Ranking the Oscar Nominated Shorts: 1962-1971

I started this blog shortly after the 80th year of the Best Animated Short category, and I realized that you could split those 80 years down to eight 10-year periods beginning with the second year of a decade and ending with the first year of the next decade. So from then on every time I've finished with one of these ten year periods I've been combining all of the nominated films from that period and ranking them by preference, since it's much easier to justify. We have now gotten to the fifth of these posts. Thanks to the timing of my hiatus it's been five months since I've last written one of these. In comparison, I was able to post three of them in the 5-month period from May to October of last year. Oh well. That's why I didn't want to do the hiatus, but I guess it was for the best.

Let's get this show on the road.

NULL: Hypothese Beta (1967)
NULL: The Shepherd (1970)
Two films whose legacy suffers from the suppressive power of greedy university institutions, (although the fact that they are still only available on the obsolete 16mm film format doesn't help.) I managed to trek all the way to the University of Arizona library in Tucson only to be told that they won't lend it out unless we have a 16mm projector to play it. *sigh* I guess I'm taking a road trip to Miami! Whooo! Then watch them go tell me to GFM because I don't have a 16mm projector. *sigh sigh*

Best Animated Short - 1968

Okay, I'm not even going to wait until the end to announce this. I don't even know why I do that because I post the title screen for the winning film on every single of my reviews, so it's not like I'm spoiling anything. It's even more true for this years because I wrote about this year's Best Animated Short winner four months ago. That's right, we have finally reached the year that Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day took home the Best Animated Short Oscar, ending the 13 year drought for Disney and making him one of the select group of people to win a posthumous Oscar. It's hard to believe that it's been four months since I was working on the puzzle based on the film, but I guess time passes when you're busy with clinical rotations, board studying, baseball*, and My Little Pony.

*No idea what to think about the Giants beating the Tigers. I mean, I like both teams. I was born in Michigan and still have aunts that are die-hard fans of the Tigers. And I've kind of gotten board the Giants bandwagon since the entire Randy Johnson's 300th win thing three years ago. I've always liked it when teams that hadn't won for a while wins again, and the Tigers haven't won since 1984, a few months before I was even born. However, I'm also not very pleased with the Tigers' efforts to essentially buy their way to the title with that massive deal for Prince Fielder. On the other hand, the Giants had won two years ago, and they beat the hometown Rangers to do so. So, it really was a lose-lose situation. At least it wasn't the Cardinals that won. 

So in my post back in June I talked quite extensively about Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, but I didn't mention any of the films that it was competing against, so there will still be something to talk about in this post.