Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

[3 Colours Red]

In no particular order:

Simpsons - Boy Scoutz 'N The Hood
Animaniacs - Meatballs Or Consequences
Dangermouse - Custard
Don Hertzfeldt - Rejected
Tex Avery - Symphony In Slang
Looney Tunes - Duck Amuck
Samination - Detective Taco
Goofy - How To Play Football
Richard Condie - The Big Snit
Bill Plympton - Push Comes To Shove

[Ginger Yellow]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

Animated shorts and episodes seem like apples and oranges to me. How do you compare, say, an episode of Archer, to, say Paperman? They're completely different art forms.

[Toby Gymshorts]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

Plus, do they have to be funny? Bob Godfrey's Great, an animated film about Isambard Kingdom Brunel, is one of my absolute favourites.

[elguapo4]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

Cordell barker -the cat came back
chuck Jones - one froggy evening

[Amor de Cosmos]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

The Sinking of the Lusitania — Winsor McCay

Betty Boop's Snow White — Max Fleischer

[San Bernardhinault]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

I know it's the obvious choice, but What's Opera Doc remains one of the greatest pieces of entertainment ever made.

[Gerontophile]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

Absolutely anything by Bill Plympton.

[Gerontophile]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

How short do you want? The Trouble With Facelifts.

[ian.64]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

Bambi vs Godzilla (as short as a title sequence but with a terrific punch line)

Golden-Age Simpsons, from Homer's adventure in space (plus inanimate carbon rod) to the classic monorail episode.

[Patrick Thistle]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

The Pixar short 'Piper' on the front of Finding Dory is amazing.

[3 Colours Red]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

Toby Gymshorts wrote: Plus, do they have to be funny?

No - I was very close to putting something by Svankmajer in there, most likely Dimensions Of Dialogue. Mind you, even that's got some extremely dark humour in there.

[Patrick Thistle]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

Lost and Found is a lovely half hour animation - does that fit in the 'shorts' category?

If so, The Wrong Trousers also needs a mention.

Another great animated short is Vincent by Tim Burton.

But Pixar have the edge on this: For the Birds, Knick Knack, and Partly Cloudy are three of their best ones. (Along with Piper mentioned above)

I always loved the Tom & Jerry where Tom was playing the piano in a concert hall and woke up Jerry who was sleeping inside.

[ShortyMedlocke]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

Birds from Pixar is brilliant and never fails to make me laugh.

Pixar - Birds

[blameless]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

Tom and Jerry - "The Cat Concerto"

[Mumpo]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

Don't have nightmares

[Gerontophile]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

ShortyMedlocke wrote: Birds from Pixar is brilliant and never fails to make me laugh.

Pixar - Birds

Loved that.

And it links to loads more of Pixar shorts on the right hand side.

[WOM]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

Already beaten to The Big Snit.

"You're always shakin' your eyes."

And, of course...

'Sawing For Teens".

[Gerontophile]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

Leon.

There's a whole series of these from a French studio. Funny enough, but I suspect that kids will adore them. (Not in French.)

[KGR]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

Barney's Hungry Cousin.

Dick Lundy aceness.

As with so many cartoons of that time, it's the music and sound that tops of the genius. (eg 1:11 when cousin steals sausage and Barney bites fork).

I'm always very partial to the cartoon trope of using alum to shrink something, the example of 1:58 being absolute prime.

Classic phonebox gag at 4:46.

[multipleman78]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

I don't know what it's called or if the entire episode is any good but the section in South Park where the guy goes on Wheel of Fortune is one of the funniest things i have seen on tv.

[Alderman Barnes]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

Crikey, that Lusitania one is fascinating and horrible. I've seen McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur, but the technique on that one is just breathtaking.

[Alderman Barnes]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

And the Betty Boop one is astonishing too. The weirdness in it, Christ. Took me right back to school holiday viewing in the 70s and thinking that with all that my daughter's generation can watch these days, they'll never see anything as downright weird as that without being pointed towards it. Or even a silent film. Or even a black-and-white one.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

Alderman Barnes wrote: Crikey, that Lusitania one is fascinating and horrible. I've seen McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur, but the technique on that one is just breathtaking.

I agree enormously powerful, which if you think about how it was achieved, one card at a time with no overlays makes it even more remarkable.

And the Betty Boop one is astonishing too. The weirdness in it, Christ.

Yeah. There's another one he did for Cab Calloway's Minnie the Moocher which is worth checking out too. He invented the Rotoscope, which enabled frame-by-frame drawing from film using Calloway as a model. Minnie the Moocher opens with a clip of Calloway and you can see how effective it was in both shorts. Calloway's the Koko/Ghost in Snow White.

Sadly the Hays code killed Betty Boop — and the idea of 'adult' cartoons — for thirty years. For me Max Fleischer is the Orson Welles of animation, he grasped the outer reaches of what the medium could do, but was too idiosyncratic and financially chaotic to run a studio successfully.

[Alderman Barnes]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

I only came on this thread to look at the Cat Concerto, which to my mind is still the highest point of Western culture to the present day, and then along comes AdC with all these jewels.

Have you seen the really old ones where Betty Boop was a dog? In a decent world, you'd be presenting a 13-part series on BBC 4 about this.

[Gerontophile]

Your top 10 animated shorts/episodes

Here is a link to the Internet Archive, which has a slew of animation shorts (along with a load of other stuff of multivarious types) which may interest you.

I only found this site last night, so have no idea of the quality.