We Three Animation Shorts

Animation has long held a special place in my heart. I certainly enjoyed it as much as the next kid, but it wasn’t until I saw a particular animated series that was loaded with enormous cultural impact, weight, and depth (of course, I refer to Chip n Dale’s Rescue Rangers) at the tender age of 14 that it really clicked. No joke: it was when I saw that show that I decided to pursue a career in art so I could be an animator.

Now, alas, it is true that my animator dreams were aptly described by the famed poet Weird Al Yankovic from his ballet “Skipper Dan”

But the years have come and gone

and I’m sorry to say

that’s not the way that it’s all worked out

Nevertheless, I still have a fondness for the craft, and especially for the handdrawn cell-shaded shorts back when you needed a specific type of animator’s table to work (or, like me, you tried the MacGyver version of a 8x10 picture frame with the back removed and a desk lamp on the floor underneath pointing up) that have stuck with me for years.

And as much as I appreciated the classic theatrical shorts from Disney and WB, for me, it was the 1980s, in particular, seems to house a collection of my favorites, all done by some person or small studio that, for all I know, never made anything else. (I am sure that they did, but do you really expect me to spend 5 minutes searching online for that info? Please.)

Three in particular I come back to now and again, or as the cool kids say, they live rent-free in my head. Free utilities, too. Heck, even free Door-Dash! Maybe they were class projects. Maybe they are passion projects. Who knows. The point is that they have a distinctive and unique voice and a timelessness that sticks around to this day, and honestly, inspire me to try and keep making stuff in hopes it someday gets to live in at least subsidized housing in someone else’s head.

The first is quite possibly my favorite animated short of all time: “The Big Snit.”

As most of my family and friends know, I have always been a bit weird. Odd. Strange. Unusual. Bizarre. And whatever else I can find in the thesaurus. As my mother so lovingly put it, “When you and the neighborhood kids were playing out ‘Star Wars’ they were all fighting over who got to be Luke Skywalker, but you were happy because you got to be R2D2. That’s when I knew you were a bit …different.”

And this short hits that chord perfectly. It’s weird, but also sweet, and sad, and hilarious, and poignant.

I love so many things about this short. The animation style is unique with neither of the characters looking smooth or even “cute.” The lines wiggle and jump – a complete no-no in normal practice but works here because… uh, well, I don’t know, and I’m not in Film Study 101 anymore so I don’t have to try and make some argument about it being a conscious decision. And, of course, the whole concept is what we call in narrative structure classes: “bat guano insane.”

Not giving anything away in the short tale, some of my favorite moments from it have to be “hiding under the refrigerator,” one of the characters completely aware of the circling hearts, and the entire segment of “Sawing For Teens.” For the last one, in particular, I can only dream of reaching that same Dada absurdist feel in my own works.

And all from a game of Scrabble that momentarily got out of hand.

Extra point: when May and I were first dating, I showed this to her once, and even she still remembers the bittersweet perfection that it is.

The next one is called, all too appropriately, “Get A Job!”

While much more conventional in terms of its delivery, it captures exquisitely the anxiety and frustrations of the actual job hunt, despite dealing with it back in the archaic days of typewriters and landlines, all done with the theme of the early 1980s K-TEL compilation records, particularly their collections of Golden Oldies.

Note to the Youth: K-TEL was a music label that used to specialize in releasing compilation albums of songs like the year’s top hits or songs from the 50s or Ted Striker’s 100 Polka Favorites, etc. Check your parents attic or storage spaces for examples.

Anyway.

So many moments from this short still hold true: the main character, Bob Dog, stepping inside an office building to find an endless hallway of applicants for one job; his grumbling shortly afterward that the interviewer didn’t even “look at my resume;” his sudden mania about how he has to “SELL MYSELF!” (which you’ll find almost verbatim in about 86% of posts on LinkedIn).

Even today, I find myself muttering the musical line, “You really blew it, baby!” after a bad interview, or giving the hilariously pathetic whimper of “Hire me….” when hitting submit on an online job application.

And hey, even the end of the short is still true in that it’s not really what you know, but who you know.

Oh, and maybe the only thing that strikes me as “silly” is that he had three interviews scheduled for one day. Now that is pure fantasy.

The last one is “Technological Threat.”

One of the earliest examples of seamless integration of 3D animation with traditional 2D animation. While I don’t know the exact details, based on what I do know from other examples of the time (the other artistic cultural touchstone from the Disney Afternoon, “Talespin,” for example used of computer animation to draw the Sea Duck in several scenes) what I suspect is that they used the computer wireframes for the drawings, printed them out somehow, and then did the traditional animation over them.

The whole thing goes beyond just technical achievement and reaches a level of “meta” (for the non-youths in the audience – and let’s be honest, that’s most of us – “meta” in this case refers to a piece of art where the art itself is a comment on its own nature or the business of the art) because it deals with, well, machines taking over human (or, in this case, Tex Avery-style dogs) jobs. While a tale about “computers” taking over the office (or these days, AI), it was also a very early harbinger of 3D animation replacing hand animation.

And all this with the added feat, at no extra charge, of doing it without any dialogue whatsoever.

Again, the details make the short stand out for me. The robots are, literally, pencil-necks. Again, for those born after 2010, …actually, make that 1980, “pencil-neck” used to be a TOTALLY SICK BURN.

I also love how when the robots do their work, they actually make the dot matrix printer sound. And no, I don’t mean that they sound like Joan Rivers.

So, there you go: three of my favorite shorts that, I think hold up surprisingly well even after 40 years. Where the big hair and dress shoulder pads failed to hold up, these products of the 1980s stand tall.

I’ve seen more animated shorts than most people, I’m willing to bet, thanks to my animation background, but there are still so many out there, and it’s not like they are easy to find at all. The late 90s “Liquid Television” was a place where I first found “Technological Threat,” among others, but otherwise (especially before YouTube) it has just been catching them on cable randomly and people sharing videos.

Later, websites like Newgrounds, atomfilms, and iFilm were spots that you could catch a number of shorts, and fostered communities that made work solely to share on said sites. And the overwhelming amount of people doing this were it just to share, not for any money. Just the love of the game, so to speak.

For example, my own little animated short from the 2000s, “The Ball Club,” was made just for the fun of it. But, if you want to tack on a few extra views for it, I certainly wouldn’t object.