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For thousands of film buffs, it takes place every February. A photocopied or e-mailed ballot invites you to take part in an Oscar Pool contest. You’ve watched at least some of the nominated pictures, and you’ve diligently researched the others, so you zip through the choices: Best Picture, Actor, Actress, etc. You may slow up a bit at categories like Best Costume or Song, but you persevere, until…Wham! Best Animated Short Film and Best Live-Action Short Film are staring you in the face. You’ve never seen the nominees (Heck, you’ve never heard of most of them!), and you either have to look up what the critics have to say or pull out the coin and start flipping.
The Short Subjects Oscars, as they were originally referred to in 1931/32, are a vestige of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Back then, a night at the local Bijou usually meant a feature or two, a serial chapter, a newsreel, a one- or two-reel live-action film, and a one-reel cartoon. Nearly every major studio had its own animation department or was linked to one (Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies unit, Universal with Walter Lantz, M-G-M with Ub Iwerks and Harman-Ising, Paramount with the Fleischer Brothers, and so on). Meanwhile, Walt Disney’s company produced its own work and let other studios (Columbia, United Artists, and RKO) handle the distribution.
As a result of this mostly in-house competition, the first decade or so of the Best Short Subject, Cartoon race was dominated by the House of Mouse. Every winner from 1932’s inaugural honoree, Flowers and Trees, and the following year’s The Three Little Pigs to 1938’s Ferdinand the Bull and 1939’s The Ugly Duckling was a Disney release. Uncle Walt’s winning streak was finally snapped in 1940, when M-G-M’s The Milky Way took home the prize. In fact, no Disney short was even nominated. What’s even more remarkable is that the bland tale of three kittens exploring a galaxy of dairy products beat out another M-G-M effort, William Hanna and Joe Barbera’s Puss Gets the Boot (which debuted Tom and Jerry), as well as Tex Avery’s seminal Bugs Bunny-Elmer Fudd tussle A Wild Hare, from Warners.
The Disney crew would be back on top in ’41 and ’42 with Lend a Paw (Pluto and Mickey Mouse’s first win) and the WWII-themed satire Der Fuehrer’s Face (you know, the cartoon that inspired thousands of “Donald Duck is a Nazi” memes). The remainder of the decade was a face-off between M-G-M and Warner Bros., with Tom and Jerry taking home the gold in 1943-46 and 1949, while the Termite Terrace gang racked up wins for 1947’s Tweetie Pie (the first pairing of Tweety and Sylvester) and 1949’s Pepé Le Pew romp For Scent-imental Reasons.
1948 would see a new player entering the race. United Productions of America (UPA), home to several ex-Disney animators who left after the 1941 studio strike, took over making the cartoon shorts for Columbia Pictures. After getting nominations in ’48 and ’49 for a pair of Fox and Crow comedies, UPA won the 1950 Oscar with Gerald McBoingBoing, about a little boy who only spoke in sound effects. The company’s minimalist animation design was likewise evident in their other 1950s wins; 1954 and 1956 for the myopic Mr. Magoo’s misadventures When Magoo Flew and Magoo’s Puddle Jumper, and 1959’s Moonbird, a whimsical story of two boys’ nocturnal quest for the title creature. In between UPA’s awards there were four more for Warners (among them Bugs Bunny’s 1958 Oscar for Knighty Knight Bugs), two more for M-G-M stalwarts Tom and Jerry, and only one for Disney, the UPA-influenced Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom.
With fewer exhibitors running short subjects in the 1960s, most of the Hollywood studios began shuttering their animation departments, farming out work to indie companies. As a result, the Best Animated Short category started to take on a more eclectic and international look (the first foreign nominee, Canada’s The Romance of Transportation, came in 1952). The Czech-American co-production Munro, directed by Gene Deitch and based on a Jules Feiffer story, won in 1960, followed the next year by Yugoslvia’s Ersatz. Comedy legend Mel Brooks and director Ernest Pintoff struck Oscar gold in 1964 with The Critic, and 1965 saw the Pink Panther’s first short, The Pink Phink, earn an award for Looney Tunes veteran Friz Freleng. The decade ended on a familiar note with two Disney wins: 1968’s Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day and 1969’s fine feathered salute It’s Tough to Be a Bird.
Those would be the last wins for Disney for over 40 years. The 1970s and ’80s saw a diverse range of creators winning, from animator Richard Williams’ A Christmas Carol in 1971 to Claymation guru Will Vinton’s Closed Mondays in 1974 and 1988’s Tin Toy, by a nascent computer animation studio named Pixar. Another stop-motion creator, England’s Nick Park, took home three awards in the ’90s: 1990’s Creature Comforts, 1993’s The Wrong Trousers, and 1995’s A Close Shave, the last two starring the duo of Wallace and Gromit.
As for the 21st century, there have been plenty of noteworthy winners: the Australian 2003 stop-motion dark comedy Harvie Krumpet; the French-made salute to consumer culture and product placement, 2009’s Logorama; 2012’s heartfelt Paperman, which returned Disney to the top spot; and Pixar’s Piper in 2016 and Bao in 2018. The problem is, most moviegoers don’t get to see the winners or the nominees these days, unless the short is made to accompany a specific feature release (like Bao with Incredibles 2, for example) or if all the nominees are released to theatres in an omnibus presentation. Today’s short film animation scene is more (pardon the term) inclusive than ever, but audiences seem less invested without the link to favorite characters or studios. If theatre chains would cut down on the pre-feature commercials and show a short of two instead, it would give a shot in the arm to this long-neglected branch of the cinematic universe.