, possibly first appearance of Acme?
Shorts Month 2026: D
Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death from Above (2022, Ayanna Dozier)
Warholian: a couple making out is only seen from the knees down, then the camera gradually moves up, but I guess the viewer has to provide their own Death From Above since my copy was silent.
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Mindscape (1976, Jacques Drouin)
Terrific light-and-shadow landcape. A painter stendhal-syndromes into his own canvas, which then becomes a slideshow of different scenes, each morphing and shifting. Charcoal… oh no, it’s pinscreen, this must have taken a hundred years to animate.
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They Caught the Ferry (1948, Carl Dreyer)
Motorcyclist getting off a ferry is determined to ride fast enough to catch another ferry. Even though this guy is supposed to be in an impossible hurry, he’s more respectful to the ferryman and gas station attendant than anyone in my city would be. Ultimately it’s the most action packed Dreyer film, and perhaps his only road safety movie. Rosenbaum: “Devoted almost exclusively to the tension and exhilaration of speeding down a country road, it is once more demonstration that Dreyer’s art, principally praised for its spiritual qualities, in fact rests on its concrete realisation of material experience.”
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Woton’s Wake (1963, Brian De Palma)
More movies should open with a ballad. Woton is a silent-comedy maniac running through the streets and rooftops. He does some harmless pranks wearing different wigs and grotesque false noses: stealing women’s earrings with his long tweezers, spying a couple having sex through a skylight and roasting them with a flamethrower, the music all tape loops of junkyard horns. One day he creates a live woman in his laboratory, seemingly by accident. Ends in nuclear war, predating Dr. Strangelove by a couple years. The cloudy cinematography and flabby editing are familiar from other student shorts, but this team reeally went for it in the makeup and music departments. Heavy Seventh Seal and King Kong references, with lots of pie throwing (another influence on Strangelove).
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The Responsive Eye (1965, Brian De Palma)
Listening to guys talk nonstop about an art exhibit of perceptual / optical illusion works. Every once in a while they’ll say something that makes the exhibit seem deeper than a Magic Eye book. The movie would be a great supplement after walking through the gallery yourself, but as a standalone experience you’re missing a whole lot, especially when they talk about the color effects we’re watching in black and white. A bit of De Artificiali Perspectiva in there. One group of critics say the exhibit is neat but they don’t think it counts as art – this would be unfortunate foreshadowing for the rest of De Palma’s career. The actress who played the pregnant teen in One, Two, Three makes an appearance. My favorite bit was when the curator bragged that the artists in this room come from all over the world, and his examples were: English, American, English again.
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Blueprint of a Pleasure Machine (2022, Amit Dutta)
Art museum commissioned Amit to make a Klahr-style cut-up montage from their film advertisement collection. I couldn’t make much sense of the voiceover spy monologue, but the animation was fun.
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Nightangel (1987, Jacques Drouin & Bretislav Pojar)
Jiri Trnka stop-motion, Alexieff pinscreen, National Film Board of Canada collab. Little guy sees the nightangel out his apartment window and runs out to meet her, is hit by a car and blinded for a few weeks. They use lighting so that we don’t see his surroundings until he perceives them, for instance, the table above his head is invisible until he bangs into it, the stairs aren’t there until he’s falling down them. The nightangel watches and helps when things get out of control, and when he can see again, they make out.
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Review (2015, Dustin Guy Defa)
A girl inadequately narrates the plot of Taxi Driver to her friends, just like how I inadequately describe movies in the blog.
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Lamentations (2020, Nathaniel Dorsky)
Looking at stuff silently through filters and screens. Messing around with focus. I tried to nap.
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Permutations and Combinations (1976, R. Bruce Elder)
We are shown some images, including comic book panels, a page of text, and we’re played a few audio clips that sound like someone cycling through ringtones. Then the movie flickers these things at us relentlessly, not always in the same order. If he’s spelling out secret messages using the editing, with each frame representing a letter, it goes too fast to make out – Zorns Lemma this ain’t. I tried to see if you can read the page of text by focusing in advance on the next word each time it appears, but nope.
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Noir et Blanc (2006, Tacita Dean)
Inside some noisy machinery, light and matter seem to warp and shake.
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Islands of Fire (1955, Vittorio De Seta)
Filmed during volcanic eruptions, he shows a fishing community thriving, then everyone running for cover one stormy evening with threats from wind and water and volcano, then upbeat music as everything returns to normal the next day. Jake Cole: “we are merely the unruly, overstayed houseguests of this planet.”
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Surfarara (1955, Vittorio De Seta)
I guess this non-seafaring film of sulfur miners fits with De Seta’s theme of showing people at work outside the cities. He gets to play with the editing towards the end, but there’s not much opportunity for beautiful image making inside a sulfur mine. Someone get these guys some gloves, and probably some face masks!
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Chantal Akerman (2013, Ricky D’Ambrose)
Handheld-shot interview in Nov 2013, covering News From Home, early inspirations, mother and Jeanne Dielman, and editing rhythms. Might’ve been more edifying if I hadn’t spent the afternoon reading a whole damn book on Akerman covering these same topics.
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Colophon (2018, Nathaniel Dorsky)
He finds a light array on a window display, some kind of digital advertisement I guess, and he stands too close so you see the pixels instead of the intended design, with street life in the background. Then after five minutes he goes to the garden and casually plays with focus, light, time, and watery reflections. The first couple minutes (figuring out what is going on with the light display) and last couple (when he starts rack-focusing to some water bugs) are cool. I let it play silent, which didn’t do it any favors.
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The Interview (1978, Michael Dudok de Wit)
Kid with tape recorder attempts to interview everyone in sight, but they all get annoyed. After flashing back on all the interactions of the day, the kid concludes it’s not him but the tape recorder that is annoying, and drops it into the ocean. Cute primitive animation with music and gibberish-speak, Michael’s art-school work.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
