As a kid, I was always transfixed by the short films that would play before PIXAR movies. None of the other movies I had on VHS tapes had little short films paying before them, making the likes of Geri's Game and Luxo Jr. all the more special than they already were. As I got older, I realized PIXAR was an anomaly in the world of American cinema in that they were the only production company or studio to put short films on all their releases (once PIXAR head honcho John Lasseter took the reins on Walt Disney Animation Studios, features from that studio also always carried short films) as everyone else in Hollywood seemed to consider the artform of short films a frivolous affair and a pointless business expense.
This wasn't always so of course. Back in the era lasting from the 1920's to the 1940's, those classic Looney Tunes cartoons and plenty of other short films played before feature programs as a way to give viewers more bang for their buck (or nickel as it were, since that was the price of a movie ticket for a certain section of this epoch of American cinema). This was back in an era where movie trailers actually came after the feature film of course, so times have changed mightily and now movie theaters not only find the costs of producing short films to be prohibitive but that they also eat up time in a dangerous way. If you've got a five-minute short film playing before a movie each time it runs, well, those minutes add up and can, in extreme cases, make you lose an extra showing, and by proxy, lose potential money on a project.
That seems like a far-fetched scenario to me though and I think it's high time most studios take a cue from PIXAR and Neon and play short films before their feature-length movies. Notice how I mentioned Neon alongside PIXAR as a studio that always puts a short film before their longer motion pictures. This new indie studio, run by Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League, has been playing short films before all of their movies starting with their initial release Colossal, all of which hail from their subdivision Neon Shorts. The first short film the studio released was 5 Films About Technology, which, apparently, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year before Neon acquired it for their short film division.
That's a nice segway into my next point on why short films need to be embraced again; it's really not hugely expensive to obtain short films. Seriously, there are film festivals all across the country showing off live-action short films that typically don't get a venue to be seen by the general at beyond just film festivals. That's a real shame for the artists who work so hard on these short film projects, but imagine if specialty studios like A24 and Fox Searchlight picked up assorted short films at various film festivals for financially feasible prices and then put them on their myriad of motion pictures? That way, you don't have to break the bank and you get to support up-and-coming artists working in the heavily undervalued field of short film cinema!
Of course, it wouldn't be bad at all if the bigger American studios got onboard with this idea of making short films a more prominent fixture of theatrical cinema. Imagine if Warner Bros. created new hand-drawn animated Looney Tunes shorts to play before their big family movies/blockbuster fare? Bugs Bunny and co. have been stuck in a creative rut for decades now and one way to get them out of it was to get them back to the format of short film storytelling they became so popular in the first place in! By contrast, darker R-rated dramas from the same studio could have appropriately bleaker short films or even documentary short films attached to them. The possibilities are endless here folks!
As a guy who grew up on PIXAR shorts and Looney Tunes cartoons, I've got a serious soft spot for the world of short film cinema, no question. It's a format of storytelling that gets its own Oscar category but gets very little respect or acknowledgment beyond the halls of Disney or Neon. I know I'm just a nerd on the internet, but I'm calling those in powers at studios big and small to action in terms of putting more short films on your feature-length movies. The financial risks are minimal and you'll help give more exposure to an artform that could use more attention. Plus, Hollywood's so fixated on reviving stuff from the past (James Bond sequels, remakes of classic movies, adaptations of classic literature), wouldn't making short films a regular presence at your local movie theater just fit right into that creative mandate that's so heavily skewed to the past?
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