Short Films

Shot by the Miles Brothers just days before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, this single continuous take rides a cable car down Market Street toward the Ferry Building, passing horse-drawn wagons, early automobiles, and pedestrians who wander casually into the frame. It is one of the most haunting pieces of early actuality footage ever made: the city it shows was largely destroyed by the quake and fire less than a week later. Historians have used everything from the cars' license plates to puddles on the street to pin down the exact filming date. The film is in the public domain.

Documentary · Silent · Short

The pilot for Walt Disney's Alice Comedies, made at his Laugh-O-Gram studio in Kansas City. A live-action girl, played by Virginia Davis, falls asleep in a cartoonist's studio and dreams herself into an animated Wonderland full of lions, dancing cats, and marching soldiers. The short mixes live-action footage of Davis with hand-drawn backgrounds and characters, a technique Disney would build an entire series around after moving to Hollywood. The film is in the public domain in the United States as a pre-1930 work.

Animation · Silent · Short · Family

The most famous civil defense film ever made: an animated turtle named Bert teaches American schoolchildren to "duck and cover" when they see the flash of an atomic bomb. Produced by Archer Productions for the Federal Civil Defense Administration and shown in classrooms across the country, it is equal parts genuine safety instruction and Cold War theater — critics have long debated whether a school desk was ever going to help. It entered the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 2004. The film is in the public domain.

Documentary · Short

Made by Émile Cohl at Gaumont in Paris, Fantasmagorie is generally considered the first fully hand-drawn animated film. Cohl drew roughly 700 frames on paper, then photographed them onto negative film to create a glowing white-on-black line that constantly morphs: a figure becomes an elephant, a bottle, a clown, a woman's hat, dissolving and reforming in a stream-of-consciousness flow. The title nods to the magic-lantern phantasmagoria shows of the era. The film is in the public domain as a pre-1930 work.

Animation · Silent · Short

The first known film adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, produced by Edison Studios and directed by J. Searle Dawley. In this 12-minute silent short, Frankenstein (Augustus Phillips) creates his monster (Charles Ogle) not through electricity but through chemical means in a boiling cauldron, and the creature manifests as a skeletal apparition born of fire and smoke. Ogle designed his own monster makeup, creating a hunched, wild-haired figure that bears no resemblance to Boris Karloff's later icon but established the first screen image of Shelley's creation. The monster haunts Frankenstein's wedding night, a psychological torment that ends when the creature sees its own reflection and vanishes. Long believed lost, a print was rediscovered in the 1970s. The film is in the public domain.

Horror · Short · Silent

Gertie the Dinosaur is the earliest animated film to feature a character with a distinct personality. Winsor McCay drew thousands of frames by hand, creating a friendly brontosaurus that eats, drinks, dances, and responds to his commands like a trained pet. Originally performed as a live stage act where McCay "interacted" with the projected dinosaur, the surviving print frames the animation with a live-action prologue. Gertie is a foundational work of character animation. The film is in the public domain in the United States as a pre-1930 work.

Animation · Silent · Short

A Van Beuren Aesop's Fables short directed by Vernon Stallings, featuring Cubby Bear as Robin Hood. Cubby swoops in to rescue a princess from an arranged marriage to a sheriff whose face, she observes, looks like a cellar door. The cartoon spoofs the Robin Hood legend with a Friar performing the wedding, a parrot providing comic commentary, and a musical medley of original tunes about the days of Robin Hood. Released February 23, 1934, the short is one of the later Cubby Bear cartoons as the character's career wound down ahead of Van Beuren's shift to color Rainbow Parade films. The film is in the public domain.

Animation · Short · Comedy · Adventure

A Merrie Melodies short directed by Rudolf Ising, and the first appearance of Goopy Geer, a tall, lanky piano-playing dog who entertains patrons at a nightclub. The cartoon is built around the Herman Hupfeld title song, with gags involving a gorilla waiter, a drunk horse seeing hallucinations in a mirror, and a chicken swimming in soup before it is served. Goopy Geer appeared in only three shorts before fading into obscurity, but the character remains a charming artifact of the early Merrie Melodies era when each cartoon was built around a song. The film is in the public domain.

Animation · Short · Comedy · Music

A wartime propaganda short produced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to convince American farmers to plant hemp. With Japan's 1942 occupation of the Philippines cutting off the rope fiber imports the Navy depended on, the government needed domestic production fast — this film walks farmers through planting, harvesting, and processing the crop, with hemp promised to buy war bonds at harvest. Long suppressed after the war when hemp was lumped back in with marijuana prohibition, it resurfaced as a staple of cannabis-reform lore; the USDA denied the film existed until a copy turned up in a government archive in 1989. As a work of the U.S. federal government, it is in the public domain.

War · Documentary · Short

Made by J. Stuart Blackton at Vitagraph Studios, this short is widely cited as the first American animated film. Blackton combines stop-motion photography of chalk drawings on a blackboard with cut-out figures and a few hand-drawn frames, making faces appear to morph, smile, and react on their own. The technique is crude by modern standards, but the idea of bringing a drawing to life on screen was new. The film is in the public domain in the United States as a pre-1930 work.

Animation · Silent · Short

The U.S. government's own film about the internment of Japanese Americans, produced by the Office of War Information with the War Relocation Authority. WRA director Milton Eisenhower, the president's brother, appears on camera to explain that more than 100,000 people — most of them American citizens — have been moved from the West Coast to inland camps, and the narration frames it as a humane wartime necessity. What it does not mention is that no charges or trials were involved. It stands as a primary document of wartime propaganda aimed at Americans themselves. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the film is in the public domain.

War · Documentary · Short

A classic Laurel and Hardy short directed by Leo McCarey for Hal Roach Studios. Stan and Ollie are escaped convicts on the run, trying to change clothes in a variety of unlikely locations. Their attempts to swap pants lead to a series of escalating comic mishaps, culminating in the famous scene where they find themselves on a girder high above a city street, still struggling with their trousers. The film is a masterclass in comic construction, building from a simple premise to breathtaking physical comedy. The skyscraper finale is one of the duo's most iconic sequences. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Short

Winsor McCay's first animated film, based on his own popular newspaper comic Little Nemo in Slumberland. The short opens with live-action footage of McCay making a bet that he can bring his drawings to life, then cuts to the animation: Nemo and his friends stretch, flip, and grow in surreal ways that were impossible in live action. McCay hand-drew every frame himself, a level of labor that set the standard for character animation. The film is in the public domain in the United States as a pre-1930 work.

Animation · Silent · Short

Two of America's great modernist photographers, Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, spent a summer shooting New York City and assembled the result into this ten-minute film, organized around lines from Walt Whitman's poetry. Skyscrapers, harbor traffic, and crowds are framed as pure geometry — it is generally considered the first avant-garde film made in America and the earliest of the "city symphony" documentaries that culminated in Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and Man with a Movie Camera. The film is in the public domain.

Documentary · Silent · Short

A Laurel and Hardy short directed by Lewis R. Foster for Hal Roach Studios. Stan and Ollie play two sailors on shore leave who pick up two girls and take them to an amusement park. The simple date becomes a comic nightmare as the boys discover they barely have enough money between them for one soda, let alone a full outing. The film's centerpiece is a brilliantly staged sequence on a boat ride, where the boys' attempts to impress their dates end in watery chaos. The film is a perfect example of the duo's early sound-era shorts, where their comic timing and vocal interplay were still being refined. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Short

A 1929 Mickey Mouse short directed by Walt Disney, structured as a vaudeville-style revue hosted by Mickey. The cartoon features a parade of animal performers dancing, singing, and doing acrobatics, culminating in Mickey performing the song "Minnie's Yoo Hoo," the first original song written for a Disney cartoon. The short is a snapshot of the early Mickey Mouse era, when the character was more mischievous and the cartoons were essentially animated variety shows. Published in 1929, the film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2025.

Animation · Short · Comedy · Music

The best-known film of the British documentary movement, made by the GPO Film Unit to celebrate the postal special that carried letters overnight from London to Scotland. The first two-thirds are lucid observation — mail bags sorted at speed, trackside apparatus snatching pouches without stopping — and the finale is the famous experiment: W. H. Auden's verse written to match the train's rhythm over Benjamin Britten's score, accelerating as the mail crosses the border. A film about sorting letters that became a small masterpiece. The film is in the public domain.

Documentary · Short

A Laurel and Hardy silent short directed by James Parrott for Hal Roach Studios. Ollie and his wife invite Stan over for a quiet Sunday, but Stan's arrival turns the domestic peace into chaos. A golf outing degenerates into a series of disasters, and the boys end up in a mud fight with a group of women golfers. The film's comic premise—the destructive potential of an unwanted houseguest—was a perfect vehicle for the duo's escalating misfortune. The golf sequences showcase their physical comedy in an outdoor setting, and the escalating mud fight is a classic Roach studio free-for-all. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Short · Silent

The very first Looney Tunes cartoon, directed by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising for Leon Schlesinger and Warner Bros. Bosko, a cheerful, rubber-limbed character, sings the title song in his bathtub before a series of gags involving his car, his girlfriend Honey, and a goat. The short established the formula for the early Looney Tunes: a song-based cartoon built around Bosko, animated in the round, fluid style that Harman and Ising had developed at Disney. The title tune, "Sinkin' in the Bathtub," was the first of many popular songs the series would showcase. The film is in the public domain.

Animation · Short · Comedy · Music

Gabby, the pompous town crier spun off from Gulliver's Travels (1939), takes charge of spring cleaning at King Little's castle and turns the job into chaos — brooms, ladders, and buckets flying as he bosses around the Lilliputian castle staff to the tune of a swing band. The seventh of Fleischer Studios' eight Gabby cartoons for Paramount, with Pinto Colvig (the original voice of Goofy) as Gabby and Jack Mercer voicing King Little. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Animation · Comedy · Short

A Private Snafu training short directed by Frank Tashlin for Leon Schlesinger Productions, commissioned by the US Army Signal Corps during World War II. An armada of malaria-laden mosquitoes trains like a military squadron and attacks American troops, finding Private Snafu woefully unprepared with his mosquito netting and repellent. The cartoon was part of a series written by Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel and voiced by Mel Blanc, designed to teach soldiers about hygiene and discipline through humor that was too risqué for civilian audiences. The film is in the public domain as a US government work.

Animation · Short · Comedy · War

A Mack Sennett two-reel comedy built around Ben Turpin and his famous cross-eyed double take. Turpin plays a hapless suitor who competes with Harry Gribbon for the girl, played by Madeline Hurlock, and stumbles through the kind of physical chaos Sennett's studio was known for, with Del Lord directing the mayhem. The surviving version is abridged but keeps the core gags and gives a clean sample of Sennett's short-form style at its peak. Like the other 1923 releases, the film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019.

Comedy · Silent · Short

A W.C. Fields comedy short directed by Leslie Pearce for Paramount. Fields plays Dr. Painless Peters, a dentist whose methods are anything but painless. The film is a series of escalating comic set pieces as Fields torments his patients, argues with his daughter's suitor, and pursues a golf game with characteristic misanthropy. The dental gags are both horrifying and hilarious, with Fields wielding oversized pliers and extracting teeth from the wrong patients. The film showcases Fields' genius for combining physical comedy with verbal wit, and his persona as the bumbling, irritable professional would become a template for much of his later work. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Short

A 1929 Mickey Mouse short directed by Walt Disney. Mickey takes shelter from a storm in a haunted house, where he encounters skeletons, ghosts, and a menacing figure who forces him to play the organ. The cartoon blends comedy with Gothic atmosphere, with the skeletons dancing to Mickey's music in a sequence that echoes Disney's own Skeleton Dance, released the same year. The short is a fine example of the early, spookier Mickey Mouse cartoons, before the character was softened into a more wholesome figure. Published in 1929, the film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2025.

Animation · Short · Comedy · Horror

A 1929 Mickey Mouse short notable as the first cartoon in which Mickey speaks, with Walt Disney providing the voice. Mickey works at a carnival, selling hot dogs and dancing with a pair of cats who perform a shimmy routine. The hot dogs, animated with a life of their own, are the highlight: Mickey spanks one into submission when it refuses to be eaten. The short is a landmark in the series, marking the transition from purely physical comedy to the character-driven humor that would define Mickey Mouse for decades. Published in 1929, the film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2025.

Animation · Short · Comedy

An educational animated cartoon directed by Denis Gilpin, written by P.D. Eastman, and produced by Ed Cullen for the Equitable Life Assurance Society. The film uses an owl and a human character named Fred Jones to teach lessons about financial responsibility and planning, in the sponsored-film tradition of the 1950s when insurance companies and corporations produced educational content for schools and community groups. P.D. Eastman, later famous for children's books like Are You My Mother?, brought his character design sensibility to the animation. The film is in the public domain.

Animation · Short · Family

The first major documentary produced by the U.S. government, made by Pare Lorentz for the Resettlement Administration to explain the Dust Bowl. It traces how homesteaders broke the Great Plains' grass for wheat, how wartime demand and mechanized plowing stripped the land bare, and how drought turned the topsoil into black blizzards that buried farms. Virgil Thomson's score, built from American folk tunes, set a template for documentary music. Congress promptly killed the agency's film program, but the film proved government could make real cinema. As a work of the U.S. federal government, it is in the public domain.

Documentary · Short

Pare Lorentz's companion piece to The Plow That Broke the Plains follows the Mississippi from its headwaters to the Gulf, indicting a century of logging, cotton farming, and flood-plain development that turned the river against the people who lived along it — and ending with the TVA's dams as the New Deal's answer. It was Oscar-nominated and, famously, beat Triumph of the Will at the Venice Film Festival. Virgil Thomson again supplied the score. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the film is in the public domain.

Documentary · Short

Winsor McCay's animated depiction of the 1915 torpedoing of the RMS Lusitania by a German U-boat, an event that helped pull the United States into the First World War. McCay made the film as a piece of wartime propaganda, animating the liner, the attack, and the drowning of passengers in a somber, documentary-like tone unlike his comic Gertie work. It is one of the earliest serious animated films and a rare example of animation used for journalism. The film is in the public domain in the United States as a pre-1930 work.

Animation · Silent · Short · War

The first Silly Symphony, and the short that proved Walt Disney's studio could do more than Mickey Mouse. Animated almost entirely by Ub Iwerks, it shows four skeletons rising from their graves in a graveyard at midnight and dancing to Carl Stalling's score, itself inspired by Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre. There is no story and no dialogue, just movement cut to music, and the timing is so sure that the gags still land nearly a century later. The picture was a hard sell at first, exhibitors balked at the "gruesome" subject, but it became a hit and launched the Silly Symphony series, which the studio used as a laboratory for the techniques that would eventually make Snow White possible. Published in 1929, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2025.

Animation · Short · Horror

A Hal Roach two-reel parody of Rex Beach's rugged Yukon novel The Spoilers — released the same year as yet another straight adaptation of the story. Stan Laurel, in one of the solo shorts he made before teaming with Oliver Hardy, plays prospector Bob Canister, whose gold claim is jumped by the corrupt local sheriff, played by perennial Roach foil James Finlayson. Directed by Ralph Ceder, the short spoofs the novel's legendary climactic brawl with a saloon fight that keeps escalating. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Western · Silent · Short

The first released Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon, directed by Walt Disney and animated almost entirely by Ub Iwerks. Oswald plays a trolley conductor whose packed car runs afoul of a stubborn cow, a steep hill, and a runaway descent. The short was a hit, launching Oswald as Universal's cartoon star and establishing Disney and Iwerks as major talents. Universal had rejected the first-produced Oswald short, Poor Papa, as too sluggish, so Trolley Troubles became the character's debut. Published in 1927, the film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Animation · Short · Comedy

The 1931 sound reissue of the 1927 Oswald the Lucky Rabbit short, re-released by Walter Lantz Productions after Lantz took over the Oswald series from Walt Disney. The original silent cartoon was fitted with a synchronized music and sound effects track to compete with Disney's sound Mickey Mouse cartoons. Oswald the trolley conductor packs his car with passengers, battles a cow on the tracks, uses a goat to climb a hill, and then loses control on the way down. The reissue was published in the United States between 1929 and 1963 and the copyright was not renewed, placing it in the public domain.

Animation · Short · 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

A Noveltoons short from Famous Studios, directed by Seymour Kneitel. Lightning is said to be the fastest horse around and a sure bet for the Ups and Downs steeplechase, but when race time comes, the horse decides to take a nap instead. The jockey tries everything to wake him, and the real fun begins as he devises a plan to enter the race with a sleeping horse. Released June 9, 1950, the cartoon was produced by Famous Studios for Paramount Pictures. The film is in the public domain.

Animation · Short · Comedy · Family

A Looney Tunes wartime cartoon directed by Bob Clampett, set on a farm where the animals are preparing for World War II in a series of blackout skits. A narrator tours the barnyard, finding chickens rationing feed, a horse collecting scrap metal, and a duck dodging air raid drills. The gags are disconnected and rapid-fire, mixing patriotic messaging with Clampett's characteristic absurdity. Released July 11, 1942, the short was produced by Leon Schlesinger for Warner Bros. and is in the public domain.

Animation · Short · Comedy

The sixth Mickey Mouse cartoon, and a curious one: Mickey and Minnie are depicted as actual mouse-sized mice, while Tom Cat is the size of a person. When Tom Cat staggers out hunting, Mickey, Minnie, and a swarm of mice break into his house and throw a musical party, playing the piano and turning household objects into instruments. The short is a loose remake of Disney's 1925 Alice Comedy, Alice Rattled by Rats, and the last time Mickey was portrayed at real mouse scale. Animated by Ub Iwerks and Ben Sharpsteen with a Carl Stalling score. Published in 1929, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2025.

Animation · Short · Comedy

An Army Air Forces short about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black military pilots in American history, made by the First Motion Picture Unit and narrated by Captain Ronald Reagan — the future president's own unit produced the film. It follows Black cadets through flight training at Tuskegee and into combat over Europe with the 332nd Fighter Group, pushing back against the Army's own official skepticism that Black men could fly fighters. Short, pointed, and a remarkable artifact of what the wartime government chose to say on film. As a work of the U.S. federal government, it is in the public domain.

War · Documentary · Short

One of the last and strangest Felix the Cat shorts, directed by Otto Messmer and produced by Pat Sullivan. Felix stays out late on New Year's Eve and gets spectacularly drunk, stumbling home through a surreal nightmare of pink elephants, dancing skeletons, and menacing apparitions before facing the greatest demon of all: his angry wife. Originally a silent film released around 1928, it was reissued by Copley Pictures in 1930 with added sound effects and music. Animation historian John Canemaker called it one of the best Felix films ever made, a final burst of creative energy from a series that would end a few years later. The film is in the public domain.

Animation · Short · Comedy

The first Van Beuren Tom and Jerry short, a duo of cab drivers not to be confused with MGM's later cat and mouse. On a dark and stormy night, Tom and Jerry drive two mysterious bearded men to a castle, only for the passengers to vanish without paying. The cabbies follow them inside and find themselves in a haunted castle full of skeletons, ghosts, and ghouls. Directed by John Foster and George Stallings, the short is a clear riff on Disney's The Skeleton Dance, with Jim Tyer's animation lending it a looser, weirder energy. The series was later reissued as Dick and Larry to avoid confusion with the MGM characters. The film is in the public domain.

Animation · Short · Comedy · Horror

A Noveltoons short from Famous Studios, directed by Isadore Sparber. Spunky the donkey tries to enlist in the WAGS, an elite corps of Army dogs, but is rejected after a series of physical tests deem him unfit for service. When a flea attack cripples the dog unit, Spunky proves his worth by saving the day. Released October 27, 1944, the cartoon is a wartime morale piece wrapped in barnyard comedy, produced by Famous Studios for Paramount Pictures. The film is in the public domain.

Animation · Short · Comedy · Family

A Merrie Melodies short directed by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising for Leon Schlesinger and Warner Bros. A crowd of animals and humans gathers at a carnival, where gags pile up around a merry-go-round, a sideshow, and a fireworks finale. The title song, like all early Merrie Melodies, is the real point of the cartoon, with the animation built around showcasing the tune. The short is a time capsule of early sound animation, made when Warner Bros. was still finding its footing in the cartoon business. The film is in the public domain.

Animation · Short · Comedy