Walt Disney Short Films Collection, Blu-ray (2015)
Shorts: “John Henry,” “Lorenzo,” “The Little Matchgirl,” “How To Hook Up Your Home Theater,” “Tick Tock Tale,” “Prep & Landing: Operation Secret Santa,” “The Ballad Of Nessie,” “Tangled Ever After,” “Paperman,” “Get A Horse!”, “Feast,” “Frozen Fever”
Directors: various
Studio: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment & Pixar 127542 [8/18/15] (2 discs)
Video: For 16:9, 1080p HD color
Audio: English DTS HDMA 5.1, Descriptive audio on some shorts, Spanish & French 5.1 & 2.0
Subtitles: English SDH, Spanish, French
Extras: “Disney Animation” featurette, Selectable
short intros to each film by the animators
Length: 79 min.
This is a fine collection of some of the best from Disney, which has been available (with some work) online, but here all together in Blu-ray images with very short introductions by the animators to each of the dozen shorts. Especially nice since theaters don’t usually show cartoons before the features anymore, and a few of these make use of traditional Disney characters such as Mickey and Minnie Mouse and Goofy. Several were either winners of or nominated for Oscars as Best Animated Shorts.
Shorts such as these are not the giant money-makers of the big features and series for movies and TV, so these delightful shorts need to be well-supported. The featurette in the extras is worth viewing. A couple of them are sort of promotional bits for big animated features such as Frozen and Tangled. “Get a Horse” and “How to Hook Up Your Home Theater” bring back traditional Disney cartoon characters. “The Little Matchgirl,” to a movement of a Borodin string quartet, is a very touching and beautiful short with no speaking whatever. “Lorenzo” is a blue cat whose big tale gets a curse put on it by a black cat and the tale dances the tango with Lorenzo all over the place. The chief animator reported that when he heard this would be based on a tango he rushed to the CD store and bought all the tango CDs he could find, but they ended up for the entire short with the very first track of the first CD he picked up. My favorite of the dozen was “Paperman,” which won an Oscar in 2012 for its unusual mostly black & white animation and a really great visual exposition of its simple story. “John Henry” is only 55 seconds long and seems like it should be part of something else. One still has to plow thru many previews to get to the disc’s feature, as with all Disney discs.
—John Sunier