Best Short Film, 1932-33

Awards presented March 16, 1934
(Films released from August 1, 1932 through December 31, 1933 were eligible.)

The nominees were ... 
(Cartoon)

• Building a Building, Walt Disney, producer
• The Merry Old Soul, Walter Lantz, producer
• The Three Little Pigs, Walt Disney, producer

(Comedy) 

• Mister Mugg, Warren Doane, producer
• A Preferred List, Louis Brock, producer
• So This Is Harris! Louis Brock, producer

(Novelty) 

• Krakatoa, Joe Rock, producer
• Menu, Pete Smith, producer
• The Sea, Educational

And the Oscar went to ... 

(Cartoon) 

The Three Little Pigs, Walt Disney, producer. 

One of the most popular Disney cartoons of the 1930s, The Three Little Pigs, and particularly Frank Churchill's song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf," was widely viewed as a parable about the Depression and the attitude needed to survive it.

(Comedy)
So This is Harris! Louis Brock, producer.



This pre-Code short, featuring some near-nudity, stars Phil Harris and Walter Catlett as themselves. Catlett hates to hear Harris sing, and goes out of his way to try to stop him. Brock, an RKO producer, oversaw the first teaming of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in Flying Down to Rio (1933), but most of his work was focused on short films. The director of So This Is Harris!, Mark Sandrich, would go on to direct Astaire and Rogers in The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, Shall We Dance, and Carefree.

(Novelty)
Krakatoa, Joe Rock, producer.

Joe Rock

Rock, né Joe Simburg, had been a stunt man and comedian in movies as early as 1915, but he turned producer, signing Stan Laurel (pre-Hardy) to a series of twelve two-reel comedies in 1924 and 1925, and producing a series called "A Ton of Fun," featuring three comedians padded into obesity and known as The Three Fatties. In 1933, he formed a separate production company to film a serious documentary, Krakatoa, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the explosion of the Indonesian island. It was distributed by Fox Film Corporation, and won him an Oscar. But he was out of the country when the award was announced, and by the time he returned his production company had gone out of business and he couldn't locate the documents that would establish his right to the award. Shortly before his death in 1984 he came across the necessary documents and the Academy gave him his Oscar.