In recent weeks, packages of the short films nominated in the twin categories of Academy Awards (Best Live Action Short and Best Animated Short) devoted to such work have had some play in a few major movie markets, just as they do every year. Because of the hook that an Academy Award nomination provides, Oscar season is one of the rare times when short films can get any attention from theatrical distributors and theater programmers. Now, thanks to DVD and the Internet and such specialty cable channels as IFC and the Sundance Channel, things are a little better for makers of short films than they used to be; if a short gets a lot of attention on the festival circuit, it may turn up on TV, often jammed together with an hour's worth of other shorts and used to plug a hole in the schedule. Or if a director breaks into features and develops a name, his or her early shorts may be recycled as "bonus features" on the DVD of a bigger movie, as Lynne Ramsay's early shorts are used in the Criterion Collection DVD for her debut feature Ratcatcher. At least it's a way to keep the films alive and in circulation. Other short filmmakers — those who don't "graduate" to features, maybe because their talents are more naturally suited to the short form — may get a lot of attention for awhile and then slip through the cracks. This may be especially true in the case of independent animators, who have to work long and hard to produce a ten-minute masterpiece, and who lost a means of getting their work seen when such annual showcases as the Tournee of Animation began drying up several years ago.
Jim Blashfield's Suspicious Circumstances, which was made in 1984 and barnstormed the country via cable TV and animation festivals in the mid-to-late '80s, is a remarkable specimen of homegrown, handmade American surrealism. The film has its own xerox-stop-motion look, which is less startling now only because Blashfield capitalized on the attention he got from the movie by accepting jobs to apply the same style to music videos for Talking Heads ("And She Was"), Joni Mitchell ("Good Friends"), Michael Jackson ("Leave Me Alone"), Paul Simon ("Boy in the Bubble"), and many others. Blashfield has a new short film, Bunnyheads, which, according to his website, is "currently infesting film festivals internationally."
Sally Cruikshank's work goes back to the seventies, when she made her classic Quasi at the Quackadero, but like Blashfield, she experienced a bump of attention in the 1980s, when she made the throbbing, mutating Face Like a Frog. It's a choice example of Cruikshank's style, which is more devoted to outright cartoonishness than many independent animators of her generation, but which has a slightly sinister, contemporary edge to it; trying to recapture the anything-goes spirit of early animated cartoons, she makes films that sometimes suggest what it might have been like if the Fleischer brothers had experienced an acid flashback. (Cruikshank worked on "It's a Good Life", the Joe Dante-directed segment of the 1983 Twilight Zone — The Movie.) Cruikshank suffered a career setback when she lost her funding for an attempt to complete a feature, but like Blashfield, she offers some of her films on DVD for sale at her website.