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.

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Module 3 - Fleischer and Smaller Studios

If Module 2 was focused on Disney, then Module 3 was focused on all of the smaller studios that the likes of Disney dominated in the 1930s and 1940s. Dave and Max Fleischer were among the most progressive animators of the 1920s and 1930s. Dave created the rotoscope, which allowed him to animate over live action footage, allowing him to make some fairly detailed characters. The Fleischer brothers later created the Fleischer Studios, which never became as big as Disney, but had some fairly revolutionary output especially in the characters of Betty Boop, Popeye the Sailor, and eventually Superman. They even released a full length animated feature only two years after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Alas, they eventually faded away in the 1940s, giving away to two other studios that never hit it big but had some popular characters: Terrytoons with Mighty Mouse, and Universal/Walter Lantz Studios with Woody the Woodpecker, Andy Panda, and Chilly Willy.

Anyways, onto the discussion

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