BY RICHARD CORLISS
Our official 100 films are all feature-length. Short films, though, have given pleasure to millions (as part of the full-service programs of '30s and '40s movie houses) and a home for the most visionary artists. Here we celebrate small movies—cartoons and documentaries, live-action story films and avant-garde experiments—with grand achievements.

MÉNILMONTANT, 1926, Dimitri Kirsanoff, France

Three murders, prostitution, homelessness, a child borne out of wedlock: the plot packs enough incident for a full shelf of Simenon novels, let alone a half-hour silent movie whose story is told totally through images. But as critic Georges Sadoul noted, Ménilmontant is "not a melodrama but an antecedent to neo-realism, portraying life itself with a sensitive use of natural sets and a feeling for poetry and truth." In this whirling synopsis of Soviet, German, French, American cinematic styles, Kirsanoff, a Russian refugee in Paris, never loses the sight of desperate or generous humanity. In the film's indelible scene, a young mother (Kirsanoff's wife Nadia Sibirskaia), shivering and miserable, is joined on a park bench by an old man she doesn't know. Without ostensibly acknowledging her, the old man leaves scraps of bread in the space between them for the tearful, grateful girl. An ennobling emotional wipeout.

UN CHIEN ANDALOU, 1929, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, France

The moon, the balcony, the pretty woman sitting on it, a man behind her. What a distillation of French romanticism! And what a slap of Spanish surrealism when the man opens a razor and slices the woman's eyeball. The first few moments of Dali's and Buñuel's sly atrocity were designed to raise hackles, subvert social and cinematic decorum and, if the filmmakers got their wish, provoke riots. So were the succeeding 15 mins., which includes (in Roger Ebert's helpful catalog) "a transvestite on a bicycle, a hairy armpit, a severed hand on the sidewalk, a stick poking the hand, a silent-movie style sexual assault, a woman protecting herself with a tennis racket, the would-be rapist ... dragging the grand piano that has the priests and the dead donkeys on top of it..., two apparently living statues in sand from the torso up, and so on." This Andalusian mutt was a grandly provocative affront from two young men who, separately, did so much to shock the very bourgeoisie whose commissions would make them rich and famous.

DRAFTEE DAFFY, 1945, Robert Clampett, U.S.

All the great Warners cartoon directors of the '40s were highly energized eccentrics, but Clampett was, arguably, insane. I mean that in the most complementary sense, because his 7-min. salvos represent the studio's output at its adolescent apex. The Clampett style was a farrago of congested plots, impudent sight gags and instant and extreme physical distortions, orchestrated at a manic pace. In this great cowardly concerto, he turns his prime vessel, Daffy Duck, into a draft dodger (this in the last year of World War II!), running hither and yon, and always amuck, to escape "the little man from the draft board." Chuck Jones would later extend Daffy's tendencies—splenetic, fearful, shat on by fate and a certain wascally wabbit—in a series of great '50s films. But Draftee Daffy will stand as Clampett's funniest, most delirious collaboration with the little black duck.

LITTLE 'TINKER, 1948, Tex Avery, U.S.

Avery, who while a Warner Bros. cartoon director created a primitive Bugs Bunny in A Wild Hare (1940), moved to MGM in 1942. There, Hanna and Barbera got all the Oscar nominations, while Tex just made unique and fabulously funny movies. His two obsessive themes: the mad, near-hopeless intensity of love, and the crazy, divine plasticity of the film medium. His characters would often step out of the film frame, or run from a Technicolor background into a black-and-white one, or call for medical assistance from a doctor in the theater audience. Little 'Tinker is one of his calmer comedies, whose hero, a romantic soul named B.O. Skunk, is desperate for female companionship. The ladies love him when he's camouflaged as Frank Sinatra (so thin his body disappears when he stands behind a microphone), but recoil when they realize he's only a little stinker. Avery piles up the visual gags without losing the central poignancy, proving there's a sweet soul inside the movies' prime cartoon anarchist.

BLOOD OF THE BEASTS, 1949, Georges Franju, France

Contrasting quiet vistas in suburban Paris with shots of sheep, cows and calves being slaughtered at the Halles de la Villette, Blood Of The Beasts can be seen as a vegetarian tract, a plea for humane treatment of animals, the first documentary splatter film or the ideal companion piece to Un Chien Andalou (where a calf's eye did stunt work for the human eye sliced in the opening scene). The film offers no hint as to how it should be taken; its noncommittal style makes it all the richer and more disturbing. Franju, cofounder with Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque Française, went on to make other superb documentaries (including the wrenching Hôtel des Invalides, about men wounded in war), and some fine feature films (Eyes Without a Face, Head Against the Walls, Thérèse Desqueyroux, Judex). But his masterpiece, arguably, is this debut film, implacably serving up images of the gruesome process by which the world is fed. Would you like fries with that?

FEED THE KITTY, 1952, Chuck Jones, U.S.

It's myopic to limit praise of Chuck Jones by saying he was the finest director of animated shorts. Jones' vision and craft earn him a place in the Pantheon of all film creators. But for now he's over here at a side altar. Chuck and his writing partner Michael Maltese created some lasting critters (Pepe Le Pew, Wile E. Coyote), but his immortality came in developing characters others had devised. Bugs Bunny gained a new insouciance, Daffy became a put-upon Everyduck, Elmer Fudd was the studio's premier patsy and Porky sputtered sensibly in support. So why chose Feed the Kitty, with its appearances by two non-stars, the bulldog Marc Anthony and the black kitten Pussyfoot? Because this 7-min. saga, of Marc Anthony's dogged attempts to protect a little friend prone to domestic disaster, displays Jones in all his visual resourcefulness and genial humanity. It shows how cartoon genius could start with a few standard comic tensions, and pull a Saturday-matinee genre out of the frying pan and into the film Pantheon.

OFFON, 1972, Scott Bartlett, U.S.

There was a time, 40 years ago, when it seemed as if movies could shake off their dependence on traditional story-telling and join painting, the novel, the play and music in the museum of modernism. That didn't take—moviegoers are essentially children, addicted to knowing "what happens next?"—but in the 60s and early 70s, the American film avant-garde produced some handmade amazements. We mention, in passing and gratitude, Bruce Conner's Cosmic Ray, Stan Brakhage's Window War Baby Moving, James Broughton's The Bed, Will Hindle's Chinese Firedrill. Those are relics, alas, of an unfulfilled hope: that an audience might embrace an enhanced cinematic vocabulary. Not so with Bartlett's film, which begins with a closeup of a blue eye, then zooms in to discover the kaleidoscope of images behind that eye, in Bartlett's verdant imagination. Actually, we can't even call Offon a film, since it was the first work to merge movie and video technology. In nine mins. of hallucinogenic fear and rapture, the picture anticipates ILM, MTV, Pixar and other industries undreamed of in 1972, except by a visionary like Bartlett.

UNIVERSE OF ENERGY PRE-SHOW, 1982-96, Emil Radok, U.S.

The short film, as a staple of movie exhibition, is dead. But the form survives, still enthralls millions each year, in theme parks like EPCOT Center at Walt Disney World in Florida. Directors can experiment with movie screens that move, or cover the 360 degrees of a circular room. The finest of the Disney pavilion films was this installation by Radok (a Czech artist who fled his country for Canada after the Soviet tanks moved in) for the Universe of Energy, sponsored by Exxon. The main show was a lumbering adventure of animatronic dinosaurs; the real excitement was out front, in a seatless theater whose screen was composed of 100 three-sided squares. At a computer's instruction, each square could twist to reveal a black or white side, thus framing a myriad of images. The "story" was the history of energy (from the oil company's viewpoint, of course). The show's art was in its style, which used technology to point the way to the next generation of art. Since the show cost millions to install, and was replaced in 1996, this magnificent demonstration of pop-up film art is unseeable now, except in the memories of the visitors awed by it.

THE WRONG TROUSERS, 1993, Nick Park, U.K.

If traditional animators are, by job definition, masochists—toiling at their drawing boards to complete an image that will last one-24th of a second—the creators of stop-motion animation must wear a hairshirt to work each day. It has to be madness: shaping plasticene to represent a dog (Gromit) and his man (Wallace), placing them in a toy movie set, exposing the film for one frame, then minutely manipulating the figures for the next eye-blink shot. Yet some people pursue the process. And Nick Park makes superb comic art of it. The genius of Britain's Aardman Studios (as John Lasseter is of Pixar), Park had feature-film success with Chicken Run in 2000. Our favorites are his three Wallace & Gromit shorts, of which The Wrong Trousers is the celestial apogee. A larcenous penguin snookers Wallace, the bachelor inventor, into devising trousers that can walk on walls or ceilings—while Gromit, the sensible, fatalist pooch, tries to avert comic tragedy. Wallace and Gromit are to make their feature debut this fall. Here's hoping that the bliss Park effortlessly (or, rather, effortfully) sustained for 30 mins. can blossom into an epic of dog's relationship to man.

THE HEART OF THE WORLD, 2000, Guy Maddin, Canada

A 6-min. short that earned spots on many 10 Best lists, Maddin's mini-masterpiece (commissioned for the 25th Toronto Film Festival) uses his trademarked technique of "instant aging"—creating silent film-style imagery on frames scratched to suggest antiquity. Two brothers (one an actor dressed as Jesus) love the same woman, a scientist who has determined that the world may end through heart failure! From Winnipeg's finest director, whose peculiar seductions include Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Sissy Boy Slap Party, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs and The Saddest Music in the World (another tale of battling brothers and unattainable women), comes an incredibly compressed epic, in a tone blending Soviet expressionism with Hollywood melodrama. Which brings us, full circle, to the innovations and emotional acuity of Ménilmontant, three-quarters of a century before.