Professor Owl gives a lecture on the evolution of Western musical instruments, starting with the advent of rudimentary brass, woodwind, string and percussion instruments by ancient cave dwellers at the dawn of history.
A woman injured in a car accident turns to the supernatural to heal herself.
Harry and Willie are scammed into buying the Thomas Edison studio lot by a man named Gorman. They decide to follow Gorman's trail to Hollywood where, unbeknownst to them, he has taken the identity of a foreign film director. The lads wind up as stunt doubles in film the which Gorman is now shooting, while the conman tries to have the bungling pair done away with before they realize who he really is.
The wealthy and impulsive Rollo Treadway decides to propose to his beautiful socialite neighbor, Betsy O'Brien. Although Betsy turns Rollo down, he still opts to go on the cruise that he intended as their honeymoon. When circumstances find both Rollo and Betsy on the wrong ship, they end up having adventures on the high seas.
After literally swimming across the Atlantic Ocean, an Englishman takes a country trip across Canada on a railcar.
On a dark and stormy night, four bored ghosts decide to have some fun by calling the Ajax Ghost Exterminators.
In this clever satire of toxic men, a cartoon pickup artist is violently torn apart by the women he targets, seen only through his own one-sided, ridiculously misogynistic point of view. Don Hertzfeldt's first student film, he plays the part of a mentally unwell animator who's losing his grip within his own movie; an idea he'd later revisit in other early "meta" shorts "Genre" and "Rejected". Despite being produced at the age of 18 and not intended for exhibition, HBO named it "The World's Funniest Cartoon" in 1998.
In Don Hertzfeldt's second student film, a hapless cartoon character is dragged through a spectrum of cinematic situations by his frustrated animator.
Charlie is a clumsy waiter in a cheap cabaret, suffering the strict orders from his boss. He meets a pretty girl in the park and tries to impress her by pretending to be an ambassador. Unfortunately she has a jealous fiancé.
A pawn shop employee must substitute for a robot in this short silent comedy.
A Southern teen at a ritzy boarding school gets into mischief while acting the sophisticated grownup to impress a suave gentleman and match wits with a pair of jewel thieves.
Educational short about the status of battle tanks and tank training in the U.S. Army in pre-War 1941, featuring a comical Army trainee from the Bronx.
Between 1933 and 1945 roughly 1200 films were made in Germany, of which 300 were banned by the Allied forces. Today, around 40 films, called "Vorbehaltsfilme", are locked away from the public with an uncertain future. Should they be re-released, destroyed, or continue to be neglected? Verbotene Filme takes a closer look at some of these forbidden films.
A magical tale of friendship and loneliness, which tells the story of a little boy who one day finds a penguin on his doorstep. Although at first he is unsure what to do, the boy becomes determined to help the penguin find his way back home... even if that means rowing all the way to the South Pole!
Newlyweds receive a build-it-yourself house as a wedding gift—and the house can, supposedly, be built in "one week". A rejected suitor secretly re-numbers packing crates, and the husband struggles to assemble the house according to this new 'arrangement' of its parts.
An oil heir and the daughter of a social climbing family are set to marry.
A sarcastic horror parody of comic book series from the 1930s.
A superstitious guy, Bien, seeks all sorts of “divine” signs that will determine his decision of asking the girl of his dreams out on a date. The fear of rejection swallows him whole, making him justify his cause to seek for more unfathomable signs. But when each sign he asks for materializes, he soon learns that he has to be careful with what he wishes.
An American on his honeymoon in Paris, organises the kidnapping of his interfering mother-in-law.
An insoluble quest.