(AKA Cartoon Hour)

I’ve been scouring the web (and my memory) for a while now, trying to find some of my all-time favorite animated shorts. Each of these is great in its own way – although admittedly they will not be up everyone’s alley. My taste in animation tends provoke either “that’s awesome!” or “what have you been smoking?” Hopefully your reaction is the former.

Sub

by Jesse Schmal

When this first came on screen in the theatre, I went “ugh”.

The visual style initially reminded me of those interminable 1970s NFB shorts that they showed at school. The teachers always got us excited about seeing “a cartoon” and then showed us some dreary, unfunny piece of Canadian content. “Sub” reminds me visually of those, but it’s much weirder, and much funnier. You may not think it’s going anywhere at first…the humour is kind a slow simmer, but stick with it. It builds to an amazing conclusion in the final minute.

Little Cow

by Laszlo Kollar & Igor Lazin

OK, this is all about the audio, but if it doesn’t make you laugh…there should be an awrd for vocals this crazy.

Balance

by Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein

This is a vertiable antique, but I never get tired of it. It is so German, in so many ways.

At The Ends of the Earth

by Konstantin Bronzit

This is another “slow builder”. Enlarge it to full screen – there’s a lot of great detail. I love the mix of Warner Brothers style slapstick with Rowan Atkinson Pacing. Some nice potty humour in there as well.

Tango

Zbig Rybczynski

Often imitated, but never duplicated, this one is amazing mostly for its context. In the days of digital production, there would really be little remarkable about this. But in 1982, made by hand, it was quite a masterpiece of planning, synchronization and editing.