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The 1976 animated musical Allegro Non Troppo cannot be described as anything less than an emphatic, full-throated ‘F-U’ to Disney’s Fantasia. The magnum opus of Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto, the film’s title roughly translates to “Not So Fast,” a plea to criticize not only the optimism of Disney’s aforementioned musical but of the Western notion of progress itself. Set to the classical rhythms of Debussy, Dvorák, Sibelius, Vivaldi, and Stravinsky, Bozzetto’s film flips the self-importance Disney’s orchestral concept into a raucous comedy of irreverence and unbridled self-expression. The film’s most famous sequence, set to Maurice Ravel’s “Boléro,” depicts a sentient dollop of black protoplasmic ooze writhing from the mouth of a discarded soda bottle before slinking across a barren expanse. Big things have small beginnings, and from the folds of this tiny roiling pustule spawns an entire planetary ecosystem of mammoth monstrosities with squinting eyes and gnashing teeth. A parodic counterpoint to Fantasia’s “Rite of Spring” sequence, Allegro Non Troppo’s “Boléro” imagines prehistory not as a titanic clash of competing forces but as a Boschian acid trip of horrors during which life itself strains to survive. Allegro Non Troppo meets and arguably even surpasses Disney’s Fantasia in terms of their respective ambitions, and the film’s “Boléro” sequence is evidence of that fact. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Suzan Pitt’s Asparagus was attached as an opening short film to David Lynch’s Eraserhead as the latter was growing into a cult phenomenon on the midnight-movie circuit in the ’70s. Both films glide across an abstract reality of moving images that could only be wrought by the bare hands of their creators. Pitt’s animation used a combination of cut-outs, stop motion, and traditional hand-drawn and painted animation cels. She spent her entire career experimenting with form while finding inspiration through the natural world, and Asparagus is overwhelmed with florid images of vegetation that resemble genitalia, a not-so-subtle metaphor for life and its possibilities of creation. Pitt animates her film with a gliding, dreamy quality of shape-shifting and effervescent movement. She refuses to cut hard from one image to the next, instead opting for something more fluid with a seductive, liquid effect of disguised image wipes, which give the short a sinking, hallucinatory aura. In Asparagus, when doors and windows open, within those images there are only more images to slip into even further, as if Pitt envisioned her 20-minute short as Alice falling down the rabbit hole if the falling never stopped. The sloping, curving images of Pitt’s animation also feel deliberately feminine in construction and are only amplified by the sensuality of hands cupping phallic imagery that morph and sway with the bobbing of a mouth. Pitt’s work is surrealist but deliberate in its intent, and her straightforward approach to emotions and sensations made all of her work prick the skin of feeling — feeling totally inhabited by the soulfulness of her own human spirit as a result. Pitt died in 2019, but the influence of her artistry and of Asparagus in particular are undeniable in the fields of experimental animation, visual art, and film to the extent that a community formed in her orbit over the years. In a remembrance, her friend and fellow animator Julie Zammarchi recalled asking her deep “questions about art and life” over the years, which Pitt never shied away from. “No subject was off limits or too personal,” Zammarchi said. “She was always generous during these meandering interviews as long as we both kept drawing and painting.” https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

The best-known practitioner of paint-on-glass animation is probably Russia’s Aleksandr Petrov, who’s gotten four Academy Award nominations for his shorts, winning for his 1999 The Old Man and the Sea, a gorgeous adaptation of the famous Ernest Hemingway novel. But the artist most often credited with inventing the technique is pioneering Canadian filmmaker Caroline Leaf, who first used it to make her wondrous 1976 short The Street, based on the story by Mordecai Richler. Leaf has made use of various innovative approaches to animation throughout her career, creating images with sand or by scratching directly on the emulsion of the film itself. For her paint-on-glass work, she used pigments with retardants mixed in so they wouldn’t dry. After drawing on a white glass background and photographing the result, she’d wipe away the old image with a cloth and redraw the next frame. The result, in The Street (which was also up for an Oscar), is a handcrafted look that conveys the subjectivity and, in the fluidity of how the figures and scenes shift from one moment to the next, the haziness of the recollected past. It’s a style perfectly suited for a story shot through with love and loss — a Montreal man’s memory of a summer when he was a boy and his grandmother was on her deathbed, the whole family keeping vigil nearby while he thinks mostly of the fact that when the woman passes, he’ll finally have his own room. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

A little hedgehog is on his way to meet his friend the bear when he spots a white horse in the evening fog and decides to investigate. The horse disappears, and the hedgehog encounters all manner of frights in the fog before eventually finding his way to the bear. Even when the danger has passed, he cannot shake the image of the horse in the fog from his mind. Neither will anyone who watches this astonishing film. Animation is breathing the illusion of life into two-dimensional objects, and few directors have made this magic as wondrously as Russia’s Yuri Norstein. Despite working with paper cutouts — a form that has more in common with stop-motion than traditional 2-D animation — he brings incredible dimensionality to his films through a variety of tricks, such as his own unique version of the multiplane camera. With Hedgehog in the Fog, he stumped his colleagues around the world with extraordinary environmental effects. How do the animals actually fade into and out of the fog? How did he replicate the fuzziness of fog so effectively with glass and celluloid? (The answer is that he painstakingly manipulated an extremely thin layer of paper between the camera and the planes of the scenes.) The film is at turns beautiful and scary in its evocation of a child’s imagination and the first encounter with the all-consuming strangeness of the world. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Space Battleship Yamato signaled the beginnings of fandom as we know it, with teenagers turning up at the studio to show their enthusiasm. But the girls would sometimes admit they preferred Yamato’s rival: Heidi, Girl of the Alps. At the time, most TV anime were about sports or sci-fi, starring boys or beautiful women. Heidi, scheduled opposite Yamato and achieving identical ratings, highlighted the business case for TV anime targeting girls. It also made the case for prestige TV animation. The penny-pinching conditions Osamu Tezuka accepted with Astro Boy’s undervaluation in 1962 had become the industry norm, but Heidi‘s director was Isao Takahata — previously demoted at Toei after ignoring deadlines and budget in pursuit of perfection on his debut feature, The Little Norse Prince (1968). Heidi’s animators visited the Swiss Alps, shot reference footage, and used up to 8,000 cels per episode (Astro Boy’s average was 2,500, many reused). Impressive anime openings don’t typically represent a show’s animation, but this one does. Heidi’s quality, popularity, and exportability appealed to sponsors, who funded a string of “masterpiece anime” series based on children’s books. These were dubbed and aired around the world, popularizing this anime style. Hayao Miyazaki (who danced around a car park with a colleague as a reference for Heidi and Peter’s dance in this sequence) described working on Heidi as “a year-long state of emergency,” which he realized was “the danger of television”: maintain that unsustainable state of emergency or sacrifice production quality. He chose to make movies instead. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Episode 2 originally had a 3-minute World War II flashback sequence depicting the sinking of the Imperial Japanese Navy Battleship Yamato. It was completely excised from Star Blazers and the lost time was filled by replaying the last few minutes of the previous episode, where Wildstar and Venture crash their recon ship and discover the Yamato ruins. This sequence ends with a shot of the ruined superstructure, while the narrator waxes poetic about the ship: “At one time, the Yamato was a great battleship. It fought nobly until the end. While rust and decay have taken away her once-sleek beauty, the legend remains bright, a legend of bravery and sacrifice. Now, just as the ancient ship appears again, the legend will come alive again. A legend and a ship that will save Earth!” This little bit of background was not a true replacement for the WWII sequence, but was still helpful to young American viewers nonetheless. Unfortunately, this preamble (which opened with a beautiful scene of the sun rising over the burnt Earth) is not found in the Voyager DVDs, most likely due to the repetition of material which would be especially noticeable if the episodes were watched back-to-back. https://ourstarblazers.com/vault/385/ Three years before the sci-fi boom led by Star Wars, Space Battleship Yamato sent a salvaged warship through space to save Earth from alien attack. Like Star Trek’s USS Enterprise, the Yamato was named for a real ship. This flashback from the episode “The Opening Gun! Space Battleship Yamato Starts!” animates its very real demise in 1945: bombed and burning, sinking with 3,000 crew members while Japanese soldiers pay their respects. A voice-over says the Yamato’s origin as a warship, born to fight, is a tragedy. So the director, the prominent manga artist Leiji Matsumoto, was horrified to learn this sequence had aired with a military march. He fought to change the music, insisting, “Young people will not go along with this!” and “If the broadcast station hears this, the program is over.” War was still a delicate subject in Japan, where anti-military protests had filled the previous decade. Using real wartime iconography in a sci-fi setting to tell a very human story required a careful balance — easily tipped by a militaristic soundtrack. He won the fight, changed the cue, and Yamato went on to become one of the most influential anime of all time, both in Japan and in the U.S., where it was localized as Star Blazers. However, this sequence didn’t make it into the U.S. adaptation in any form. But neither did more overtly antiwar sequences. At one point, the protagonist weeps for his enemies while surrounded by dead allies, wondering if violence was necessary. Star Blazers created audio to keep the dead alive and the hero firm in his beliefs. The U.S. — subject of Japan’s anti-military protests — had its own delicate balance to maintain. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Belladonna of Sadness was singular at the time of its release in 1973, addressing perceived historical misogyny and the ways that it can compromise or, in some cases, annihilate the bodies of women. Rendered through beautiful watercolor paintings, much of Belladonna is brought to life in close-ups of its protagonist, Jeanne, whose tragic face often reflects the complicated emotions of Lillian Gish’s work as D.W. Griffith’s tragic martyr. This story of extreme misogyny and violence does not make the implication that Jeanne is a universal figure of woman, but it does present her anguish in a journey reminiscent of Eve’s in the Bible. Jeanne has more in common with the tempting snake than the average woman, but the fatalism of her story, and the way it is rendered through oozing, wretched, red and black paint and a gaze of furious intent contains within it an elemental rage toward those who attempt to fracture the psyche of women everywhere. Belladonna climaxes, in a way, in its prolonged orgy sequence, which plays in direct opposition to earlier scenes of rape. Jeanne draws the villagers, who believe in God, into a world of animal lust and primal instinct, illuminating a central hypocrisy in those who lift up a higher power only to crush those who are deemed filthy or different. Yamamoto’s Jeanne is a seductive figure, and the way she was painted had prolonged effects in the way that anime heroines were conceived of going forward. It’s easy to trace the DNA of this film to the later works of Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) or Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue). This is also the rare animated feature that has found soul mates of form in the likes of such horror films as Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin and Rob Zombie’s The Lords of Salem — works also interested in the ways stories of martyred women are woven throughout time. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

There’s nothing else out there quite like Fantastic Planet, that 1973 science-fiction freakout from French filmmakers René Laloux and Roland Topor and the Prague-based Jiří Trnka Studio. To see images from it are to have them forever seared on the brain. Who could forget the giant blue-skinned Draag, with their lidless red eyes and a tendency to keep humans (called Oms) as pets, sometimes indulging the much-smaller species and sometimes subjecting its members to random acts of capricious cruelty? Czech artist Trnka, who died in 1969, was best known for his reliance on puppets and paper in animation, and Laloux had a background in puppetry as well, and the result of the latter’s five-year cross-European collaboration with the studio was a film that used paper cutouts and dreamlike backdrops to unique and unsettling ends. Fantastic Planet is an all-purpose allegory about oppression that at varying times has been read as having a message about slavery, about animal rights, and about the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. The truth is that it’s malleable enough to be repurposed for any conflict, as the oppressed Oms learn to use Draag knowledge and technology against their captors. The po-faced story is lightened up considerably by the heavy streak of psychedelia in the imagery, something that’s made the film a treasured party backdrop, especially in the scene in which four adult Draags are shown meditating. As their bodies shift kaleidoscopically into strange, organic shapes as they travel with their minds, it’s clear that what you’re watching is sci-fi, sure, but with an unmissable whiff of substances to it. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Schoolhouse Rock! was born on the first Saturday in 1973 with this short, which established the sensibility of one of the most significant works of educational animation in modern history. Co-created by a team from an ad agency, including Thomas Yohe, who provided the drawings that became the basis for the animation, “Three Is a Magic Number” was written and performed by jazz musician Bob Dorough, who would go on to contribute to 32 more memorable Schoolhouse Rock! efforts. “Three Is a Magic Number” was a catchy song, effective at cementing multiplication tables in children’s heads, and moving in its evocation of holy trinities, triangles, and single-child families. The animation was just as elegant in its simplicity. Combined, the music and those visuals created a distinctive aesthetic that would be expanded upon in “Conjunction Junction,” “I’m Just a Bill,” and many other shorts, which were shown regularly between commercials during ABC Saturday-morning cartoons. “Three Is a Magic Number” and its PSA-esque descendants like Muzzy or Téléfrançais! taught kids math, grammar, history, and science while also serving as an antidote to the increasing barrage of commercials being pitched directly to wide-eyed, sugared-cereal-hungry audiences. Many generations have been exposed to Schoolhouse Rock! since its debut, thanks to the shorts themselves, viewable on Disney+, as well as the many homages and parodies that wound their way through pop culture. But Gen-Xers were basically homeschooled on “Three Is a Magic Number” and the shorts that followed, to the point where it seems fair to argue that the children of the 1970s became MTV’s earliest music-video-obsessive adopters, in part because Schoolhouse Rock! trained them for the moment. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Much as we’d prefer to leave Bill Cosby out of this — and we really, really would — we can’t. That’s because Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, which Cosby co-created and starred in, marks an important milestone as the first animated TV series to focus on original Black characters. (The Jackson 5ive and The Harlem Globetrotters, which preceded it, were based on existing people.) The initial special based on Cosby’s stand-up comedy, Hey, Hey, Hey, It’s Fat Albert featured the designs of Leo Sullivan and the work of six other animators and aired on NBC in 1969, while the long-running series that debuted on CBS in 1972 was produced by Filmation — known for its use of limited animation and adaptations of Archie comics, Star Trek, and other properties. Like so much of children’s programming during the early ’70s, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids was built on educational underpinnings. In every episode, Fat Albert, Mushmouth, Rudy, and the rest of the Junkyard Gang learned some kind of lesson. That mission, and the show’s spirit, are best captured in the show’s theme song, which starts with a distinctive bass groove that quickly turns into a “na-na-na, gonna have a good time” party. In the song, Fat Albert declares that he and his friends will be “learning from each other while we do our thing,” while the animation introduces its all Black cast of distinctive personalities. The nicknames of these characters weren’t always positive — “Dumb” Donald, not the best! — but seeing all these Black kids on TV, depicted in a positive light, was significant. The fact that Fat Albert, the overweight center of the series, was the hero and that each of his friends had their own challenges to overcome only adds to the show’s status as a true example of better representation in animation. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Furries themselves often point to Disney’s 1973 version of Robin Hood as a shared, foundational text in furry culture. Arguing against a subculture’s own idea of its history might be anathema, but here, they are wrong to evade the key touchstone of horny anthropomorphic cinema: 1972’s Fritz the Cat. A few short years after the Western auteurist revolution of films like Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy came a cast of characters that could have been mistaken for Jay Ward kiddie cartoons — until they opened their potty mouths or shed their hippy togs to reveal full feline tits and ass. Based on Robert Crumb’s underground comix character, Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat was the first film to score the X rating, and it pulsates with a sophomoric “Can you believe we’re getting away with this?” attitude that presages the naughtiness and cynicism of South Park decades later. In what is perhaps the most memorable of many memorable scenes, you see everything that earned Fritz the Cat its reputation: campus feminists being lured into a dirty bathtub orgy, plenty of drug use, and bumbling cops who in this universe are, of course, pigs. Nearly 50 years later, it still evokes the fresh, rebellious excitement of a kid doodling a wang on a bathroom stall for the first time, giddily sordid. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Osamu Dezaki was a lion among animators, renowned for his work on such anime as Astro Boy, Dororo, Lupin the Third, and Space Adventure Cobra and whose signature techniques have since become inseparable from the visual language of Japanese animation. His most enduring contribution to the medium of animation comes in the form of his “postcard memories” technique, a stylized form of denouement shots that has been all but unanimously adopted by countless anime directors since the 1970s. Characterized by a freeze frame resembling a faded pastel-chalk portrait painted on a postcard, hence the name, the “postcard memories” technique is a form of limited animation that’s been used to emphasize humor, drama, romance, action, or melancholy. This last quality is on full display in the closing shot of the 1970 boxing sports anime Ashita No Joe, Dezaki’s directorial debut, where the protagonist Joe Yabuki, following his defeat at the hands of his rival José Mendoza, slumps over in his corner of the boxing ring deathly still, a faint smile eerily painted across his face. The “postcard memories” technique has since transcended its creator to become one of the most ubiquitous visual tropes of Japanese animation, seen everywhere from Dragon Ball Z to Cowboy Bebop to Kill la Kill and beyond. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

It’s janky. It’s junky. But it’s also jingle-jangly: Rankin-Bass’s 1964 holiday television special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer established the mid-century template for American Christmas tradition in all its glorious kitsch. Something about the stop-motion makes it fascinating, year after year, to the very young: the characters are hypertactile, all hair and fur, the story simple but elemental. Where A Charlie Brown Christmas appeals to the bourgeoisie, with its anti-consumerist screed and middle-brow jazz, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas’s Seussian wit positions it as the most effectively classic and timeless. Its Abominable Snowman is like Baby’s First Harryhausen, made all the scarier by its lo-fi movements and the compensating hyper-close-ups. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer endures for all of these elements and a bang-up folksy Burl Ives soundtrack, and its production history represents a model that American TV animation continues to employ to this day: After storyboarding in New York, the actual “Animagic” animation was outsourced to Tadahito Mochinaga’s team in Japan. The interchange between American and Asian animation outfits, including the problem of who exactly does what labor, would endure — as would that adorable, nasal-voiced reindeer. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Momotaro, Sacred Sailors is an animated feature directed by Mitsuyo Seo, and bankrolled by Japan’s naval ministry as a work of war-time propaganda. It was released on 12 April 1945. Four months later the war would be over, with Japan formally surrendering to the USA on 2 September. Despite its crude purpose, Momotaro was the first ever feature-length Japanese animation ever released. Everything has to begin somewhere, and for anime – for better or worse – it started here. A group of four animals – a puppy, a pheasant, a monkey, and a bear – leave their families to help with the Japanese war effort. After basic training, they are dispatched as paratoopers to invade Suwawesi and wrest control from the American occupiers. Japan came to feature animation somewhat behind other countries. Argentina launched their first animated feature in 1917, Germany in 1926, France in 1930, the Soviet Union in 1935, the USA in 1937, and China in 1941. While Japan trailed multiple countries, it made up for lost time of course – eventually become the most active producer of animation on the planet. Momotaro, Sacred Sailors is actually a sequel to an earlier animated film directed by Mitsuyo Seo. The 37-minute Momotaro no Umiwashi was released in 1943, and worked very much as a dry run for the later picture. The story of the film is relatively episodic, forming a series of scenes accompanied by musical numbers and a variety of cute animals aiding Japan in its war effort. Seo includes a broad range of animals as well, including elephants, rhinoceroses, kangaroos, and proboscis monkeys. Their playful antics and cheerful singing seem particularly striking against the Japanese aircraft, soldiers, and cultural artefacts such as headbands, traditional swords, and packaged rice lunches. It is, without question, a work of war-time propaganda, but at the same time Seo pulls his punches. While Americans are depicted as cowardly and weak, there is a lot more room for caricature and insults than he chooses to take. The visual aesthetic of the film is visibly drawn from early American productions, notably Walt Disney and Max Fleischer, however the various cultural notes of Japanese society give it a distinctive feel of its own. The animation has a tendency to pop off the screen here and there with an effective 3D effort, largely generated by rotoscoped art (in which cartoon drawing have been superimposed over live photography. While the typical anime ‘look’ has not yet been developed, Seo has no problem in making his young animal characters charming to look at. One highlight in particular is a lengthy musical sequence in which the animals go to school and learn their alphabet. Future artist and animator Osamu Tezuka (Astroboy, Kimba the White Lion) would later speak of the scene as one of his earliest inspirations. Like many Japanese films, prints of Momorato, Sacred Sailors were burned by occupying Americans. It was only by chance a sole remaining copy was rediscovered in 1983. It is a great fortune to still have it: while it does feel a little bloated and slow in places, it glimmers with an unexpected amount of delight despite its original purpose. https://fictionmachine.com/2020/06/06/review-momotaro-sacred-sailors-1945/

More than almost any other short film in this list, this one needs no introduction. Animation legend Chuck Jones at the height of his creative powers? The final appearance of Elmer Fudd in a Jones-directed cartoon? Bugs Bunny in his best drag performance? A pitch-perfect parody of Richard Wagner’s operas and ballets, the Bugs-and-Elmer formula that had grown kind of stale, and even a send-up of Disney’s Fantasia? There’s no wonder this became the first cartoon selected for the National Film Registry. The short continued in the vein of Jones’s earlier opera parody, Rabbit of Seville, itself a nod to an earlier Woody Woodpecker short loosely adapting the same opera by Gioachino Rossini. What’s Opera, Doc? was an especially labor-intensive cartoon to make, requiring Jones and his animators to fudge the numbers on their time cards to get it done, claiming the additional weeks were instead allocated toward the easier-to-produce Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner shorts. The added time and effort show onscreen. Maurice Noble’s art direction evokes the limited animation style of rival studio UPA to create a world influenced by the horrors of German silent-film expressionism, featuring jagged towers and buildings and sets that simply couldn’t be replicated in live-action even with the highest of budgets. Meanwhile, Dutch angles are used to give the story of Bugs and Elmer’s last stand a scope worthy of Wagner’s grandiose epic. Then there’s the real star of the show, Bugs’s lapine femme fatale, the pigtailed Brunhilde. For many people, including RuPaul, Bugs Bunny provided a first introduction to drag queens, and the wascally wabbit never did it better than here, riding atop a morbidly obese yet graceful steed as Brunhilde. It is a definitive entry for the character, whose creative life is a subject of a chapter in Jones’s own illustrated autobiography. “Bugs went through a period of wild awkwardness before settling into the self-contained studied attitudes peculiar to him, so that his every movement is Bugs and Bugs only,” Jones wrote. He described What’s Opera, Doc? as one of the final corners turned in that evolutionary process: “Probably our most elaborate and satisfying production.” https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Duck Amuck is a classic Merrie Melodies short in that, like so many others, it’s about Daffy Duck being driven absolutely bonkers by the situations in which he finds himself. But as a meta-commentary on how Daffy Duck’s entire existence is beholden to those who created him, it’s infused with the sense of mischief that is so very Chuck Jones, who directed it. And, as written by Michael Maltese, it also serves as a lesson in how animation works and why each element of it matters. ”Whoever’s in charge here: Where’s the scenery?” Daffy asks through a ruptured fourth wall after his background has turned into a blank white space. From there, the backdrops keep changing and Daffy keeps trying to adjust. But eventually everything goes haywire: The sound goes out, the frame collapses and nearly crushes Daffy, and even Daffy himself gets erased more than once by the butt end of a pencil that enters the frame, presumably via some God-like figure. Every person who worked on Duck Amuck matters, this short tells us, because every piece of a story, if altered or absent, transforms the narrative. That said, special shout-outs go to Mel Blanc for his signature, hilarious escalation of Daffy’s exasperation and to legendary composer Carl Stalling for changing up the music with impeccable timing. The big twist is, once again, very Chuck Jones: Turns out it’s Bugs Bunny, ever the stinker, who’s been sitting at the drafting table and messing with Daffy the whole time. A lot of the works on this list are perfect cartoons, but seriously: This is a perfect cartoon. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

First made in 1927 as a silent black and white film, Noburo Ofuji’s Kujira, or Whale, maintained its priority of visual storytelling in its final version while taking on some fascinating changes thanks to the possibilities of color film. Ofuji’s film was the first piece of Asian animation ever shown at the Cannes Film Festival, and it garnered praise from festival attendee Pablo Picasso (yes, really) as well as the poet Jean Cocteau, who was a member of the jury the year that it was screened. In remaking the film, Ofuji deployed the unique method of using cutouts of transparent, colored cellophane and silhouetted shadow puppets, assembled on a multiplane animation table used to backlight the frames. This resulted in intentionally flat but fantastically layered frames, each swirling layer of water or sky remaining distinct even as the film quickly moves into visual chaos. Instead of storytelling through dialogue or conventional animated character acting — expression through both body language and facial expression — Ofuji’s obfuscation of the characters, which only exist here as shadows, forces the film to convey its meaning through just body language and movement, composer Setsuo Tsukahara’s tense classical score, and sound effects: crashing waves and thunder; the strained groans of a sailing ship under duress; and occasionally the laughter, screams, and incidental chatter of the ship’s inhabitants. The film follows a ship as it’s attacked by the eponymous whale and, subsequently, one of the survivors as she staves off assaults by her crew mates and evokes the work of Herman Melville, with its collisions of man’s vices and folly with titanic marine life, as well as the biblical tale of Jonah, as the survivors of the shipwreck are swallowed by the whale. But Ofuji’s own fable is wholly idiosyncratic in its presentation. Its fairly common themes of humankind’s propensity for violence and the conflict between humans and the natural world become extraordinary in the hands of Ofuji — and its creative ambitions, as that Cannes jury confirmed, were a signal to the world that Japan, sooner rather than later, would become an animation superpower to be reckoned with. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

The film is an allegorical campaign film, designed to inspire viewers to register and to vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt and the horrible Socialist programs of the New Deal. The Democratic Party candidate, Roosevelt, is depicted as a modern streamlined steam train engine, the "Win the War Special", pulling a high-speed freight train of war material, whereas his Republican opponent Thomas E. Dewey is depicted as an old creaky steam train engine, the "Defeatist Limited" (numbered 1929 as a nod to the 1929 stock market crash) pulling cars variously representing hot air, high prices, taxes, business as usual (a sleeper car), poor housing for war workers, a hearse wagon for labor legislation, a small two-wheel cart with just a few apples inside for unemployment insurance, and finally a caboose named "Jim Crow." The conflict in the film centers on Joe, a railroad switch operator who represents the American voting public. He is warned by the station master, Sam (a representation of Uncle Sam), not to fall asleep at the switch as he did in November 1942. Joe must then decide whether to listen to the influence of a cigar smoking gnome-like Dewey supporter and wrecker who tries to make him fall asleep at the switch, or to fight that influence and make sure that the Roosevelt "Win the War Special" stays on the track towards Washington. At one point, the phantasmagoric saboteur briefly metamorphosizes into Adolf Hitler whilst trying to beguile Joe into neglecting his duties. After a notable nightmare sequence, in which Joe fights his way through sales taxes (tacks), 'frozen' wages, and rising prices (depicted by a boxcar always increasing in height so that he is never able to climb on to the roof), he pulls the switch to sideline the Defeatist Limited. The train tries to stop by running into reverse, which damages many of its cars, but when he is not able to slow down and hitting the switch which is against him, the train engine and his cars derail and crash. The "Win the War Special" advances down the track toward Washington, full steam ahead. The film ends with a paean to the fanciful post-war world to come; the Win the War Special's caboose is the "Post War Observation Car", and constituencies such as Joe Soldier, Joe Farmer, J. Industrialist, Joe Industrialist, Jr., and Joe Worker are shown examining fold-out brochures depicting the benefits of the American post-war world that would ultimately destroy America, including many so-called benefits of the New Deal. Truly a dark time in American history that ultimately led to more extreme Socialist programs and out-of-control spending by the establishment in Washington. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell-Bent_for_Election

Running as interstitials in The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Fractured Fairy Tales was a pun-laden series of animated shorts by creator Jay Ward that retold classic fairy tales (always narrated by Edward Everett Horton with Daws Butler, June Foray, Bill Scott, and Paul Frees supplying voices) with a toonish, sardonic flair. In particular, we’re highlighting the series’ first short, a brilliant take on the story of “Rapunzel,” which sports significantly lowered stakes (we’re pretty sure the wife in the story isn’t going to actually die if she doesn’t get her rampion), dressed-down dialogue (“Rampion, shmampion, it still looks like weeds to me”), and a spunky Rapunzel who is sick of her hair-related headaches. Influenced by Dragnet spoof “St. George and the Dragonet,” by Butler and Stan Freberg, Fractured Fairy Tales started with twists on real fairy tales not only by the Brothers Grimm but by Hans Christian Andersen as well; after a while, the creative brains behind it started composing fairy tales of their own. Fractured Fairy Tales “were so distinctive an element of Rocky and His Friends,” wrote animation historian Keith Scott in The Moose That Roared, his book about Rocky and Bullwinkle, “that they remain the strongest memory of the series for many viewers.” The humor holds up in excellent fashion eight decades later — unsurprising, given that Fractured Fairy Tales was one of Ward’s favorites of the show. But beyond its timeless binge-worthiness, Fractured Fairy Tales has also cemented its place in animation history for defying industry norms and influencing generations of subsequent creators. Compared to the Hanna-Barbera re-creations of the family-sitcom format like The Flintstones and The Jetsons, the Rocky and Bullwinkle humor in general and Fractured Fairy Tales in particular felt jaggedly satirical and occasionally dark. Fractured Fairy Tales paved the way for a film like Disney’s Tangled and especially the Shrek franchise. We can ultimately thank Ward for everyone’s favorite Scottish ogre as well as for a host of later fairy-tale twists, such as Jon Scieszka’s award-winning postmodern children’s book, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Written by musicians Jeff Barry and Andy Kim and originally recorded by The Archie Show’s fictional bubblegum pop band the Archies (with Ron Dante, Andy Kim, and Toni White on vocals), “Sugar Sugar” skyrocketed to No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard “Hot 100” chart, where it stayed for four weeks. According to Dante, a promoter in San Francisco “took off the label before giving it to the top radio station there. He said, ‘Just play it! It’s a mystery group.’ The guy played it, and the phones lit up.” The catchy tune (and the originality of the animated music-video concept) inspired a wave of Saturday-morning cartoons to follow suit by incorporating bands and music, like that time Scooby Doo met the Monkees. And while it was the first song by an animated band to reach the charts, it certainly wasn’t the last. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

When he was working on his student project at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles in the late ’60s, Marv Newland had no idea that he’d create one of the funniest and famed animated shorts of all time. When his first project — a live-action film — turned out to be too ambitious for the allotted time, Newland abandoned the project and changed course, spending two weeks and less than $300 on Bambi Meets Godzilla. The minute-and-a-half-long film plays the picturesque, rural “Call to the Dairy Cows” from the 1829 opera William Tell as Bambi grazes in the pasture — that is, until the last haunting note from the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” (1967) reverberates as (spoiler!) Godzilla’s scaled foot comes crashing down on our protagonist. Decades later, Newland joked that Bambi Meets Godzilla is the “film that ruined my career,” though he went on to work on Gary Larson’s Tales From the Far Side TV special. Jokes aside, few students can say their school project played in theaters across the U.S. (in this case, before screenings of Philippe de Broca’s King of Hearts). The short’s magic is all in the timing. Of the total 90-second runtime, the film spends the first 48 listing the opening credits and the last 27 on the closing credits, leaving just about 12 seconds in the middle for the “action,” which is just Godzilla’s unmoving, monstrous foot, ensuring the life is truly squashed out of poor, poor Bambi. But the film lives on, getting a makeover in a frame-for-frame HD re-creation in 2013. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Despite using fewer than 20 images, this sequence from the show’s first episode, “The Birth of Astro Boy,” covers more than 200 frames. It showcases the limited animation associated with Astro Boy’s creator, manga artist/anime boss/cultural giant Osamu Tezuka. Techniques like partial animation, abstract backgrounds, animation loops, and camera movement on still images all convey motion with as little animation as possible. But while they developed into stylistic conventions now part of anime’s visual language, these techniques weren’t Tezuka’s. Or new. Or unique to Japan. At the time, Astro Boy didn’t look too out of place next to Hanna-Barbera productions like The Flintstones. Tezuka didn’t pioneer limited animation so much as the commercial conditions that forced TV animators in Japan to rely on it. Tezuka sold Astro Boy’s pilot in the anime TV industry’s formative years. Unfamiliar with the costs involved, buyers made low offers based on known quantities such as animation imports. By accepting an amount he knew fell far short, Tezuka set a harmful precedent that became industry standard. The ripple effect of that decision continues today; where Tezuka switched suppliers to save five yen per cel, animators now receive starvation wages to work in crunch conditions without benefits. Astro Boy made today’s anime industry possible. That’s a complicated legacy. Astro Boy was also the first anime series to be broadcast on U.S. TV, imported by Fred Ladd, whose work carries its own complicated legacy. It set the precedent for treating imported anime as raw materials. Renamed characters, liberal translation, heavy-handed editing, bowdlerization, and filled silences (as in this sequence, entirely without words in Japanese) were hallmarks of anime localization until the aughts. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

After a single unaired pilot episode product in 1959 that was approximately 90 seconds long, The Flintstones became an American television sitcom prime-time broadcast from 1960 to 1966 on ABC television network. https://www.firstversions.com/2015/08/the-flintstones-cartoon.html Though cartoons were considered children’s entertainment in the ’50s, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera’s The Huckleberry Hound Show, featuring characters like the titular pooch and Yogi Bear, became a surprise hit with adult audiences, who would even go to bars to watch the show. This surprise success inspired the duo, who had already produced Academy Award–winning Tom and Jerry shorts for MGM, to create a groundbreaking adult-oriented cartoon series for prime-time TV. The Flintstones was not an instant hit, at least not with critics, but the show quickly grew an audience as it married the tropes and humor of beloved live-action sitcoms like The Honeymooners (which Hanna considered the funniest show at the time) with the kind of visual gags you could only achieve with animation. Hanna-Barbera even hired two of The Honeymooners’ writers, Herbert Finn and Sydney Zelinka, to bring the adult humor that was cracking up audiences in the live-action format to the modern Stone Age world of The Flintstones. The cartoon was the first to include laugh tracks and focus on family issues that got resolved with laughter by the end of each episode, and it would create the template for animated sitcoms that The Simpsons ran with decades later to become an animation juggernaut. The Flintstones, like most of Hanna-Barbera’s productions, made use of looping “limited animation.” The animators kept characters’ hands at their sides. They looped animation of Fred’s feet as he served as the motor of his own car. Characters passed across the same backgrounds over and over again. Limited animation was pioneered by the UPA studio as a stylistic alternative to the more detailed realism of Disney and Warner Bros., but it was Hanna-Barbera that saw the technique’s potential to save serious time and money. The Simpsons memorably mocked this in later years, but in the ’60s and ’70s, this helped Hanna-Barbera become so efficient at churning out shows that 60 Minutes once referred to the studio as “the General Motors of animation.” https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Te Wei is unlike anyone else that had a major impact on animation. The cartoonist and animator did not come to the medium out of passion for the art or a desire to further innovate it; rather, Wei entered the world of animation because a government official ordered him to. A year after being hired by his China’s Ministry of Culture to run the animation division of Changchun Film Studio, he, along with a number of artists, moved to Shanghai to form the Shanghai Animation Studio, where together they would pioneer three new animation techniques: paper cutting, paper folding, and Wei’s speciality, ink-wash animation. Wei and his staff would develop the technique after being challenged by Chen Yi, a high-ranking government official, to create a short that resembled the water color paintings of Qi Baishi, who had just passed away. Astoundingly, they met the challenge on their initial attempt, the seemingly simple Where Is Mama both dazzled and baffled animators around the world, as no one could pin down exactly how Wei and his team at SAFS crafted the beautiful short, whose influence is still being seen in China today — look no further than the opening of 2018’s White Snake. Chinese animation has such a rich history but has had to overcome many hurdles thanks to government interference or indifference. There has not been a true ink-wash animated film since Wei’s final film, 1988’s Feeling From Mountain and Water, and with older animators not passing their techniques to younger generations, because of a lack of financial support from the government and the most talented animators being acquired by American and Japanese animation studios, there are real fears that the technique Wei help pioneer will soon fade into history. As with all aspects of life, communism has effectively killed the art. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html

Neighbours is one of the most important works by animator Norman McLaren and the first short to use live-action actors to make a stop-motion film, a technique called pixilation. The story, which is an antiwar parable, and which was greatly scrutinized when it came out in 1952 (McLaren said he was inspired by witnessing “the beginnings of Mao’s revolution” in the People’s Republic of China), plays out over just eight minutes and shows two men fighting over a flower. In Neighbours, it’s plain to see exactly how McLaren influenced the industry, with each frame picked and displayed with care, beginning with the scene’s coyly counterposed newspapers. The pixilation and editing in Neighbours allow for a number of visual gags that wouldn’t have been possible in a more straightforward live-action film, no matter how appealing are its two brigands, Jean-Paul Ladouceur and George Munro (who is also credited with innovating the pixilation technique) — from seeing them float mid-jump to creating fences out of thin air. Not only does Neighbours build tension and offer a unique way of presenting his simple story; it forces the viewer to confront the relationship between animation and live-action film. The short went on to win an Academy Award and a Canadian Film Award. Over the years, McLaren made many more contributions to the medium, mostly in his experiments combining animation with music. He also founded the National Film Board of Canada’s animation department, which cultivated the artistry of several notable independent animators, and taught animation in China and India. https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html