I used to watch IFC’s Animation Celebration about every time it came on. I’m a big fan of Bill Plympton (particularly his Plymptoons). If I recall correctly, it also featured a short which would later become the ill-fated Comedy Central show Bob and Margaret.
I also love Don Hertzfeldt’s Rejected. And seeing how this is post #700…
Dance! Everybody dance!
My anus is bleeding!
I am a big fan of Bill Plympton’s shorts too (his short cartoons, not his underwear). Particularly the how to quit smoking one. And the ones with two blokes fighting in increasingly creative ways.
My Top 10:
Snow White: Betty Boop meets Cab Calloway in this surreal masterpiece years before Disney’s version.
Duck Amuck: Chuck Jones obliterates the 4th wall in Daffy’s battle with an (almost) invisible animator.
Begone Dull Care: The Oscar Peterson Trio provide fantastic accompaniment to Norman McLaren’s classic piece where the animation is from directly painting on the film, scratching the emulsion to create lines, figures, and movement.
The Man Who Planted Trees: Richly-deserved Oscar-winner plays like watercolors in fluid motion. As great a tale of modest humanism as has even been on film.
The Wrong Trousers: Wallace, Gromit, and one malevolent penguin make for irresistable fun in this stop-motion caper.
Inspiration: Czech animator Karel Zeman’s miraculous achievement: creating a stop-motion animated film out of glass figures by heating each figure, moving them (a fraction of an inch), and waiting for them to harden before shooting the next frame. The story: a dandelion seed/clown finds love and adventure when he floats into a dewdrop. Amazing.
Little Rural Riding Hood: Tex Avery’s best incarnation of the Wolf vs. Red series. Hilarious.
The Bulleteers: The best superhero movie is this wonderful Superman short from the Fleischer brothers. The colors, lighting, and action are unsurpassed.
The Great Piggy Bank Robbery: Daffy again, this time with Bob Clampett, with a menagerie of villains that would send Dick Tracy running for the hills. Not Duck Tracy, though. Sweet a-go-ny!
Night on Bald Mountain: Before Disney’s Fantasia, Alexander Alexeiff brought the world this version of Stravinsky using his remarkable pinscreen animation style.
My favorite animated shorts? I have a pair that my wife bought me for Fathers day, with Tweety Bird on them. 
One Froggy Evening
Perfection in six minutes.
I was just thinking about Don Hertzfeldt! I was actually going to start my own thread, because I saw this Chiclets commercial…
Now I only saw the very end, while I was on the phone, but it was animated by either Hertzfeldt or someone who was totally ripping him off. Has anyone seen this commercial? I tried to find stuff on Google, but without success.
I love Hertzfeldt, I think Billy’s Balloon is benious. (That would be my shocking mis-spelling of genius. I was so startled by it I thought I’d keep it in.)
ZJ
One Froggy Evening
Duck Amuck
What’s Opera, Doc
Feed the Kitty
The Crunch Bird (one joke, but perfectly told).
Bambi Meets Godzilla
The Wrong Trousers
The original South Park short
The Critic (not the TV show, but the short starring Mel Brooks).
I also love Bill Plympton. He showed a new short that he was working on at the film festival I volunteer for, and it was so great. I can’t remember the title, but it was a man walking his dog and showing all the “dangers” they encountered from the dog’s point of view. It was so funny, and so exactly like I would imagine dogs to think. I can’t find the name of it anywhere, but believe me, it does exist.
But the short that amazed me the most would have to be Fast Film. It was truly amazing. It was made only by parts of other films, like they cut up the pictures from films, and animated those into things, so like there was a horse galloping across the desert, and the horse was made of other movies. I know that makes absolutely no sense, but that is only because Fast Film is so unbelieveable. There isn’t much of a plot in it, other than guy and girl trying to get away from bad things, and with shootouts and car and train chases, but really, I can not recommend seeing Fast Film enough.
The Wrong Trousers
A Close Shave
Creature Comforts
Bambi vs. Godzilla
Lupo the Butcher
Frog Baseball
There are many many cartoons I saw at Spike and Mike Animation Festivals that I loved but I just can’t remember now, mostly because it was a long time ago and I was in a different state of mind.
I find many of the Itchy and Scratchy cartoons-within-a-cartoon irresistable. I would love to make or buy a ‘best-of’ DVD that was just a compilation of Itchy and Scratchy.