Thursday Movie Picks #382: Best Animated Film (Oscar Edition)

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. It's the first Thursday of the month, so as with other months this year that haven't had another theme (eg. October's look at horror), we're getting an Oscar themed edition of the blogathon. This time, the category is "Best Animated Film". Now, this one might have been difficult for me since I don't watch much current-day animation. However, the category only says Best Animated Film, and doesn't specify the relatively recently instituted categore of Best Animated Feature. There have been separate categories for short films going back to the 1930s, one of live-action shorts and one for animated shorts, so I decided to pick three winners from the Best Short (Animated) category:

Flowers and Trees (1932). The winner of the first Oscar in the category, at the 4th Academy Awards, is this short from Walt Disney. It's basicallly a vignette about anthropomorphic flowers and trees, with none of the Disney characters you'd recognize. But it was the first winner in the category, and is also historically significant for being the first movie in the modern three-strip Technicolor, as opposed to two-strip which came before it. (Live action in three-strip came a few years later with some shorts, and in 1935 the first feature, Becky Sharp.) Something like Three Little Pigs, which won the following year is probably better, but I wanted to pick the first. Walt Disney, it should be pointed out, won the first eight Animated shorts Oscars.

The Cat Concerto (1946). Tom and Jerry short in which Tom is a concert pianist trying to play the piano arrangement of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody. However, Jerry has set up home on the strings, and once the hammers start hitting the strings, Jerry gets agitated enough to try to stop Tom, who gets obsessive about killing Jerry. As always, Jerry wins the day.

The Pink Phink (1964). The first Pink Panther short, and one of the last "traditional" animated shorts to win, as the studios were shutting down their animation departments at the time. The Pink Panther wants a house to be painted pink, while his nemesis (officially named "The Little Man"), a short, all-white man, wants to paint it blue. All sorts of visual gags ensue as most of the Pink Panther shorts have no dialogue.

Interestingly, some of the best-known Warner Bros. shorts never even got nominated, such as Rabbit of Seville, What's Opera, Doc?, or Duck Amuck.