Well, David Fincher started out working for Korty, who also directed the Oscar-winning documentary feature Who Are the DeBolts? And Where Did They Get Nineteen Kids? And many other filmmakers who produced shorts for Sesame Street either had won or went on to win Academy Awards, or at least were nominated. Is it akin to how adults in the US don’t necessarily have an appreciation for math? Are these shorts associated too much with education? Is there nothing for grown-ups to like about the films of John Korty? And to wonder why there’s not more of an interest in experimental cinema and short films from most Americans who would have been raised on such works through Sesame Street. Today is also PBS’s birthday, so it’s a perfect occasion to acknowledge the impact of their most famous program. I’ve been thinking about the show’s influence on my appreciation of film this week because I was just at the Dok Leipzig documentary festival, which celebrates the mixing of animation and nonfiction (they call such hybrids “animadocs”), and I caught a retrospective of old Hungarian shorts falling into that category, most of them produced by Gyorgy Matolcsy at Pannonia Film Studios, and they reminded me of stuff I’d seen on Sesame Street as a kid, only more avant-garde and sometimes more political. And other shorts in the early ’90s include a few from John Lasseter and Pixar and a handful based on the art of Keith Haring. Some of the more famous names among them are Maurice Sendak, Friz Freleng, Mo Willems, William Wegman and Andy Warhol. That short came a bit later than my days of watching the educational children’s program (fortunately I was introduced to the Quays soon after, during college), but there were plenty of great animators and other filmmakers who contributed to Sesame Street in my time. They made a short for Sesame Street back then titled Rain Dance, about a farming family and their livestock dancing during a much-needed downpour. But anyone who grew up on public television in the early 1990s might have already been familiar with the Quays’ work and just not known it. This year, with a new documentary he directed, Christopher Nolan got a lot of props for helping to spread awareness of the Brothers Quay, animation legends who aren’t as well-known as they should be.
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