Best Animation Movies of 1937

Night in an old mill is dramatically depicted in this Oscar-winning short in which the frightened occupants, including birds, timid mice, owls, and other creatures try to stay safe and dry as a storm approaches. As the thunderstorm worsens, the mill wheel begins to turn and the whole mill threatens to blow apart until at last the storm subsides.

It's time to laugh like crazy as Mickey, Goofy and Donald fight against raging gears, twisted springs, deafening bells and a sleeping stork. Watch them reach new heights of humor as their valiant efforts to clean a bell tower turn into a real circus!

On a dark and stormy night, four bored ghosts decide to have some fun by calling the "Ajax Ghost Exterminators." Shriek with laughter as ghost hunters Mickey, Donald and Goofy are scared silly by the hilarious haunts and taunts of these spirited pranksters!

Donald continually heckles Mickey's magic act, but Mickey bests him at every turn. Donald shoots off a magic pistol that causes all the stage props to fall down on them at the finish of the act.

Donald Duck goes to a museum of modern inventions. After getting in without paying, he meets a robot butler who takes Donald's hat every time he sees him. Donald is very annoyed by this and magically fixes himself a new hat every time this happens and strolls on. Ignoring the sign not to touch it, Donald starts playing with a wrapping machine and ends up being wrapped himself. He also encounters and tries out a robot nursemaid and a fully automatic barber chair. They both don't do him much good.

Mickey, Donald, Goofy, and Pluto experience all that Hawaii has to offer. Donald tries hula dancing, Pluto explores the beach and Goofy takes up surfing!

Popeye the Sailor, accompanied by Olive Oyl and Wimpy, is dispatched to stop the dreaded bandit Abu Hassan and his force of forty thieves.

To get at nurse Olive, Popeye and Bluto fake various illnesses. Olive sees through this and tells them they need to be either very sick or hurt real bad, so they try to get hurt, but both have a sudden run of what would normally be very good luck. Out of desperation, Popeye feeds Bluto the spinach when they start fighting.

'Popito' and 'Olivita' are a dance team, performing at Wimpy's Cafe. Bluto is jealous, and heckles and otherwise disrupts the act.

Olive asks Popeye to walk her dog Fluffy, but Popeye is embarrassed because Fluffy is as weak looking as the name implies. Sure enough, when Bluto and his bulldog come by, the dogs (and their owners) get in a fight.

Popeye and Bluto share an art studio; Popeye is a sculptor, and Bluto paints. Olive drops in for a likeness, and the boys compete. When they start to fight, Olive starts to leave, but Popeye convinces her to stay when he eats his spinach and vanquishes Bluto.

A compilation of five Oscar-winning Disney shorts, released to help promote the upcoming release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Popeye gives Olive a parrot that he's trained. Bluto sets the bird free and then tries to kill it.

To the toccata portion of Bach's "Toccata and fugue in D minor," we watch a play of sorts. Blue smoke forms a background; a grid of black lines is the foreground. Behind the lines, a triangle appears, then patterns of multiple triangles. Their movements reflect the music's rhythm. Behind the barrier of the black lines, the triangle moves, jumps, and takes on multiple shapes. In contrast with the blue and the black, the triangles are warm: orange, red, yellow. The black lines bend, swirl into a vortex, then disappear. The triangle pulsates and a set of many of them rises.

Bluto dirties all of an office building's windows himself, to drum up business for his window cleaning service. When he gets to Olive's stenographer office, about ten floors up, she says no: Popeye's going to wash her windows. And the battle with Popeye is on.

This riot of color was a showcase for Lye’s hand-painted and stenciled imagery. Sponsored by Imperial Airways, it incorporates the airline’s “speedbird” symbol, and the music consists of “Honolulu Blues” by Red Nichols and a rumba by the Lecuona Cuban Boys. Time Magazine raved about the film, describing Lye as England’s alternative to Walt Disney (a David-and-Goliath comparison!). Like Lye’s other films, Colour Flight was not eligible for distribution in the US due to its status as an overseas advertising film. - Harvard Film Archive

Porky is reading the Greek myth of the gorgon, who turned everyone she looked at into stone. Mother tells him it's bedtime; he dreams of being Porkykarkus, the hero that saves Greece.

An inexperienced duck hunter is taunted and tormented by a mischievous duck.

Baseball: Bluto's Bears vs. Popeye's Pirates, and both Bluto and Popeye have girlfriends cheering them on.

Ub Iwerks dusts off the skeletons from his early-Disney days and puts them to work at Columbia… in a graveyard replete with eerie owls and surrealistic bats, skeletons begin to rise from their graves and form a loosely-jointed band.

After Porky and Gabby oversleep yet again, their boss warns them that they'll be fired if they're late again...

Popeye and Olive are grooving to the sounds of Wimpy the organ grinder, but their neighbor Bluto wants him to move on. Popeye and Bluto settle their disagreement in their usual fashion.

Popeye is sitting outside Olive's lunchroom at the airport, distraught. She's closed the business to fly away with an aviator (Bluto, of course). But it's hardly what she expected; he has her painting his plane, while it's flying; when she says she's rather go back to Popeye, he tries to throw her off the plane. Popeye sees this, and takes off in a plane, just in time to help her out. The boys get into a dogfight, and Bluto manages to demolish Popeye's plane.

Popeye, an employee at Useless Machine Works, is on his lunch break when Olive stops by and Swee'Pea crawls into the factory. He narrowly misses several horrible fates while Popeye tries to save him and gets into much worse trouble.

Porky Pig and his family inherit Uncle Solomon's estate, but if they die everything goes to the lawyer, who turns himself into a Mr. Hyde-style monster in an effort to kill off the pigs.

A small girl makes her living selling matches on the streets of New York. It's winter, and the hustling crowds at best ignore her, and some are outright rude. She takes shelter and, to try to stave off the cold a bit, lights a match. It gets blown out; this happens again, then on the third try, she falls into a dream. In this dream, cherubs attend her, she gets a new doll, then a new dress. The cherubs put her on a throne. Then a storm comes, and she goes toward a candle. That candle goes out, and we see that back in the real world, so did her match and her life. An angel comes along and takes her soul.

Swee'pea is crying, so Olive calls on Popeye (and Bluto overhears) to cheer him up. The boys compete by doing various silly antics, to no avail. After a while, the antics progress to beating each other up, then Bluto finds excuses to bake and freeze Popeye. Having had enough, Popeye reaches for the spinach, but grabs a can of onions instead. Soon all the adults are crying and now Swee'pea isn't!

Porky and another contractor are competing to submit the lower bid for a new city hall. When they submit identical bids, the city has them compete, whichever finishes first gets the job.

Swee-Pea is reluctant to eat his spinach, so Popeye tells him about the football game when he was young (against Bluto, with Olive cheering and Wimpy keeping score) and also reluctant to eat his spinach.

Porky Pig has some problems when his mobster lookalike decides to frame him for a bank job.

The "fearless warrior" of the poem is a very small child whose pants keep falling down. He tries to shoot a grasshopper with his arrow, but the grasshopper spits in his eye. He tries to shoot a bunny rabbit, but the rabbit is too cute and pathetic. He tracks a bear, and runs after its cub and right into the mother. But the rest of the animals, thankful for him saving the rabbit, come to his rescue.

Goofy (front) and Donald (rear) are dressed in a moose suit, trying to lure moose for hunter Mickey. When they do find one, it turns out to be more than they can handle.

Mickey hosts an amateur hour radio show.

Bugs of all kinds convene on a jazz club for an evening of fun.

Housecleaning blues are just what Betty Boop has the morning after a wild party. Grampy to the rescue!

Betty Boop's baking is interrupted by obnoxious practical joking friend Irving. Can Grampy out-joke the joker?

A dog chases a rabbit, ultimately cornering him against a tree. But the dog doesn't want to eat the rabbit, just make friends. The rabbit takes his new friend (who he names Sniffy) to where the rest of the rabbits are playing football, and after introductions, they join in. A fox happens along. Realizing he can't attack while the dog is present, he calls the dog away. The opposing team asks the fox to join them, but he proves to be an awful football player. The dog starts to return, and the fox starts rounding up rabbits, with help from a carrot-baited fishing pole. The dog returns and chases fox; the rabbits are set free, and the fox is catapulted far away by a tree. The rabbits carry Sniffy off on their shoulders.

Donald is courting Daisy (called Donna, here in her first appearance) Duck in Mexico. He arrives on a burro, which doesn't get along at all well with her; she convinces him to buy a car. They head through the desert, but the car breaks down, and throws Donald out, then takes off on its own with Daisy trapped inside the rumble seat. The car hits a rock, throwing Daisy into a mud puddle, to Donald's excessive amusement. Daisy pulls a unicycle from her purse, and rides off.

Mad scientist Mickey has just brewed up a potion; to test it out, he squirts it on a fly that's been trapped by a spider, a (regular) mouse being harassed by a cat, then the cat when Pluto goes after it, and Pluto when dogcatcher Pegleg Pete goes after him. Each of the underdogs turns against his tormentor.

Parabola is a celebration of film’s ability to create new ways of seeing the forms around us. Creating juxtapositions between light/shadow, stasis/motion, and form/music, this black-and-white short invites us to see the parabolic curve, or “nature’s poetry,” as both invigorating and beguiling.

It's race day, and first prize is $2 million (less $1,999,998.37 in taxes). Porky's little car is matched against cars driven by stars of yesteryear, including Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin. When the black #13 driven by "Borax Karoff" makes a bid for the finish line, can Porky fend him off?

Porky and two pals stumble onto a Mexican town on the day of the town's annual bullfight. When they learn the contest winner gets $1,000...

The cat's asleep, so the mice are on the loose, for a while at least, in the pantry. When he wakes up, they pile the food on him and get him thrown out, and then they *really* have the run of the house.

Red walks past a pool hall; the wolf sees her and pursues. But Red is oblivious to his come-ons.

In this 1937 Terrytoon, one of the funniest ever made by the studio, a drunk goat is scared by the appearence of three pink elephants. The goat runs into Farmer Al Falfa's house.

Betty Boop is so delighted with her new fox fur that Pudgy the Pup grows jealous, then thinks he's killed it...

An orchestra puts on a symphony.

Porky reads a book of new dog tricks; unfortunately, his dog, Rover, is old. A puppy comes by and taunts him.

Porky invests his savings. Mayhem ensues.