The Life of the Animated Short

Last year seemed like just another year in family-friendly animated tentpole movies. A year with a near-alarming amount of sequels, even from the big houses… You had a single Pixar movie and a single Walt Disney Animation Studios film last year, and both were sequels, entries in popular, massively successful franchises. Other stalwarts, like DreamWorks, Warner Animation, and Sony, delivered sequels. A few non-sequels were IP-based, you had the odd original here and there, the inventive film that was held back by negative outside factors, the likes. In a way, it was a down year after a relatively strong 2018. If you were to remove Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse from that equation, you’d still have a pretty solid year with the likes of Isle of Dogs, Incredibles 2, and more.

Actually, last year had one real departure…

The then-latest Pixar film, Toy Story 4, did not have a short film attached to the beginning. The end of a long-time Pixar tradition that began in 1998, and in many ways, the possible end of a long-time American animation tradition. When Jan Pinkava’s subtle and entertaining short Geri’s Game rolled before Pixar’s sophomore endeavor A Bug’s Life, Pixar started something for themselves and in a way they inadvertently kept the idea of the animated short before a feature-length film alive.

Not only did Toy Story 4 lack a short, but so did Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Frozen II. In fact the previous Disney animated feature, 2018’s Ralph Breaks the Internet, did not contain a short either. The studio’s 22-minute special Olaf’s Frozen Adventure was attached to cousin studio Pixar’s Coco in fall 2017, much to a lot of audiences’ collective dismay. No, Walt Disney Animation Studios’ last feature-length film to have a true short attached was Moana, back in fall 2016.

An unlikely candidate of last year’s crop contained a short film… The Angry Birds Movie 2, a Sony Pictures Animation release of a Rovio production. Similarly, the short wasn’t quite Sony Animation’s own original work. Made possible through a Kickstarter campaign, Matthew A. Cherry’s heartwarming and often times stark Hair Love was picked up by the studio and attached to this silly mobile game-based romp about birds and pigs fighting evil masterminds on icy islands. Quite the pair! Said short was nominated for, and won, the Oscar for Best Animated Short. Select theaters brought the short back (!!!), this time it played before Sony’s live-action blockbuster tentpole Jumanji: The Next Level, another seemingly unlikely companion.

In a way, Sony not only kept an animation tradition alive, but also resurrected a long-dead tradition… An animated short before a live-action film, and not to mention a less family-friendly film at that. Sure, the latest Jumanji entry is a film families have flocked to. Current PG-13 films are really just like the ’80s blockbusters that were easily rated PG back when they were released, that little number doesn’t matter but it’s just there for reasons. Either way, this sort of thing hadn’t happened in a while – an animated short attached to a live-action tentpole, even if it these screenings were special engagements.

The animated short film is far from dead, but for the most part, it’s out of cinemas… Again.

This past year, Pixar slowly rolled out their SparkShorts initiative, a program tasking various artists to make these experimental little shorts and see them through in a short span of time. Six films were made in total, the first three – Purl, Smash & Grab, and the Oscar-nominated Kitbull – were rolled out to the public in February of last year on YouTube, and then debuted on Disney+ the day the streaming service launched. Three more were rolled out on the platform after that, Float, Wind, and Loop. It is known that more are in development, but it seems certain that they won’t be appearing in theaters before Pixar films. It also seems certain that no “regular” shorts will play before upcoming Pixar films. Onward looks to have no short whatsoever, ditto Soul.

Walt Disney Animation Studios launched their own experimental shorts program with Short Circuit, which was also a Disney+ endeavor. While the majority of the shorts on the program debuted at film festivals, these were mostly exclusive to the service, in terms of general release. Many of these shorts were even shorter than the usual short (that’s a lot of short in one sentence), some of these micro-length films ran no more than maybe four minutes. Unlike the SparkShorts, a lot of them feel more like visual exercises than compact stories. Perhaps they’re prep work for a future Disney animated feature? Who knows.

DreamWorks has been making shorts, but they haven’t been attaching them to their feature films. The likes of Bilby and Bird Karma didn’t air before any Universal Pictures release or one of DreamWorks’ own films, much to my confusion. Special screenings of Abomniable had the short Marooned attached, but little else.

Outside of the surprise appearance of Hair Love, has the animated short been relegated to the small screen again?

Sometimes, the short subject can be the unsung hero of the animated medium.

American animation was essentially running on the short film until the idea of using the art form to tell longer stories was taken seriously. The short cartoon, usually running between 5-8 minutes, was the heart of animation being made in the United States during the Golden Age. Only one other studio dared to challenge Disney on feature-length films, the Fleischer studio; and they ended up only making two films total. If anything, the Disney studio were lucky to make it past five features, for three of theirs were box office disasters. Shorts were sometimes the place for experimentation, outside of pure comedy. After all, it took the Silly Symphony series to get Disney to the world of features. Many of animation’s boldest endeavors were sometimes films that ran under 10 minutes long…

The television boom of the 1950s had changed the game, and as we all know, the American animated short cartoon had experienced a prolonged series of setbacks. For example, MGM mandated that their cartoon studio be shut down in 1957, laying off the entire team behind Tom & Jerry (whose debut short just turned 80 recently) and other cartoons. The logic from the higher-ups was simple, they thought “Why continue making these when we have a whole backlog of over a hundred shorts we can re-release every few years?” They soon found out that they had made a mistake, and since the duo who spearheaded Tom & Jerry – William Hanna and Joseph Barbera – had started their own new studio with some of their old team, they had to start over. Tom & Jerry lived on through theatrical shorts made by different studios (first they were done by Gene Deitch, at his Rembrandt Films in Czechoslovakia, afterwards they were handled by Chuck Jones and some of his Warner Bros. colleagues) until MGM truly decided to call it quits in 1967. It turned out, even in a day and age where these short cartoons could be boxed into half-hour packages for broadcast, there was still a demand for a short cartoon in movie theaters. Perhaps the European market played a big role in keeping the animated short alive?

Warner Bros. wound down Looney Tunes in the late 1960s, Terrytoons released their final subjects in 1971, and the Walter Lantz studio closed up shop a year after that. One curious studio stayed a little while longer, DePatie-Freleng Enterprises. Through United Artists, they released their final theatrical short cartoon – a Pink Panther entry called Therapeutic Pink – in early 1977.

Disney, interestingly, were one of the first studios to move on from short cartoons. Mickey Mouse had made his last theatrical appearance in 1953’s The Simple Things (left), Donald and Goofy assumed the top position until the studio put the breaks on short film production. Walt and Roy O. Disney ended their partnership with distributor RKO Radio Pictures and created their own distribution arm, Buena Vista, in the same year The Simple Things came out. From here on out, short production dwindled. After the 1961 release of the Goofy sports series entry Aquamania, Disney traded 6-8min shorts for “featurettes”, essentially a film version of novellas: Too long to be shorts, too short to be features. Disney made the occasional featurette or educational film (such as Freewayphobia) throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Disney’s first true shorts since the early 1960s were more elusive experiments like Tim Burton’s Vincent (screened once in L.A. in October 1982, but largely unavailable for years) and Darrell Van Citters’ Fun with Mr. Future. (Similarly screened once, it remains commercially unavailable to this day, but you can watch it on YouTube courtesy of Thief and the Cobbler restorer Garrett Gilchrist.)

During animation’s 2nd Golden Age in North America, the cartoon short made a comeback…

Warner Bros. produced two Looney Tunes subjects, The Duxorcist and The Night of the Living Duck in 1987 and 1988 respectively, the first of which received limited play. It was later edited into a compilation/clip-show feature called Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters, which was released in fall 1988 with Night of the Living Duck preceding it in theatrical release.

At Disney, the runaway success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit lead to three short films starring the film’s cartoon characters. The first of these was Tummy Trouble, which was attached to their live-action blockbuster Honey, I Shrunk the Kids in the summer of 1989. That same year, Disney had opened an animation facility in Orlando, housed in the Walt Disney World park formerly known as Disney-MGM Studios. They were assigned the next two Roger Rabbit cartoons, Roller Coaster Rabbit (attached to Dick Tracy in 1990) and Trail Mix-Up (attached to A Far Off Place in 1993). Disney put a hybrid 2D/CG short Off His Rockers before Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, and Runaway Brain – Mickey Mouse’s first under 10-minute short since The Simple Things – before A Kid in King Arthur’s Court. The longer form featurette had its last hurrah in 1990 with The Prince and the Pauper, which Disney attached to The Rescuers Down Under. You began seeing more Looney Tunes shorts from WB again, such as Box Office Bunny and Carrotblanca. They were attached to the odd live-action family flick. Pilots for upcoming TV shows sometimes showed up before movies, most notably the pilot for Nickelodeon’s Hey Arnold!, which was attached to the live-action Nick comedy Harriet the Spy.

It seemed that the tradition had come back. Somewhat. Most of the time, these shorts were playing before family movies, sort of aligning with the stigma that animation is a children’s medium. We didn’t see these shorts air before “adult” movies at this point.

via Cinema Treasures

Most audiences today would probably laugh at the idea, but there was a time when cartoon shorts regularly ran before live-action pictures that weren’t family-friendly. Of course, most animation made during the Golden Age wasn’t explicitly family-friendly, either. Cartoons and live-action pictures all adhered to the dreaded Hays Code, but the subject matter of many movies made during the period definitely puts them out of family reach. Even then, it was the norm to see a cartoon before a picture like those. Audiences in the 1940s had no problem seeing a Looney Tunes cartoon precede one of Warner Bros.’ gangster movies, if anything, the cartoon was probably often the highlight of the show. There’s a fun story on a bonus feature for the Tom & Jerry Golden Collection Vol. 1 set that was released in 2011: It is stated on this documentary that audiences in the 1940s would “roar” excitedly when they knew a Tom & Jerry cartoon was going to play before the main Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer feature. Once they heard the series theme as the MGM roaring lion logo cued up, the anticipation would be through the roof.

Nowadays, you’ll probably hear someone in the audience murmur “What is this?” or “Is this is movie?” “When is the movie gonna start?”

A night and day difference, really. Throughout the ’90s, aughts, and this past decade, the place for animated shorts was either animated movies or live-action family flicks… The latter of which is quite rare these days.

Theatrical animated shorts were on and off past the early ’90s. Warner Bros. had their ups and downs, you saw some Looney Tunes works in theaters in the ’90s and a handful of CG Looney Tunes shorts this past decade. 20th Century Fox (well, now it’s 20th Century Pictures) attached a Simpsons short called The Longest Daycare to Ice Age: Continental Drift in 2012. DreamWorks put the short First Flight before special screenings of Over the Hedge in 2006. Pixar, of course, had a short before every movie after A Bug’s Life debuted. Whenever they didn’t have a new short ready, they’d fish an old one out of the past and use that (a then 13-year-old Luxo, Jr. ran before Toy Story 2 in 1999, and 1989’s Knick Knack played before 2003’s Finding Nemo) instead. It then came to a point where Pixar had shorts ready for non-Pixar releases, many of which were entries in their pre-existing franchises. The Cars short Tokyo Mater played before Disney Animation’s Bolt, Toy Story short Small Fry ran before The Muppets, while Muppets Most Wanted added Party Central (a Monsters University short) to its program.

Disney on the other hand kept some shorts in the film festival circuit following the release of Runaway Brain, like John Henry and Lorenzo (which Disney interestingly put before a Touchstone drama called Raising Helen), some were later released as bonus features on various films’ DVD releases. They slowly wobbled back into making and commercially releasing short films in the late aughts (for example, How to Hook Up Your Home Theatre ran before National Treasure: Book of Secrets), until trying to commit to having a new one play before every new Disney animated feature: The Ballad of Nessie before Winnie the Pooh, Paperman before Wreck-It Ralph, Get a Horse! before Frozen, and so on until the late 2016 release of Moana, which had Inner Workings attached. Frozen Fever preceded live-action Cinderella in 2015. The response to Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, originally meant to be a TV special, wasn’t pretty. It was actually pulled from theaters mid-flight… Was it because it was unexpected and 22 minutes long? Or was it because it was 22 minutes of Frozen before the main attraction?

I can only hope that the response to Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, all 22 minutes of it, playing before Coco didn’t tell Disney that the audience doesn’t want shorts anymore. That was the last time you saw a Disney Animation short/featurette before the feature, and Bao was the last Pixar short you saw in theaters…

So the question is… Will the short remain a big screen appetizer? Or will it once again stay on the small screens? Given that there wasn’t a huge gap between the release of Therapeutic Pink and The Duxorcist, not to mention the fact that re-issues of old shorts sometimes appeared in theaters during the dry period of the late ’70s and early ’80s, maybe they will remain a big screen thing…

UPDATE: Abruptly confirmed on February 27th, Pixar’s new film Onward does have a short rolling before it…

But it isn’t a Pixar short, be it a regular short or an experimental SparkShort.

It is a Simpsons short. You’ve probably heard by now, Playdate With Destiny runs before Onward in theaters. It played before the special advance screenings on the 29th, and will be attached to all general release prints. This is… A strange development to say the least.

While it’s no lie that Disney now owns all of 21st Century Fox’s assets, including The Simpsons, it is certainly unorthodox to see a Simpsons piece, or anything from the Fox/20th Century Pictures camp, playing before a mainline Disney release. There are some small Pixar-Simpsons connections, yes. After all, Tracey Ullman herself voices a character in Onward. Ullman’s sketch show, of course, was what launched the titular family in 1987. Various Simpsons alumni have been in and out of Pixar, most famously Brad Bird and David Silverman. I guess that justifies it? I guess The Simpsons being animated justifies the double-bill, too? Since the short is about Maggie, they were able to pass with a G-rating, a first for the franchise in its 33-year history.

What’s truly unusual though, is that 20th Century Pictures just recently released a family-friendly live-action/CG hybrid picture a few weeks ago: The Call of the Wild. I think it would’ve made more sense to put Playdate With Destiny before that instead of Onward, but I suspect it was attached to Onward because Disney didn’t have much hope for the Harrison Ford CGI dog movie, which currently is set to lose a lot of money at the box office. Might as well attach it to the Pixar film that a good amount of people are going to see. (It, too, is seemingly underperforming in pre-sales, but that’s another story.)

Still, we don’t know if Soul will have anything attached, or Disney Animation’s Raya and the Last Dragon. Every other animated film this year, from Warner’s Scoob! to Sony Animation’s Connected (formerly The Mitchells vs. the Machines) to Illumination’s Minions sequel, are up in the air when it comes to shorts. I do wonder though, since Disney owns The Simpsons, does this mean we’ll see more Simpsons theatrical shorts before their releases? Maybe. I wouldn’t have imagined The Simpsons keeping the theatrical animated short alive…