The 12 shorts in this collection were made at the Soyuzmultfilm Studio during the late '80s, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet regime ended the subsidies that had financed the studio's output since its establishment in 1936. Nina Shorina's mordant stop-motion film "Door" (1986) probably ranks as the best known work in the anthology. The outré inhabitants of a crumbling apartment house…
Monsters ~ Monsters
These shorts from the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) illustrate how animated films can be used to present information in a concise, entertaining form. Prepared in conjunction with UNICEF's Declaration of Children's Rights, the Oscar-winning short "Every Child" (1979) deftly blends hilarity and pathos. A small child is passed from household to household, like an unwanted fruitcake at ho…
Bored, bored, bored. That's how young Keith feels about being stranded at the time-worn Mountain View Inn with his parents. Then he meets Ralph, an equally stir-crazy mouse who quickly befriends Keith and begs to ride Keith's toy motorcycle. Soon Ralph masters the tiny two-wheeler and "rrroom-zzzooms" through the hotel hallways, dodging four-legged predators, adults, and the occasional va…
This 1962 special marked the last hurrah of Mr. Magoo, who starred in 43 cartoon shorts, including two Oscar® winners, from the UPA Studio between 1949 and 1959. Magoo appears as Scrooge in a Broadway production of "A Christmas Carol" in this minimally animated hour. The play-within-the-show features forgettable songs by Jules Styne and Bob Merrill: Tiny Tim ("played" by the animated character…
Outrageous, outlandish, and more than a little perverse, Mutant Aliens could only have sprung from the mind and drawing board of animator Bill Plympton. As with his previous features The Tune and I Married a Strange Person, Plympton can't sustain an idea very long before he drifts into wild digressions, in this case involving plenty of boisterous sex and blood-spattering violence, and his story…