Big studios and independent filmmakers. Handcrafted clay and digital creations. They’ve all won Oscars in the Best Animated Short Film category.
This weekend, the five short subjects Butterfly, Forevergreen, The Girl Who Cried Pearls, Retirement Plan, and The Three Sisters will vie for this Oscar, joining an illustrious list.
Continuing a look back that began with articles in 2024, and 2025 in celebration of these shorts, and the Academy Awards this Sunday, here are three Oscar-winning shorts, each one celebrating an anniversary this year.
The Country Cousin (1936) – Disney, 90th Anniversary
This Disney Silly Symphony, directed by Wilfred Jackson, was inspired by Aesop’s Fable, “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse.”
It opens with a telegram to “Cousin Abner Countrymouse,” where “Monty” invites him to the big city, and Abner walks there all the way from “Podunk.”
When he arrives at the cousin’s house, Abner attempts to take cheese out of a mousetrap, but the cousin shows him something better – the dining room table. Abner immediately begins taking big bites of the food, while Monty is more refined.
Abner eats everything quickly, including the mustard, which makes him thirsty, and then gets a drink of champagne. This, in turn, makes him intoxicated, and he begins squeaking like a little toy, to the dismay of Monty.
Abner then gets stuck on a pile of bread, which collapses, and he thinks he sees another mouse when he spots his reflection in Jell-O. A slip in some butter sends Abner and Monty crashing off the table, taking food and silverware with them.
Monty then begs Abner to be quiet, as a cat is nearby, but Abner attempts bravery and kicks the cat in the rear. The cat is infuriated and chases Abner out on the roof, down the drainpipe, and into the city street below. The cacophony of the traffic and pedestrians is all too much and he runs back to Podunk as the short concludes.
The Country Cousin boasts impressive artwork, including beautifully detailed backgrounds, and full, lush, creative animation, including a sequence where the cat’s mouth opens wide like the maw of a monster, as well as dizzying perspective and motion, as Abner scrambles across the city street.
Additionally, legendary animator Art Babbitt crafted masterful personality animation for the sequences in which Abner is intoxicated.
For more on The Country Cousin, check out Jim Korkis’ article from 2021. And for more on Disney’s record album of the story and songs, read Greg Ehrbar’s article from 2018.
A Herb Alpert and Tijuana Brass Double Feature (1966) – Faith & John Hubley, 60th Anniversary
Set against a white backdrop, this entire, infectious cartoon short is like a sketchbook come to life with black pen lines meeting what looks like either watercolor or magic marker, as the music of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass is perfectly timed to underline the action.
The familiar music (Alpert’s music was used on TV’s The Dating Game) “Spanish Flea” and “Tijuana Taxi” are used for the “double feature” of the two separate cartoons rolled into one.
In “Spanish Flea,” a flea resides in a lovely flower, bothering no one, but the donkey and chicken who live there, until a bulldozer arrives. The land is cleared for a massive resort hotel, and the animals are pushed off their land.
The resort flourishes until the flea decides to begin biting all the patrons. This causes the entire hotel to relocate to another area, allowing the donkey chicken and flea to return to their field.
In “Tijuana Taxi,” the titular vehicle is overloaded with a group trying to get to the airport. There’s a crazy ride through the streets of Tijuana and through a bullfighting arena. When they reach the airport, the customs officer takes too long, so the taxi driver flies off in his car.
A Herb Alpert and Tijuana Brass Double Feature, directed by John Hubley, with a story by John and Faith Hubley, is filled with all the energy of Albert’s music, coupled perfectly with the Hubley’s unique blend of what feels like loose, improvisational animation. It’s also filled with great gags, including a recurring one where the Tijuana taxi continually runs over the same man.
For more on the short, and the other shorts that competed against A Herb Alpert and Tijuana Brass Double Feature, check out Jerry Beck’s article from 2017.
Leisure (1976) – Suzanne Baker, 50th Anniversary
“The new challenge for humans is leisure.” So states the narrator (Alexander Archdale), and that’s the basis of this thought-provoking short that traces man’s journey through work and leisure time, from the Stone Age to the modern age.
Made in Australia, and produced by Suzanne Baker, with Bruce Petty directing, Leisure uses a variety of creative visuals from Hubley-like drawings that show the artist’s work, to cut-outs and photographs.
Images, such as the simple, comical line drawings of early man discovering industry, after tussling with a dinosaur, to a whirring collage of photos and artwork to express the Industrial Age, Leisure is an entertaining expression of the still timely search for work-life balance.
There’s a brief anniversary celebration of three animated shorts that were all golden on Oscar night. Cheers and congratulations to this year’s Academy Award Nominees and Winners.
Michael Lyons is a freelance writer, specializing in film, television, and pop culture. He is the author of the book, Drawn to Greatness: Disney’s Animation Renaissance, which chronicles the amazing growth at the Disney animation studio in the 1990s. In addition to Animation Scoop and Cartoon Research, he has contributed to Remind Magazine, Cinefantastique, Animation World Network and Disney Magazine. He also writes a blog, Screen Saver: A Retro Review of TV Shows and Movies of Yesteryear and his interviews with a number of animation legends have been featured in several volumes of the books, Walt’s People. You can visit Michael’s web site Words From Lyons at: 
Disney’s Three Little Pigs, Three Orphan Kittens, and the Tortoise and the Hare all won Oscars, and they all were given sequels. So it’s somewhat surprising that there was never a follow-up to “The Country Cousin”. It would have been fun to see what happens when Monty visits his cousin Abner in Podunk, as sort of a “Green Acres” counterpoint to the original’s “Beverly Hillbillies”.
There really is a Podunk in upstate New York, not far from Ithaca. Sophisticated New York writers seized upon the name as shorthand for any community in the howling wilderness north of the Bronx, probably because “Podunk” is a lot easier to spell than, say, Canajoharie or Skaneateles.
The characters in “The Country Cousin” were designed by illustrator Charlie Thorson, who did a lot of fine work for Disney in the 1930s (and was never credited for any of it). Several years later, Thorson designed a set of similar characters for Chuck Jones’s “Naughty But Mice”, another cartoon in which a naive mouse (Sniffles) wanders into an unfamiliar environment, makes a new friend, gets intoxicated, and is pursued by a tuxedo cat.
The fact that Disney has repeatedly won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature simply by adapting children’s books is quite disconcerting.
Disney’s dominance in the world of animation had some rather negative effects, as it imposed the same visual style and approach on various American studios until the 1950s, when the UPA style emerged.
I really disagree there. And they were adaption of fables, NOT children’s books.
It’s almost hard to believe “The Country Cousin” could be 90 years old!
This post puts me in mind of a special that aired on television in the either the late 60’s or early 70’s titled “The Fabulous Shorts” which provided a mini-education in animated short subjects. The Hubley work referenced above was one of the shorts shown on the special–in its entirety as I recall. There was some Disney material as well as from other studios. This was of course long after the heyday of the animated theatricals, and to a youngster like myself at the time it was a revelation. I also remember that the promos I saw were a bit vague as to the show’s actual content–they were saying “Watch it, it’ll be good” or to that effect without showing any clips. Not to say that there might not have been more enlightening promos, but the ones I saw were more in the form of voiceovers over stills. Yet it was sufficient to make me curious enough to watch it. I have never seen the show since, but it was a great one.
“The Fabulous Shorts” aired on NBC in 1968. It was hosted by Jim Backus and produced by Lee Mendelson. It doesn’t appear to be available online.
Even though it’s undoubtedly a good animated film, I’ve never understood how “The Country Cousin” could have won the 1936 Oscar. The film that truly deserved the Oscar was “The Old Mill Pond,” directed in 1936 by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, because it paid a vibrant tribute to African-American celebrities.
I’m genuinely surprised that this wasn’t the film that won the Oscar, to the point where I wonder if the judges deliberately passed it over out of racism. I’m starting to believe more and more in Léon Schlesinger’s claim that the Oscar ceremonies were rigged…
“We didn’t win so it’s rigged”?
That’s litteraly what dRump thinks.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure the Awards were/are not rigged (at least for the animation categories).
Always interesting to get different takes one which films should have won in a given year. I doubt that Old Mill Pond was passed over out of racism though, because it beat out several other cartoons to actually secure a nomination.
But we gotta address the elephant in the room here- the third, unmentioned, nominee Popeye Meets Sindbad clearly deserved the Oscar. The Flesicher studio at its best and truly the best cartoon of 1936, imho.
Among the nominees that year, Popeye the Sailor versus Sindbad the Sailor is better than both. So is, in my opinion, Page Miss Glory, which wasn’t even nominated.
I went looking into the Academy Awards:
Wilfred Jackson wound up directing three Oscar-winners in Silly Symphony’s streak of eight, although he never had the experience of having two of his films competing with each other, as Bert Gillett, David Hand, and Clyde Geronimi did. Add to those three only John Hubley in the heyday of UPA as having won against himself. Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones, Bobe Cannon and Gene Deitch were the only other directors to even be in position to try.
John Hubley is also one of the few directors to make Oscar-winning cartoons for different studios. Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng are two others. If Hubley Studios is a legally distinct entity from Storyboard, Hubley would be in the probably-unapproachable heights of having done it for three studios. (Although Tex Avery cartoons were nominated from three studios!)
Well i just lurked on the older cartoon research posts of the academy award animated shorts of yhe later years of the late 60s , 70s, and 80s and I was dissapointed of how anlot of the shorts are difficult to find because some of them look interesting to me. Also I just remembered that there is only one soviet film that was nominated in the academy awards around the late 60s that features a lion wanting to go back to africa after getting tired of the circus job. i think most people back then were more serious about the cold war and that’s why there isn’t alot of soviet animated films that were nominated but some of the films from the eastern bloc countries like yugoslavia or hungary were nominated or even win the academy award during that time.
@Jack Bohn: Nick Park also won an Oscar as a director competing against himself for Best Animated Short, when “Creature Comforts” defeated “A Grand Day Out” for 1990.
While I’m thinking of Oscars, does anybody know the reason why the “Warner Home Entertainment Academy Awards Animation Collection” is missing 10 Warner Brothers and MGM nominated cartoons?
I can imagine various reasons; half are non-series cartoons, and wouldn’t contribute a well-known face to the sales effort. Throw in the one with the semi-obscure Barney Bear, and the ones that double-dip Tweety, Sylvester, and Speedy Gonzales and that’s most of them, but there is “Beep Prepared,” the only chance for the Road Runner (Acadamigo Nominatus) and Coyote (Refusto Awardum). Or is it just the global answer that these cartoons weren’t mastered for DVD yet, or they didn’t want to push the price up to a four-DVD collection?