George Pal Productions

Jimmy Durante leads a down-on-their-luck vaudeville family whose Christmas turns around when Rupert, a trained squirrel, starts retrieving cash their miserly landlord has hidden inside a wall. Produced by George Pal — later famous for The War of the Worlds — with Rupert brought to life through Pal's signature stop-motion Puppetoon animation. Directed by Irving Pichel, the film blends holiday comedy with a gentle satire on sudden wealth. It is in the public domain through non-renewal of copyright, and later reissued in colorized form as A Christmas Wish.

Family · Comedy

George Pal's Puppetoon short, photographed in three-strip Technicolor, tells the story of Jan and Janette, a young Dutch couple whose windmill country idyll is overrun by an army of mechanical Screwball soldiers — an unmistakable allegory for the Nazi occupation of Pal's native Netherlands. When a thunderstorm rusts the invading machines into scrap, the tulips grow again. A young Ray Harryhausen worked on the film's replacement-animation puppets. Released by Paramount in 1942, it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short and was added to the National Film Registry in 1997. The film entered the public domain because its copyright was not renewed.

Animation · War · Short