This is another edition of Short Starts, where we present a weekly short film(s) from the start of a filmmaker or actor’s career. The new animated feature Epic doesn’t seem to be high on a lot of lists of anticipated summer movies, but it is sure to draw in the kids. While Fox’s Blue Sky Studios may only be the third most significant company making animated features in the U.S., that’s still very lucrative business (mostly for the Ice Age series). And director Chris Wedge, a founding member of Blue Sky who hasn’t taken the helm of a movie since 2005′s Robots, is a name you should know in the world of animation. Even if Wedge wasn’t such a big wig, though (and even if we didn’t share a birthday, which I take very seriously), I always like devoting a Short Starts post to directors of animated works. More than most kinds of filmmakers, they tend to have begun with short subjects, and these shorts tend to be available to watch online. Both are true of Wedge’s early animated films, two of which are very crude, very short, very early examples of computer animation from the 1980s — Tuber’s Two Step and Balloon Guy — and then a later longer piece that won the Academy Award in 1999, titled Bunny. Join us in watching and learning about all three films after the jump.

Short Starts presents a weekly short film(s) from the start of a filmmaker or actor’s career. With the role of Tom Buchanan in Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby, actor Joel Edgerton continues his rise in stardom. He even has a couple of character posters to show for his fame. Long before he was embodying a character from classic American literature, though, and long before he was hunting Osama Bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty and fighting his brother in The Warrior and even playing Darth Vader’s stepbrother in the Star Wars prequels, he was a regular figure in the short subjects scene. We can thank part of this on his nationality, as Australia is a great country for short films (it’s home of Tropfest, after all). On top of that, he came up through the film collective known as Blue-Tongue Films, alongside his writer/director/stuntman brother Nash (who is Joel’s double in Gatsby) and filmmakers David Michôd (Animal Kingdom) and Spencer Susser (Hesher). Joel made his film debut in Blue-Tongue’s first work, a nine-minute film from 1996 titled Loaded, which is directed by Nash with writer Kieran Darcy-Smith. I thought about simply posting that early baby-faced short start from the actor, but seeing as he’s in so many shorts, most of which are online, I’ve sampled five of his first appearances after the jump, two of which aren’t Blue-Tongue productions, all of which feature Joel pre-beard and pre-bulk. 

Short Starts presents a weekly short film from the start of a filmmaker or actor’s career. Australian comedienne Rebel Wilson is really on the rise, and very quickly at that. It’s only been two years since she made her mainstream Hollywood debut (if we exclude playing a featured goth extra in Ghost Rider) with a small yet memorable role in Bridesmaids. But last year she was on fire with six major parts including a voice performance in the latest installment of the Ice Age series. Her big breakout, though, came with her scene-stealing stint in Pitch Perfect, which she’ll have a chance to reprise in a newly announced sequel. That movie helped her land the gig hosting last Sunday’s MTV Movie Awards, a ceremony hip to what’s hot at the moment. And now this Friday she can be seen in smaller capacity as a “penis magic” specialist in Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. To find her short start, we only have to go back to 2009′s Bargain! This isn’t exactly the beginning of her career, which for years has consisted of regular TV work Down Under, but it is her first lead performance in film. And while this lead performance is only a few minutes in length, it garnered Wilson a Best Actor award at Tropfest. The funniest thing about it, however, is that it’s nothing compared to the confident comedic standout we know her for only three years later. She’s great in the film, which is written and directed

Short Starts presents a weekly short film from the start of a filmmaker or actor’s career. Director Fede Alvarez, who made the Evil Dead remake out this Friday, broke out with a short film that went viral. You’ve probably seen that one, the giant robot invasion pic Ataque de Panico! (Panic Attack!) — watch here if not. Before that, though, he and his Evil Dead writing partner, Rodo Sayagues, made a few other movies including one that you can also watch online. And it’s a lot more akin to what we can probably expect from his Hollywood horror debut. There’s blood, boobs, semen, guns, machetes and screams of pleasure and of pain. It’s called El Cojonudo: La Nunca Jamas Contada Historia De — loosely translated on screen as The Never Ever Told Story of Mr. Balls.

  Short Starts typically presents a weekly short film from the start of a filmmaker or actor’s career. This week we present short films from the start of  Irish cinema. While St. Patrick’s Day is technically specifically a holiday to honor St. Patrick, because he’s the patron saint of Ireland the occasion has become a time for celebrating all things Irish. For many of us, that means wearing green, drinking Guinness and/or Jameson (and/or Harp, Kilkinney, Bulmer’s, Smithwick’s, Bailey’s, Old Bushmills … alcohol in general) and blasting Dropkick Murphys while drunkenly attempting to/mocking stepdance. For a few of us, it’s also a moment to recognize Irish cinema, and by that I don’t just mean Darby O’Gill and a bunch of IRA/”Troubles” dramas (though many of these are great). Maybe it means something by one of the McDonagh brothers (like Martin’s foreign-set In Bruges or John Michael’s domestically placed The Guard) or any one of the Roddy Doyle Barrytown Trilogy adaptations (if you’ve only seen The Commitments, get to Stephen Frears’ The Snapper and The Van too). You’re also encouraged to watch some shorts, particularly since Ireland is a great producer of shorts, many of which go on to Oscar consideration like Martin McDonagh’s Six Shooter, which won in 2006, and recent nominees Pentecost, The Crush, The Door, New Boy, Give Up Yer Aul Sins and Fifty Percent Grey. And we can go all the way back to 1900 for the beginning of short films shot and/or produced in the country. Check

Short Starts typically presents a weekly short film from the start of a filmmaker or actor’s career. This week we present a short film from the start of a film property. Say what you will about Oz the Great and Powerful (I’m not a fan, but the $80 million gross implies some of you are), but you can’t dismiss it simply out of loyalty and preference for MGM’s The Wizard of Oz. That film may be a classic, but it’s far from being an original product that can be ruined by any remake, sequel or prequel. Sure, the new Oz strangely attempts to get away with as much visual linkage to the 1939 film as Disney could get away with, but it’s also just another in a very long list of adaptations of L. Frank Baum‘s children’s stories, which includes animated versions, Muppet versions and all-African-American versions, as well as silent incarnations going back more than a century, many of which involved Baum directly. The first cinematic treatment of Oz was in 1908, as part of a compilation of stories adapted from Baum’s books (including non-Oz works) titled The Fairylogue and Radio Plays. I don’t technically qualify the project as the first Oz movie because it only partly involved colorized film material in addition to slides and live performance, all wrapped up in a traveling stage show. Naturally, this means it doesn’t survive — also it was not financially successful, resulting in Baum’s bankruptcy in 1911, so that may be

Short Starts presents a weekly short film from the start of a filmmaker or actor’s career. The new film Stoker represents a departure for South Korean director Park Chan-wook. It’s not only his first English-language feature but also his first time directing a screenplay written by someone else (Wentworth Miller, in this case). Whether this is a new phase in his career or just a one-off remains to be seen, but it’s certainly something new. Holding that in mind, let’s look back on another moment of transition in Park’s career. His first feature, The Moon Is… the Sun’s Dream, premiered in 1992 but break-out success didn’t come until 2000’s Joint Security Area. In between he directed 1997’s Saminjo (totally unavailable outside of South Korea) and one darkly comic short film that is probably his best-regarded early work.

Short Starts presents a weekly short film from the start of a filmmaker or actor’s career.  Twenty years ago, a young Ewan McGregor began his acting career with a short film made for Channel 4 called Family Style. The 11-minute, black and white effort was also the directorial debut of Justin Chadwick, whose latest, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, was just acquired for distribution by The Weinstein Co. Back in 1993, McGregor still had long hair, a look you’ll find familiar if you’ve seen Shallow Grave, and was far from being a great actor. His crying scene in Family Style is pretty awful. But look at what two decades does for a guy, going from a breakthrough role in Trainspotting to portraying a young Obi-Wan Kenobi and working with Woody Allen, Baz Luhrman, Peter Greenaway, Todd Haynes, Tim Burton, Ridley Scott, Ron Howard, Steven Soderbergh and Roman Polanski, earning two Golden Globe nominations… And now co-starring in a big budget, live-action adaptation of Jack and the Beanstalk (Jack the Giant Slayer). 

Both leads in Beautiful Creatures are relative newcomers, but actress Alice Englert is more of an out-of-nowhere choice for such an anticipated adaptation. She’s been garnering raves for her performances in festival favorites like Sally Potter’s Ginger & Rosa and the recent Sundance debut In Fear, but otherwise this Thursday will really mark her introduction to general moviegoers. And I’ll admit, she’s excellent in Beautiful Creatures, standing out as a dramatic centerpiece amidst the enjoyable over-the-top stints by Jeremy Irons, Emma Thompson and Emmy Rossum. Between that, the other two features I mentioned and Roland Joffe’s upcoming Singularity, the 18-year-old could very well be the next big thing, and perhaps the best of such since Jessica Chastain. So, where did she come from? Very literally she came from Jane Campion, the Oscar-nominated director of The Piano. She even had her first real starring role in one of her mother’s films, the short The Water Diary, which is part of the feature-length omnibus 8. While IMDb credits this as Englert’s first work, she actually made her debut in an earlier short from 2001, Paul Maling’s Listen. You can watch that in full over at Alice-Englert.org. After The Water Diary, she appeared in one more short before the hiatus that led up to this year’s heavy output. That one, Hannah Cowley’s Flame of the West, does not appear to be available online anywhere, but you can check out a trailer that barely features the actress here.

Later this week, the alleged final theatrical release directed by Steven Soderbergh will open nationwide. Titled Side Effects, it’s a fine little thriller involving psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry. Maybe not the grandest finale for the filmmaker who gave us such big movies as the Oceans trilogy, Traffic, Che, Shizopolis and of course Sex, Lies and Videotape, but he didn’t enter the business with a bang either. Soderbergh’s first professional directing gig, at age 21, was helming a little-recognized concert film titled Yes: 9012Live, which presents a 1984 performance by the band Yes during their tour supporting the album 90125. (You can see a clip of them doing “Roundabout” from the film here.) Supplementary to that, he shot a short backstage documentary during the tour called Access All Areas. It’s a crude look at the reunited prog-rock group both aesthetically and content-wise. It’s quickly cut, offering only bits of moments rather than full-on scenes. And some of those little bits include band members mooning the camera, talking about needing to poop and putting their butts up to the microphone of Larry Blake, who would continue on as Soderbergh’s regular sound man for almost 30 years (through Magic Mike). And at the end of the film, everyone has false credits where Tony Kaye and Trevor Rabin are said to be known as “Jack Mehoff” and “Michael Hunt,” respectively. Who knew Yes was so childish?

Nobody really knows Fisher Stevens the director. We tend to think of him primarily as the actor who boldly went brownface for the Short Circuit movies and more recently appeared in a few episodes of Lost. (But if you’re really hip, you best remember him for My Science Project.) He also won an Oscar for producing the documentary The Cove three years ago. But he has been directing here and there since the mid-’90s. He helmed a little-known rom-com in 2002 called Just a Kiss and collaborated with Dan Klores on the also under-seen 2007 doc Crazy Love. This Friday, his biggest directorial effort to date, Stand Up Guys, opens theatrically in a modest number of locations considering it stars Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin. In anticipation of that new feature, I’d like to go back 18 years and look at Stevens’s directorial debut. It’s a short titled Call of the Wylie, and it’s a live-action comedy about the Warner Bros. cartoon character Wile E. Coyote. In his personal life, he goes by his middle name, Ezra, and acts like quite the highbrow thespian in spite of the slapstick role he’s best known for. Starring as the Coyote is Patrick Breen, who also scripted the short (as well as Stevens’s Just a Kiss and another short, Phineas). Call of the Wylie depicts the character being fired by Jack Warner and then meeting a woman named Melody (as in Merrie Melody) played by Amy Irving. Over drinks and smokes,

If you already have low expectations for Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, you might not be interested in seeing the first film by Norwegian director Tommy Wirkola. It won’t exactly do much for your interest in the new action-infused fairy tale. But if you’re like me and are fascinated by the calling card short films of Hollywood moviemakers, you’ll want to check out Remake. Anyway, it’s under seven minutes, so you’re not wasting too much time. The short was produced in Australia in 2006, and Wirkola shares helming duties on the film with Kit McDee (who has his own action feature with the word “hunters” in it out this year called The Hunters Club Movie). They both also co-star as hotel desk clerks (or owners?) who offer guests homemade Betamax videos featuring cheap remakes of popular movies (Titanic, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Scream and Deep Throat are among the titles we see). Basically these movies have been “sweded,” although Remake was made before Be Kind Rewind, which coined that term and popularized the concept.

Ruben Fleischer is on a roll right now, with his third feature in four years hitting theaters (a bit delayed) this Friday. Before Gangster Squad, he directed the dark comedies Zombieland and 30 Minutes or Less, and long before that he made his first film, a short from 2001 titled The Girls Guitar Club. Producing and directing off a script from the comedy duo of Karen Kilgariff and Mary Lynn Rajskub (both of whom were then perhaps best known for Mr. Show), Fleischer thought it would be his calling card for jumping into Hollywood. “I basically spent all the money I had saved and was sure that movie deal offers were gonna come and I’d be directing pilots [for] television shows,” he told Collider back in 2009. “And as soon as people saw the short film, but of course people thought and said, ‘Oh that’s good,’ and [then] nothing ever really came of it.”

Hollywood kicks off the new year in movies this Friday with the release of Texas Chainsaw 3D. The horror sequel stars 26-year-old actress Alexandra Daddario in her first major studio lead role, a gig that came a decade into a career that began with a regular stint on the soap opera All My Children. Since then she played many supporting parts on the big and small screen (as well as on the web) before landing the job playing Annabeth Chase, one of the main demigod characters of the Percy Jackson movies (the second of which opens in August). However, Texas Chainsaw 3D actually marks her second time playing the lead in a slasher film, the first being in the indie flick Bereavement, shot in 2007 but not released in theaters until last year. Even before that, Daddario appeared in a short film, as many young actors now do when starting out. And while she’s really only in Pitch for literally half a minute, I think it’s always interesting to see what actors were doing early on, in this case seven years ago. But I also thought I’d share this film because it deals with the movie business. Written and produced and co-starring Jason Fuchs (who co-wrote this year’s Ice Age: Continental Drift) and directed by Ian Gelfand (an associate producer on the great 2011 doc A Matter of Taste: Serving Up  Paul Liebrandt), the short is about two hotshot NYU film school grads (Fuchs and Another Earth‘s Robin Taylor) who try

Later today, we have a Christmas-themed edition of Scenes We Love, in which you’ll find a number of favorite movie moments of varying genres and content. Some of them involve Santa Claus. So, in lieu of finding a short film made by or featuring someone related to a new film out this week, I thought it would be fun to look at some of the earliest cinematic appearances of the jolly old holiday mascot. If you want to go back further than your usual classics-honoring tradition of watching Miracle on 34th Street, definitely check out these five ancient shorts.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that the most exciting thing about Tom Cruise‘s new action flick, Jack Reacher, is Werner Herzog. The legendary German director does act, occasionally, but playing a Russian bad guy in a mainstream Hollywood movie? That’s something to be excited about, if only because his Russian accent will almost definitely be memorably off-beat. Yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, this isn’t Herzog’s first time dealing with machismo on film. Way back in 1962 he made a short called Herakles, his very first film ever. It’s a critical look at the relationship between masculinity and the 20th century world, at least in a sense. The bulk of the film is made up of footage of bodybuilders working out in a gym, wearing the scantiest of briefs and flexing for the camera as often as possible. The beefcake reel is then interwoven with images from the modern world that clash with the “ideal” human male, sarcastically representing the twelve labors of Hercules. “Will he clean the Augean stables?” Herzog asks, and then shows us an enormous pile of trash.

There’s a great short starring Martin Freeman making the rounds this week, and I recommend watching that two-year-old film, titled The Girl is Mime, when you get the chance. But there’s another short led by the actor that I’d like to showcase this weekend in anticipation of The Hobbit. Way back in 1998, before Freeman was in Sherlock or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Love Actually or even his breakthrough, the original UK version of The Office, he had two small yet notable gigs. One was appearing alongside Doctor Who‘s Shaun Dingwall in Vito Rocco’s music video for Faith No More’s cover of “I Started a Joke.” The other was starring in the 11-minute black and white film I Just Want to Kiss You. Written and directed by Jamie Thraves, best known for music videos he’s helmed for Blur, Radiohead and Coldplay, this French New Wave-style throwback has Freeman looking very young and very skinny and actually quite goofy as a guy just hanging out with his mate and meeting girls and getting into trouble with his dad. The goofiness is a bit surprising if you primarily think of Freeman as the straight man of The Office and Hitchhiker’s Guide and other such gigs. I certainly don’t know of him doing a lot of voices and vocal sound effects and the sort of spry physicality he exhibits in the short these days. Yet it does fit nicely alongside his completely physical performance in The Girl is Mime, and though he’s