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An error has ocurred. Please try againLike a metascore, this masterlist is intended to represent a wider consensus. So a film that appears on many Top 100 lists (like Vertigo) will place higher than a film that only appears one or two lists (like High Noon).
For more internationally celebrated Canadian films, check out my list of Canada's Best: Top 10 NFB Animated Shorts https://www.imdb.com/list/ls027121457/
The idea was a definitive list of the greatest animated short films, different the greatest and best loved cartoons. These visionary shorts run the full spectrum of the animated medium, from family-friendly fables to challenging experimental works expressing something less comforting.
http://prettycleverfilms.com/category/saturday-morning-cartoons/#.WheYiP1e6hc
Since its formation in 1939, the NFB has been nominated 35 times for the Best Animated Short Academy Award, winning six. This list contains 5 Oscar winners and 3 entries on Jerry Beck’s list The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals.
A notable entry on the list is The Log Driver's Waltz (1981); John Weldon’s enthusiastic take on a traditional folk song bursting with lumberjacks, moose and other quintessentially Canadian imagery. The Log Driver's Waltz is not as well known internationally as the Oscar-nominated NFB cartoons, but the musical short remains a memorable favorite in Canada and is still one of the NFB’s most requested films.
Watch them for free at https://www.youtube.com/user/nfb
Reviews
The Death of Batman (2003)
"Not a Good Idea"
The first line of dialogue in this indie short is Batman saying "Not a good idea" and that accurately sums up the whole project. The original concept, writing and approach to the character in 'The Death of Batman' are not good ideas and, in fact, the entire short is a extremely bad idea. This short has nothing to do with the other fan-based indie shorts, 'Batman: Dead End,' 'World's Finest,' and 'Grayson,' which are essentially mock-up trailers for films that fans would like to see developed and are intended for presentation at comic conventions. Whereas those three shorts are created out of a spirit of fanboy reverence and earnest enthusiasm for superhero movies, 'The Death of Batman' feels like it was made by a person expressing severe angst toward the concept of the superhero. I hesitate to use the word disturbing to describe this short because that word suggests an emotional impact that a skilled filmmaker could achieve, in the way a horror movie or an art film can be both disturbing and rewarding. 'The Death of Batman' is disturbing without being rewarding in the slightest. I think I understand what the director had intended; Batman as a Christ-figure (the short's last image is a stained-glass image of Jesus). So the less-than brilliant rationale for this indie short appears to be that for the Dark Knight to work, cinematically, as a Christ-figure he must be brutally tortured and die. The director seems focused on every type of taboo that could never make it into a studio superhero movie, such as having the hero tortured, sexually assaulted and then pointlessly killed with a heroin overdose. Personally I like a darker Gotham than most and I have imagined what an R-rated Batman movie might be like, however 'The Death of Batman' is unrewarding even in simply seeing it as a for-adults superhero story because all of its extremeness and shock value is all it has to offer. This short is nothing more than somebody's perverse imagining of Batman's death with no redeeming character insight and a failed Christ comparison. This is not a funny short, as others on this sit have suggested - it is not amusing or entertaining or even thought-provoking.
If you are someone who cares about the character of Batman, this short is only an upsetting and angering experience Do yourself a favor, DO NOT WATCH THIS SHORT. I don't mean that as in a trekkie telling you not to watch 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture' because it fails to meet certain expectations or do not watch 'Batman & Robin' because it's a waste of time, I mean that if you watch this short could ruin Batman for you. I wish I had never seen it.
Batman Begins (2005)
NOT the Batman film I've been waiting for (Just like that, Marvel wins)
Let me begin by say that I am a Bat-freak, and I have read most Frank Miller stories. Having said that, I felt that Goyer's Batman Begins script comes off like a sloppy forgery of Miller's Batman: Year One miniseries (down to lifting the last scene with the Joker's playing card), with villains inappropriately thrown-in. The Bat-Tank is an idea from Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns and it is also tossed in, not to assist the story, but to pander to a motor-crazy American culture in a moment of pimp-my-Batmoblie obviously inserted in the script by a Warner Bros. marketing team after reviewing last year's Hummer sales.
I don't mean to totally hate-on a film without cause, after all this IS a step above the Joel Schumacher versions of the Dark Knight, but only slightly. This film has none of the visual resonance or thrilling pleasure of Tim Burton's Batman movies, also Katie Holmes' character is used to twice rip-off the Burton movies. Most offensive was at the end when a familiar line is used, badly, to reveal that Bruce is the Bat to the female lead, which is exactly like the mistletoe line in Batman Returns only much more lame. So lets say I was still expecting better, and I also felt that many of the 'jokes' that were designed to relieve the tension fell flat, like Gordon seeing the Bat-Tank and saying 'I gotta get me one of those.' I did like Garry Oldman's version of Lt. Gordon, but he wasn't used in any interesting such as the personal crisis Gordon faces in Miller's Year One. For me, Nolan's style for capturing the fight sequences was a total misfire, as you could rarely see a single landed impact through the over-editing. ASIDE FROM NOT BEING THE DEFINITIVE BATMAN MOVIE, IT IS JUST NOT A GOOD MOVIE PERIOD. I wasn't expecting perfection, just an enjoyable evening in Gotham City and they didn't even give me that. I had read some reviews asserting that Frank Miller fans and the Sin City crowd will be satisfied with this one, which can't be the case. If Warner Bros. wanted to make the Frank Miller people happy than they would have done a film of the real Batman: Year One with Darren Aronofsky directing, as originally planned 3½ years ago. Also, everyone was saying how serious and realistic this film was, and yet the climax of the film was so overwrought with separate elements that it became laughable. Goyer's attempts to clumsily tie the too-many strands of this film together with a death-train headed straight for the Wayne Enterprises building which will poison and evaporate all the water in Gotham within an instant. Come on, we can do better than this. This is a horrible idea for the ending of any movie, and to me is comparable in many ways to the very silly ending of Batman Forever.
I found Nolan and Goyer did not learn from the mistakes of Schumacher, electing not to emphasise a single villain and instead orchestrating a rather lame pageant of familiar characters without focusing on any of them. In Batman Begins, the genocidal cult-leader Ra's Al Ghul isn't the charismatic megalomaniac as he is in the comics and cartoons and the Scarecrow is limited to an Arkham administrator / mob chemist. I am a dedicated DC comics guy, however if this is any indication of the type of DC films that are on their way into theatres, then Marvel has already won the biggest battle of them all. Both the Spider-Man and X-men films were far superior to Batman Begins, and in particular Spider-Man 2 had compelling action with a story that featured the allegorical properties of the superhero. I am sorry to report that Batman Begins offers us nothing more than action sequences which are obscured by 'stylish' editing in an endlessly hollow feature.