Jumping Beans (Dave Fleischer, 1922)

Before Betty Boop and Popeye, the Fleischer studios made the “Out of the Inkwell” series featuring Koko the Clown, each short of which begins with Max dipping his pen in his inkwell and drawing Koko on his canvas, invariably resulting in a battle of wits between the animated character Koko and his human creator Max, with each one confounding the other in humorous ways. Despite being made nearly 90 years ago, these shorts remain highly impressive, especially Jumping Beans, an imaginative short in which an army of Koko “clones” invades Max’s world. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhL2UcDCdHk

 

The Skeleton Dance (Walt Disney, 1929)

Featuring imaginative animation (by Ub Iwerks, a pioneer at the Disney studios) and playful music and sound effects (by Carl W. Stalling, an innovative composer in animation best known for his later work on Looney Tunes cartoons), The Skeleton Dance, whose gleefully morbid sense of humor seems so far removed from the cutesy anthropomorphism typical of later Disney productions that you’d swear a relative of Tim Burton must have been employed in the animation department at the time, is five minutes of lively animated hilarity. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhxjzc9uuE

 

Northwest Hounded Police (Tex Avery, 1946)

Following his pioneering work for Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes, Avery moved to MGM where he created, among other characters, Droopy, the pint-sized, jowly basset hound who moved and talked with sloth-like speed yet always managed to outwit his adversaries. In Northwest Hounded Police - a superior remake of Droopy’s debut cartoon, Dumb-Hounded (1943) - an escaped convict, a wolf named Joe, runs afoul of Droopy, here a diminutive Mountie who continually mystifies Joe with his ability to seemingly materialize out of nowhere, always turning up wherever Joe tries to hide and delivering a one-liner in his patented deadpan style - be it at the top of a mountain, at the bottom of the sea, or inside the belly of a lion (”crowded, isn’t it”). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5QpGzkL0h4

 

La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)

Using only still photos, narration and music, Marker creates a remarkably effective post-apocalyptic sci-fi film, the hero of which travels back in time, desperate to recapture a haunting moment from his childhood, only to be confronted by a deathly revelation. This experimental short was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RvmJan17q8

 

The Flat (Jan Svankmajer, 1968)

At once hilarious and unsettling, The Flat is a surrealistic masterwork in which a man becomes inexplicably trapped inside a bizarre cabin which seemingly operates in contradistinction to all known universal laws, mystifying the hapless protagonist at every turn and making him the butt of some absurdist cosmic joke. http://www.viddler.com/explore/Ms_Valerie/videos/345/

Posted on May 25th, 2009 by Mat Viola
Filed under: Short Films