Cartoon shorts now and then

[Rumpelstiltskin]

Compared to features, shorts are relatively cheap to produce, and is used to experiment with new technology and testing ideas and fresh directors and so on. They are also great when we are dealing with plot ideas that is excellent for a short, but would never work as a feature. Imagine if How To Hook Up Your Home Theater or The Band Concert were 90 minutes long (just as most features like Bambi, Tarzan or Aladdin wouldn't work as five minutes long cartoons).

The fact that they are less expensive than features was also the main reason why Disney made the so-called compialation movies in the 40's.

With Fantasia, it was the opposite. This was a film with a large budget, and each segment would have been way too expensive to produce on its own. But with a large budget for a whole movie, Disney could afford to make shorts that would otherwise have been impossible to make.

What about today then? Back when they made Fantasia they used advanced animation techniques such as drybrush and airbrush, perhaps backlight animation and very complicated shots with the multiplane camera. Now, these effects can be made digitally and much cheaper and faster. Does it mean that all cartoons now costs about the same, of that there are still some shorts which can only be released as a collection in compialation movie with a budget, like Fantasia?

If Disney today can ake any kind of cartoon they want for about the same budget, we probably wan't miss anything. But if there are still some around which requires the little extra that makes it impossible to reelase them individually, it would be great to see a movie like that someday, with shorts on 5-10 minutes which can't be done separately and doesn't work as features (and I mean "conventional" cartoons, not animated pieces of classical music)

Then we have the featurettes; Fun and Fancy Free, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. Stories too long to be called shorts, and too short to be called features. Imaging all the stories waiting to be told, but who finds themselves in this situation of being too short and too long at the same time. Even if movies with a single story is what most expects from Disney, I wouldn't mind if they tried something new now and then, and released a compialation movie consisting of for instance three featurettes, each on about 30 minutes. After all, the studio took the risk with Fantasia 2000.