Mine is Jours de Plaine. The one I am linking to one Youtube is not very good in clarity. I don’t care because I have a better copy on tape. It never fails to hypnotise me. I don’t understand French, but this short always leaves me on the verge of tears, in a good way. The beauty of the colored pencil-type sketches morphing over the ethereal singing, as it exhibits a deep love of the history of one’s home. It transfixes me everytime.
I also would like to find an animated short that was on a tape I rented. The short was called Hilary. I didn’t like it at first, but I watched it a couple of times, and it grew on me. It’s a stop-motion flick about a guy telling a boy a bedtime story, and it’s full of dark angst. Youtube has about a ten second clip of it, but that’s all. I’d like to find the whole thing somewhere online if I could.
The company I work for distributes a lot of shorts. When I started, the first film everyone insist I watch is an animated short called “Down the Road.” I’ve spent the last couple months plowing through the rest of their library, but so far nothing I’ve seen has been half as good as this one; it’s the best thing we have. We showed it a free screening in the neighborhood a couple weeks ago and it got a huge response. (Sorry, I looked for a copy online somewhere–don’t tell my boss–but I couldn’t find one. But here’s the trailer.)
Aside from the the big commercial cartoons (otherwise Chuck Jones would win multiple times over – he’s already directed at least three of the ones in this thread), I like:
The Critic (1963)-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otPkk1sUFkI Mel Brooks does the monologue. “I think this is very symbolic. It’s symbolic of JUNK.” Directed by Ernest Pinkhoff Edifice – a short cartoon from the 1960s that tells the History of Civilization in the form of a building. I can’t find it now, but it’s been on the internet before. “Allah be praised! I’ve invented the zero!” “What?” “Nothing, nothing.”
I have no access to the yubetube right now, but there’s a Woody Woodpecker cartoon I’ve seen a couple dozen times in my youth that’s a classic.
Woody’s trying to go over the Niagra Falls in a barrel and the poor guy trying to stop him gets antogonized the whole time.
The best sequence is where he’s shipped off somewhere in the barrel and hurries back to Niagra saying “mush” the whole way. First on a dog sled, then in a plane, then after knocking a kid off his scooter and making him cry, then finally stomping past a couple who are kissing on a bench.
Hmmm…counting “short” as “under half an hour,” I’m actually probably going to have to say one of the old Disney auto safety shorts starring Goofy. It’s never too early to learn about braking distance, even when you’re still in preschool.
I’ll second Kiwi! too, of course, though as beautiful and memorable as it is, I prefer cartoons that don’t make me want to blow my head off.
No one has mentioned these two classics: Rabbit of Seville One Froggy Evening – For me, this is an amazing cartoon. Not a single line of dialog, but funny as hell.
