Directed by: Oskar Fischinger
The tagline for Disney's Fantasia (1940) read: "Hear the pictures! See the music!" This is, in effect, what Oskar Fischinger was doing with his animation – communicating music to the deaf, giving visual life to music using colours and geometric patterns. His approach, though later imitated by Walt Disney, was largely appreciated outside the mainstream. However, Allegretto (1936) and An Optical Poem (1937) were both commissioned by big studios – Paramount and MGM, respectively {however, the former film was inconceivably stifled into a black-and-white release}. It was a little novel, I'll admit, to see such an abstract cartoon presented under the MGM banner, and, indeed, it seems that the studio was understandably cautious; they bizarrely introduce An Optical Poem as a "scientific" experiment.
Fischinger's film uses patterns of oscillating circles, paper cutouts dangling from invisible wires, synchronised to Franz Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2." The animation itself resembles a journey through outer space. The orbiting circles are akin to moons orbiting planets, planets orbiting the sun, and there's an unmistakable image of a comet hurtling across the night sky. The overall effect of the space-themed visuals and accompanying classical musical is not all that dissimilar to Kubrick's use of the "Blue Danube" waltz during 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Fischinger seems to be suggesting that to fully articulate such magnificent music is beyond the grasp of our earthly minds – to do so, we must utilise objects far beyond our mortal scope. Most incredibly of all, Fischinger reconstructed these great objects using little more than coloured paper and wire.
Fischinger's film uses patterns of oscillating circles, paper cutouts dangling from invisible wires, synchronised to Franz Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2." The animation itself resembles a journey through outer space. The orbiting circles are akin to moons orbiting planets, planets orbiting the sun, and there's an unmistakable image of a comet hurtling across the night sky. The overall effect of the space-themed visuals and accompanying classical musical is not all that dissimilar to Kubrick's use of the "Blue Danube" waltz during 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Fischinger seems to be suggesting that to fully articulate such magnificent music is beyond the grasp of our earthly minds – to do so, we must utilise objects far beyond our mortal scope. Most incredibly of all, Fischinger reconstructed these great objects using little more than coloured paper and wire.
7/10
Tomatos Another Day (1930) (directed by James Sibley Watson and Alec Wilder) made one appearance at a Boston theatre in the early 1930s, but received such a weak audience response that the creators dismissed it as an outright failure. One can understand the audience reaction: the film itself is so incredibly stilted and awkward (albeit deliberately so) that if you approach it in the wrong mind-set – expecting a traditional melodrama – you're likely to be dismayed at its incompetency. Sibley's son, J.S. Watson Jr., remarked that the film might have proved successful had a popular comedian been involved: "Harold Lloyd, directed by (Mack) Sennet, might have brought it off." Indeed, the film did remind me of W.C. Fields' The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933), in which the actors were encouraged to emulate the melodramatic acting style to the nth degree. Watson uses the same deadpan brand of satire, though his actors, rather than hamming it up, adopt a mechanical, minimalistic delivery that makes them sound monumentally uninterested in their roles.
Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) wrote his three Mity (Myths) classical pieces in 1915, in a collaboration with violinist Pawel Kochañski, for whom the pieces were originally conceived. I don't know anything about classical music, but apparently this work was revolutionary, described as "impressionistic" and "a new style, a new mode of expression for the violin." The three pieces were "La Fontaine d'Aréthuse," "Narcisse" and "Dryades et Pan," of which the first is the most well-known. To my knowledge, there's no specific story that is supposed to go with La Fontaine d'Aréthuse," but here Dimitri Kirsanoff has apparently attempted to devise his own. Fitting the images to the music, but also striving to tell a story, La Fontaine d'Aréthuse (1936) follows his similarly music-orientated short film of the previous year, the wonderful 
When you've only got three minutes to tell a story, you'd better make it count. Pixar Studios has always excelled at such an efficient brand of storytelling: Geri's Game (1997) is a masterpiece in four minutes, and For the Birds (2000) and Lifted (2006) have always been crowd- pleasing favourites. Kiwi! (2006) is a student film by Dony Permedi, and it was produced in much the same mould. The short certainly looks like a student film, the CG animation terribly crude by modern standards (though, admittedly, it's unfair to compare any animated film to the standards of Pixar). However, the technical detail doesn't necessarily matter, as long as it succeeds in telling an emotionally-absorbing story. This it does pretty well. An ambitious little kiwi, long confined to the earth by his measly ratite wings, fulfills his lifelong ambition to fly – or, at least, to approximate the sensation of flight. The moment of success is oddly touching, and the single tear that slips from beneath his eyelid would be familiar to anybody who's ever achieved his lifelong dream. Still, I didn't find Kiwi! quite as life-affirming as many viewers seem to have – for me, it was an amusing little aside, and certainly not a bad way to spend three minutes of my time. 
D.W. Griffith is certainly not a name associated with comedy, but he did direct a few of them early in his career {including his debut, Those Awful Hats (1909)}, before briefly returning to the genre with The Battle of the Sexes (1928). This comedy short from 1909 – The Gibson Goddess – might also be considered a "battle of the sexes." On a trip to the sea-shore to enjoy some peaceful reading time, a beautiful woman (Marion Leonard) is harassed by group of male admirers, who follow her along the beach like a pack of hungry hounds. After several unsuccessful attempts to evade her followers, the woman strikes upon the perfect solution to dispel their interest in her: she gets changed into a leg-revealing beach costume. I'd have thought that revealing her body would only fuel the men's lust, but apparently not – each man apologetically excuses himself from her company, some unable to disguise their revulsion.
Junkopia (1981) is only my second film from Chris Marker – after the breathtaking, poetic La Jetée (1962) – but the two works are not all that dissimilar. Indeed, out of a purely documentary framework, Marker (with co-directors John Chapman and Frank Simeone) seems to have constructed a work of science-fiction. Like his previous masterwork, Junkopia exists without dialogue (and, in this case, characters) and also eschews movement (though not as dramatically as the other film's still images), both by the camera and its subjects. There is one marked exception to this rule. Just as La Jetée climaxed in an unforgettable shot of a woman's eyes fluttering open, Marker ends this film by swiftly and unexpectedly zooming out from a model ship floating in the ocean, startlingly reinforcing the vast, alienating landscape that is his subject. In fact, "alien" is an ideal adjective to describe the film. Michel Krasna's electronic score wails insistently on the soundtrack, as eerily disconcerting as Kubrick's use of Ligeti's "Atmospheres" in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
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