Non-Nominated Highlight - The Band Concert (1935)

Well, today is the day Disney's latest film Frozen opens wide, which is all fair and good, but more importantly it also means that Oscar contender Get a Horse! will finally move from the film festivals to the general public. Yes, I've already gone to see it, and I've updated my thoughts on the film in my entry on the Shortlist (which you all must read because I'm getting desperate). And you can stay for Frozen, which is, you know, pretty good.

But today is also the week after the 1935 review went up, and while Three Orphan Kittens, Who Killed Cock Robin? and The Calico Dragon were good films, those were far from being the film animated film from 1935. No, there is one film that came out that year that topped them out and may as well be the best Disney film of all time. (At least the animation professionals polled by Jerry Beck sure think so.)

Best Animated Short - 1935

We are coming ever so close to the end of the line. Thankfully there's still the 2013 Oscar race to start preparing for, but the question now is what to do with this blog once I get through these last four reviews. Do I just sit around for a year and then spring into action every November when the next year's Oscar race comes into being? Do I make random posts about some other animation topics once in a while? Do I go ahead and review the Best Animated Feature nominees? That actually doesn't sound like a bad idea, but it'll take much longer than these reviews of short films whose films are short, but it still takes me hours to write them. I was toying around with posting these reviews on tumblr, but it hasn't amounted to much. We shall see.

Best Animated Short - 2013 - The Shortlist

So last year the list of qualifying animated short films were leaked to the public and I was able to make a post about it, which turned out to be one of my most popular posts. Well, it's been a year since then and I've been waiting for the list of qualifying films, but one never appeared. I went snooping around but the most I found was that the showing of the qualifying films had already happened back in October 22-23 or sometime around then. Well, a few days it came out that the Academy had come out with the shortlist of the films, which are the ten films that the Academy will meet again to decide on the nomination. So like last year, I will be writing on each of the films. The problem is unlike last year when a few of the films were readily available, only one of them fit the bill so far. So most of these will be just previous based on the trailers.

And of course just to show how useless this blog is / how hard it is to blog regularly, the list of finalists has been out for a week, but thanks to a combination of a hectic work schedule and an awesomely awesome pony convention (Nightmare Nights Dallas), this post only just now going up now when you were able to find the films practically everywhere else online.

Best Animated Short - 1936

Hooray! My COMLEX 3 is over and I can finally relax and enjoy myself at Nightmare Nights Dallas this weekend! How did it go, you ask? Well how should I know? I'm writing this three weeks early so I won't have to waste much more time studying. Oh the joys of getting a nice long queue.

Anyways, now that we're in the 1930s it's kind of weird to go back and see just how different things were, especially in the game of baseball. In 1936 there were only 11 300-game winners. 30-win seasons and .400 seasons were uncommon but not impossible. The first Hall of Fame voting was held as the BBWAA elected Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Babe Ruth (just one year removed from his last game), the late Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson. And a 17-year-old high school kid named Bob Feller is able to make it to the big leagues and strike out his age, even if it was against the hapless Philadelphia Athletics. Yes, things sure were different back in 1936. And yet the animated short films remain as timeless now as they were back in 1936. Some of them were, at least.