Ah, the 1960’s. The Vietnam War, hippies, psychadelia (I’m just laying groundwork here. I’m not that old.) Not a bad movies across the decade, either. Alfred Hitchcock released Psycho, and To Kill a Mockingbird, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Sound of Music also made their debuts. Movies I all love, but all very long. Very all artsy. Very un-fun. The same goes for the 70’s (disco*, Jaws, The Godfather, The Exorcist) and the 80’s (afros, E.T., The Shining, Raging Bull). Like always, the bright spot is animation. Animation itself began to evolve, and so did animated shorts. Below, we’ve featured a list of animated short films from the 1960’s through the 1980’s.
Munro
Director: Gene Deitch
Release: 1961
Munro is the cute (and hopefully fictional) story of a four- year old boy who is recruited for the army. The story holds relevancy to the Vietnam War (the time 1960) and it scored itself an Oscar for Best Animated Short in its year. Personally, I love looking at the animation for these shorts, if only to know that even iMovie could make animation look so much better now.
Storytime
Director: Terry Gilliam
Release: 1968
I love you, Chris Columbus, and the entire Harry Potter saga to death, but like J.K. Rowling herself, Terry Gilliam was my first choice to direct the first two Harry Potter movies, and even now I can’t help wondering what an experience that would’ve been like. Storytime is my favorite of the short films on the list, and the only one that I wouldn’t prefer in updated animation. Storytime is Gilliam at his best, blackly comic yet whimsical and engaging yet casual. The idea is so simple, so ridiculously stupid- it feels as if it was written in no time at all (which it probably wasn’t). But Gilliam’s offhand style and whirlwind storytelling is always worth watching.
Cosmic Zoom
Director: Eva Szasz
Release: 1969
For you amateur film makers: ever spend time just playing around with your camera? Zooming out and playing with shadows and light at random? Sometimes this is the greatest source of inspiration, as in Cosmic Zoom, which is just an extroverted and introverted shot of the universe. It’s a minimalist’s daydream packaged into old-fashioned animated short film, very absorbing and creative.
Special Delivery
Director: Eunice Macaulay
Release: 1978
There’s adultery, lies, murder and full-frontal nudity. But because it’s animated, that’s not a problem right? I love the hypocrisy of the MPAA. Special Delivery is satire in its full form, Canada’s Oscar submission in 1978, which, surprisingly, won. We weren’t sure whether or not to put this one on, but one’s thing’s for sure- we couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Tin Toy
Director: John Lassetter
Release: 1988
Before Toy Story came along in 1995, Pixar was a small studio experimenting with an untested form of animation, three-dimensional computer generated animation. Tin Toy was the first movie-short or full-length- to be completely computer-generated, and Lassetter’s efforts were rewarded, winning an Oscar for the short and getting the go ahead to do the first Toy Story seven years later.
Come back Saturday for shorts from the 1990’s through the 2000’s, and check back all this weekfor new shorts for BooleanFlix’s Shorts Week!
*Again, I lack a knowledge of British pop-culture, and therefore I am unsure if the whole ‘peace age’ thing is a stereotype that only applies to Americans.
