The Fall of the Theatrical Short

If you've ever watched a block of Looney Tunes or Tom and Jerry shorts on a Saturday morning while eating Cheerios, welcome to the club. If somebody made a pie chart of how I spent my childhood, I'm pretty sure I'd see that watching cartoons eclipsed sleeping. There's a lot to love about old cartoons, most of which were originally shown theatrically before movies. From violence to cool visuals to violence, these shorts had it all. However, if you squinted past your spoonful of cheerios, you might have noticed that not every cartoon was the same. The style and humor of these shorts, which were shown back-to-back, could be wildly different.

Take, for example, "The Bowling Alley Cat" from 1942, directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (one of my favorite cartoons):

And "Switcin' Kitten" from 1961, directed by Gene Deitch:

The elaborate character animation and design of "The Bowling Alley Cat" is gone in "Switchin' Kitten" (whose name might also be the weakest rhyme I've ever heard). The sensibility of the humor is also strangely different. The reason? The cartoons were not only produced for radically different budgets - they were produced on different continents. "The Bowling Alley Cat" was produced in Culver City, California, and "Switchin' Kitten" was produced entirely in then-Czechoslovakia.

 The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Cartoon Studio was created in 1937 to get in on some of the money that Walt Disney Animation and Warner Bros. Cartoons had been earning for years. It housed some of the most talented artists and directors of its day, including William Hanna, Joseph Barbera, and Tex Avery. In 1940, it ended Disney's nearly decade-long Oscar streak and earned twenty oscar nominations and 8 wins of its own.

Theatrical shorts were lavishly produced in the 1930s and 1940s. This was, in part, due to a practice known as "block booking." Movies were sold in blocks or packages (comprised of a film, a B-film, and live action and animated shorts) and were played largely in theaters owned by the big-five movie companies. Independent movie theater owners were often forced to buy inferior films with the film they sought to buy or were edged out entirely by studio-owned theater chains. Eventually, in 1948, the Supreme Court decreed that the Big 5 movie studios were in defiance of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The studios were forced to sell their theater chains and end the process of block booking.

This was a definite win for independent movie theaters, but the side effect was that it devalued the package of film shown with the feature, including the animated short. Cartoon studios were forced to work for much smaller budgets, and were partially sustained by selling packages of old shorts to television. In the words of Walt Disney, "There was no money in the short subject. You sold them in bunches, like bananas."

MGM closed its cartoon studio in 1957 when it saw that it received the same amount of money for old cartoons as for new cartoons. However, in the 1960s, MGM realized that there was still some money to be had, they contracted Gene Deitch, a former UPA artist who was living in Czechoslovakia with his new Czech wife. His crew was not well-trained, and their cartoons are full of errors.

Another side effect of MGM's closing was that its two lead directors, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, left to form a new television cartoon studio called Hanna-Barbera, which - as we've seen -was an early adopter of animation outsourcing.

It's a bummer that the artistic and stylistic experimentation of the theatrical animated short died died by the mid-1960s. However, fortunately, the form did not die. As Hollywood cartoon studios fell, independent animators rose. Jan Svankmeyer, Jules Engel, and John and Faith Hubley all produced independent animated films to great acclaim outside of the studio system. Now, the presence of new animation technology has made short production attainable for almost anyone who has the desire.