Ranking 1970s Animated Short Oscar Winners

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Ranking 1970s Animated Short Oscar Winners

The seventies were probably the weakest era not only for Oscar winning shorts, but also for animated short films in general as there just weren’t a lot of the quality ones made during this period. Of these ten, only a couple are great and the rest are either solid or downright mediocre, but here is my ranking of all ten. They were very easy to rank for me personally.

10. Frank Film

This is such a stupid, pretentious piece of garbage and it has to be the worst ever Oscar winning cartoon in my opinion. It basically consists of a bunch of unrelated images and nothing of it makes sense whatsoever and nothing is connected. This cannot even be called animation and it is a textbook example of pretentiousness and being artistic for the sake of being artistic.

9. The Crunch Bird

The ending in The Crunch Bird is funny and it is the only good thing about this whole miserable affair which features awful animation with lazy style and execution and not to mention the voice acting which is simply horrible in its amateurish approach. And everything before that ending was uninspired as the story is weak and the runtime is way too short.

8. Leisure

I am getting really tired of these documentary animated shorts from the seventies. they favor images and frames instead of full, fleshed out animation which is very annoying and far from any sort of artistic. Leisure is about, well, leisure which is an interesting, rarely talked about subject matter, but the execution is mostly typical so it is not a particularly good short.

7. Every Child

Every Child is a Canadian animated short film that was made to promote children’s rights and UNICEF. Of course it is thus very admirable and important in its cause. However, the film itself is quite weak as the animation is pretty dull and mediocre and again the acting, this time the mumbling, was quite annoying. A full silent or full talkie approach was sorely needed here.

6. Closed Mondays

Will Winton here wasted his time and significant talent on such a regular stoner picture which lacks any message or point to it whatsoever. Very overrated and overly ambiguous. The only great aspect to it is its stop-motion animation which was absolutely terrific and one of the best of this entire bunch.

5. Is It Always Right to Be Right?

This movie is very important in its message of peace and cooperation. It was very important for 1970 and it is still timely even today. But even though I respected it so much, it was a case of great message over style and substance this time around as its animation is very weak and mediocre with an unfortunate overreliance on live-action segments.

4. Great

Great is not great, nowhere near as great as the title would imply. It is overlong and it is again a pretty typical documentary animation from the 70s. However, what it gets right is the animation which is better than average here and its style was interesting as the film has quite a lot of songs which are so catchy that they made the movie more fun.

3. A Christmas Carol

I found Alastair Sim’s performance in the main role very overrated here. Extremely overrated and not my cup of tea. The entire movie is too straightforward, but honestly one of the best ones on this list owing mostly to its good execution, pacing and particularly excellent and very competent for TV standards animation. It was also well directed by Richard Williams.

2. The Sand Castle

The Sand Castle is such a wonderful, extremely authentic short that uses sand animation to groundbreaking, gorgeous effect as it looks absolutely splendid. But it also sounds great thanks to a beautiful score. The pacing is off, but the story is very interesting, moving emotionally and quite epic and grand in a way. This is one of only two true bright spots on this list.

1. Special Delivery

Special Delivery deals with very mature issues, but presents them in a comedic manner which was refreshing to see. It is the kind of convoluted, situational movie that is amusing rather annoying. Also its crazy and weird tone was again good here rather than frustrating. Its animation is certainly crude, but its narrative approach is phenomenal and the story is so delightfully crazy and ridiculous that I loved every second of it. It is by far the best 70s Oscar winning animated short and a deserved winner here.