Earlier this year the animation world lost an unsung hero. Paul Fierlinger was perhaps best known as the writer/director of the Teeny Little Super Guy shorts on Sesame Street. He and his wife Sandra also created the critically acclaimed My Dog Tulip. I’ve linked to some of his work here and recommend you read the great profile Cartoon Brew did on him. Enjoy!
His Alphabet song also from Sesame Street.
This year I intended to start profiling national film archives that host a lot of great content online at the start of the year as part of my long-inactive By Any Means Necessary series. More than halfway through the year, I am finally doing it.
This idea started late in ’24 when I started noticing how many countries had such sites and I started perusing and bookmarking them.
Even before Conan’s Estonia joke at the Oscars, I’d seen some films on their site. As this archive is less likely to be well-known I’ll spotlight it today.
Today is Võidupüha, an Estonian holiday, which commemorates their victory over Latvia in the Battle of Cēsis. So I am featuring Arkaader, a joint project of the Estonian Film Institute and National Archives of Estonia, to host many historical films online; short and feature, narrative and documentary. Many of the films are free-to-stream. Others are available to rent for a small fee.
Any of the places I feature will have plenty of places to explore, due to the fact that they’re more likely to be dialogue-free I recommend starting with this curated list of animated shorts. There are also music video and experimental films. Most of the films typically have subtitles.
While watching a recent episode of Welcome to Wrexham I noticed they once again used a snippet of an old British Pathé newsreel featuring Cardiff City and Wrexham. British Pathé has a vast online library of digitized newsreels, so I decided to search it out. Sure, enough I found the match in question. Not much footage of live sports about 100 years ago, when they were it tended to be mostly random snippets, most people would have gotten the narrative of the game from newspapers. However, old newsreels and snippets of actual events (referred to as actualities back in the day) are some of the best time capsules we have. They’re peepholes into a past mostly confined to the written word. Enjoy!
It’s rare to see a music video come along for a classic song that never had one, but we’ve recently enjoyed the privilege with the release of “Psycho Killer” by The Talking Heads. If a video is finally to come along for such a song, it’d better bring A-list talent with it , this video does just that. Saoirse Ronan, one of the finest actors on the planet pairs with director Mike Mills (C’mon, C’mon) to present a hypnotically edited, brilliantly performed interpretation of inner-turmoil outwardly portrayed. As the band themselves said “This video makes the song better. We LOVE what this video is NOT — it’s not literal, creepy, bloody, physically violent or obvious.” Enjoy.
It was fairly commonplace in hte eighties to have music videos that were a section of a film. Such is the case of the song that was Rufus Wainwight’s debut in Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller.
The film is a so-bad-it’s-good treat from Canada, but Wainwright’s song is unironically great and catchy. Enjoy!
During the World War II Hollywood’s biggest animators joined the war effort with entertaining instructional and propaganda shorts. For years these titles were scarce, the most hard-to-find were the Private Snafu shorts directed by the Warner Brothers stable of animation directors including the likes of Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett and more along with the voice talent of Mel Blanc in his best Bugs Bunny/Brooklynite voice. However, these have started to become more available since the advent of the Internet. With it being Memorial Day weekend in the US, it seemed an appropriate time to share these.
When I searched my page’s archives I realized I’d yet to feature one of the undisputed landmarks of early cinema, The Great Train Robbery, on my page. So here it is…
Earlier this year both the Netflix limited series Adolescence and its young star, Owen Cooper, took the world by storm. Last week, Cooper made his first appearance in a music video. You can view it here.
Unfortuntely, director James Foley died last week. He was the director of many noteworthy films such as Glengarry Glen Ross, Fear, The Chamber, the series House of Cards on Netflix as well as many collaborations with Madonna starting with music videos and then features. “Papa Don’t Preach” was the genesis of my love of staccato cuts.
An animated short by the inmitable Don Hertzfeldt.
I haven’t posted much lately and I’ve considered many themes that I could begin. That has only fed my procrastination. So, first things first, I’ll try and get Short Film Saturday back up by not trying to stick to a given theme, but rather just trying to post one weekly. Enjoy1
The Movie Rat 