Short film
Based on Wikipedia: Short film
The Art of Brevity: A History of Short Films
Every movie ever made started as a short film. Not metaphorically—literally. When cinema was born in the 1890s, films lasted about a minute. Sometimes less. The technology simply couldn't handle anything longer. What we now call "short films" weren't a category back then. They were just films.
That changed as the medium grew up. By the time the 1920s rolled around, audiences expected feature-length entertainment, and those brief works that had once defined cinema became supporting acts—appetizers before the main course. The American film industry started calling them "short subjects," a term that carried a subtle implication: these weren't the reason you bought your ticket.
But here's the thing about short films. They never stopped mattering.
What Counts as Short?
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that hands out the Oscars, draws the line at forty minutes. Anything longer, and you're in feature territory. Anything shorter, and you qualify for the Best Short Film categories they've been giving out since 1931.
Other organizations see it differently. The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television gives documentaries up to forty-five minutes and scripted films nearly an hour before they graduate to feature status. There's no universal agreement, which makes sense when you think about it. A forty-minute film feels long for a YouTube upload but impossibly brief for a theatrical release.
In the silent era and early sound period, the industry used more precise terminology. A "two-reeler" ran about twenty minutes—two standard 35-millimeter film reels at roughly ten minutes each. A "featurette" stretched to three or four reels. These terms have mostly faded from use, but they remind us that short films were once measured in physical objects, in the actual spools of celluloid that projectionists threaded through their machines.
The Golden Age of the Short Subject
Imagine walking into a movie theater in 1925. You wouldn't just see one film. You'd see a program—a carefully assembled collection of entertainment that might run two hours or more. The feature attraction was the centerpiece, sure. But surrounding it? A newsreel bringing you footage of world events. A travelogue showing exotic locations most audience members would never visit. A cartoon. And almost certainly, a short comedy.
These comedy shorts were enormously popular. Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp character became one of cinema's most recognizable figures through shorts before Chaplin moved into features. The Our Gang series, featuring a group of neighborhood kids getting into mischief, ran from 1922 to 1944 and produced over two hundred episodes. Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy—many of the silent era's greatest comedians built their reputations in films that ran less than half an hour.
Virtually every major studio maintained dedicated short subject departments. For some companies, especially in the silent era, shorts weren't a sideline. They were the entire business.
The Animated Exception
Cartoons existed almost exclusively as shorts. The economics were simple: hand-drawn animation cost a fortune in labor. Every second of screen time required dozens of individual drawings, each slightly different from the last, creating the illusion of movement when projected in rapid succession. Feature-length animation was theoretically possible, but practically insane.
Walt Disney changed that calculation with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, proving audiences would pay for a full-length cartoon. But even Disney kept making shorts alongside features. So did Warner Brothers with their Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced Tom and Jerry. Universal had Woody Woodpecker. Paramount distributed Fleischer Studios' Betty Boop and Popeye.
These weren't afterthoughts. Warner Brothers' animation unit included Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and Robert McKimson—directors whose work still holds up as some of the medium's finest. The seven-minute format forced a kind of concentrated brilliance. Every gag had to land. Every frame had to count.
1938: The Year Everything Changed
The Great Depression didn't just cause economic hardship. It restructured how movies reached audiences.
Before the Depression, theater owners assembled their own programs. They picked a feature, selected shorts they thought their audience would enjoy, arranged the order. They were curators as much as exhibitors. But as money tightened in the 1930s, studios started selling packaged deals—take the feature we want to push, and we'll include a B-movie, a cartoon, maybe a short or two. The practice was called block booking, and it stripped theater owners of their programming autonomy.
The double feature emerged from this shift. Instead of one feature surrounded by varied short subjects, audiences got two features back to back. The supporting shorts started to seem redundant. Why pad the program with twenty minutes of comedy when you could show another movie?
The year 1938 proved decisive. Hal Roach, one of the most successful short comedy producers, shut down almost all his short subject operations that year. He sold Our Gang to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and focused on features instead. Warner Brothers closed their Vitaphone short subject studio. Educational Pictures, another major producer, went under entirely after its president made a disastrous attempt to break into features.
Only Columbia Pictures expanded its short comedy output that year. Columbia and RKO Radio Pictures would keep producing two-reelers into the 1950s, but they were exceptions. The two-reel comedy, once a staple of American moviegoing, was becoming an endangered species.
The Serials: Please Come Back Next Week
One short format thrived even as others declined: the adventure serial.
Serials had been around since 1912, and they worked on a simple but devastatingly effective principle. Each chapter ran fifteen to twenty minutes and ended with the hero in mortal peril. A bomb about to explode. A train bearing down. A villain's death trap springing shut. And then—the screen went dark. "Continued next week."
This was appointment viewing before the term existed. Children especially became obsessed, begging parents for movie money every Saturday so they could find out if Flash Gordon escaped the monster's clutches or Buck Rogers survived the rocket crash. The cliffhanger ending, which we now take for granted in serialized television, was perfected in these cheaply made but compulsively watchable adventures.
Serials outlasted most other short formats. Republic Pictures and Columbia kept producing them into the mid-1950s, though by then they were cutting corners ruthlessly—recycling action footage from older serials and connecting them with minimal new scenes featuring actors in identical costumes. The audience didn't seem to mind, or maybe didn't notice.
Even after Republic stopped making serials in 1955 and Columbia followed in 1956, theaters kept showing reruns. A 1964 re-release of Columbia's 1943 Batman serial sparked unexpected mania—merchandising, fan excitement, ultimately a new television series that would define Batman in popular culture for a generation.
Television Kills the Short Film Star
Television changed everything, but not all at once.
By 1956, most studios had canceled their live-action short subject departments. The logic was straightforward: why make theatrical shorts when television offered an infinite appetite for brief entertainment? Variety shows, sitcoms, anthology dramas—TV consumed content in quantities that theatrical shorts never could have satisfied.
The Three Stooges held out longest, releasing their final two-reel comedy in 1959. They'd been making shorts since 1934, an extraordinary run that outlasted the format itself.
Cartoons proved more resilient. The invention of limited animation—a cost-cutting technique that reduced the number of drawings per second and reused more material—made animation economically viable for television. Studios could produce cartoons for TV at a fraction of theatrical costs, then run them repeatedly in syndication.
The major theatrical animation studios responded differently to this shift. Warner Brothers reorganized its animation department several times during the 1960s before exiting the business entirely in 1969. By then, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck had been in television reruns for years anyway. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contracted out Tom and Jerry to overseas studios with mixed results before shutting down cartoon production in 1967. The creative team behind MGM's classic cartoons, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, saw television's potential early and formed their own company in 1957, eventually producing The Flintstones, Scooby-Doo, and dozens of other series.
The Pink Panther, which started in 1964 and continued until 1980, holds the distinction of being the last regular theatrical cartoon short series. It spent its entire existence in the limited animation era, never knowing the lush, expensive production values of the 1940s golden age.
The Modern Renaissance
Short films didn't disappear. They transformed.
Without the theatrical ecosystem that once supported them, shorts became something else: a training ground, an artistic statement, a calling card. Film schools taught students to make shorts because shorts were what students could afford to make. Independent filmmakers used shorts to demonstrate skills and attract investors for larger projects. Artists who had things to say that didn't fit feature length found in short films a natural home.
Film festivals became crucial. Clermont-Ferrand in France, running since 1979, established itself as perhaps the world's most prestigious short film festival. The Tampere Film Festival in Finland has showcased shorts since 1969. The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in Germany dates to 1954, predating even the theatrical decline of the format. These festivals provide what theatrical distribution once did: audiences, attention, legitimacy.
Tropfest, founded in Sydney in 1993, claims to be the world's largest short film festival and has spread to multiple continents. Its founder argued that the festival helped spark renewed international interest in short filmmaking as a creative form rather than just a stepping stone to features.
Pixar and the Theatrical Revival
In 1995, Pixar released Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature film. It was a revolution. But Pixar did something else that year, something quieter but significant: they screened a short film before the feature.
This wasn't unprecedented—Disney had occasionally paired shorts with features. But Pixar made it a tradition. Every Pixar theatrical release since has opened with a short. The studio has produced original shorts consistently since 2001, and these films have won multiple Academy Awards.
When Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, it adopted the practice, producing new animated shorts starting in 2007. DreamWorks Animation creates shorts as bonus content for home video releases. Warner Brothers, sitting on one of cinema's richest archives of classic animation, sometimes includes vintage shorts on DVD releases and briefly produced new Looney Tunes theatrical shorts between 2010 and 2012.
The theatrical short hasn't returned to its golden age prominence. No one buys a ticket specifically to see the cartoon before the movie. But the format persists, a small pocket of continued existence within mainstream commercial filmmaking.
The Internet Changes Everything Again
The internet solved short films' distribution problem in a way no one anticipated.
YouTube launched in 2005 and became, among many other things, the largest short film distribution platform in history. Vimeo attracted a more professionally oriented community. Suddenly, anyone could upload a short film and potentially reach millions of viewers without navigating the festival circuit or hoping for theatrical placement.
The results have been mixed but undeniably democratic. A 2009 horror short called No Through Road went viral and essentially created what's now called "analog horror"—low-budget, found-footage-style horror distributed primarily online. The film spawned three sequels that together function as a web series, a format that couldn't have existed in the theatrical era.
Curated platforms have emerged to help viewers find quality work amid the deluge. Sites like Short of the Week, Omeleto, and others function as editorial filters, selecting noteworthy shorts and presenting them with context and commentary. Shorts International and Magnolia Pictures organize annual theatrical releases of Oscar-nominated shorts, creating a brief window each year when short films return to movie theaters across North America and Europe.
ShortsTV became the first television channel dedicated entirely to short films, though television itself has become just one screen among many.
Why Short Films Still Matter
The economics of short filmmaking create space for experimentation that features rarely permit.
When a film costs less to make, it can afford to fail. This sounds like a criticism but functions as liberation. Short filmmakers can try techniques that would be too risky in a production with investor expectations and theatrical distribution deals on the line. Pixilation—the stop-motion animation of human actors—appears far more often in shorts than features. Films without dialogue, films with non-linear structures, films about subjects too narrow or strange for commercial consideration: all find homes in the short format.
Professional actors and filmmakers sometimes make shorts not as career stepping stones but as ends in themselves. The constraint breeds creativity. Every great director working today learned something from making films with limited resources and limited time to tell their story.
From Forty-Six Seconds to Forty Minutes
The Lumière brothers' earliest films ran about forty-six seconds each—the physical limit of their camera's film capacity. Workers leaving a factory. A train arriving at a station. A baby being fed. These weren't stories so much as moving photographs, demonstrations that this new technology worked.
Some commentators have noticed an echo of those earliest films in today's ultra-short digital content. Micro-fictions designed for mobile phone viewing, lasting seconds or minutes. Social media videos that capture moments rather than narratives. The physical constraints that limited the Lumières have been replaced by attention-span constraints, but the result is similar: extremely brief moving images, created and distributed at massive scale.
Whether this represents a return to cinema's origins or something entirely new depends on how you define the terms. What's certain is that brevity in moving images has never gone away. It just keeps finding new forms.
The short film has been declared dead several times—by the double feature's rise, by television's dominance, by theatrical distribution's collapse. It keeps coming back, not because of nostalgia but because brevity has its own value. Some stories need ninety minutes. Some need five. The format that seemed like a historical artifact has proven to be permanent, adapting to each technological shift while remaining fundamentally itself: a film, but shorter.