Bambi Meets Godzilla c. 1969 : One of the funniest shorts of all time

When he was working on his student project at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles in the late ’60s, Marv Newland had no idea that he’d create one of the funniest and famed animated shorts of all time. When his first project — a live-action film — turned out to be too ambitious for the allotted time, Newland abandoned the project and changed course, spending two weeks and less than $300 on Bambi Meets Godzilla.

The minute-and-a-half-long film plays the picturesque, rural “Call to the Dairy Cows” from the 1829 opera William Tell as Bambi grazes in the pasture — that is, until the last haunting note from the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” (1967) reverberates as (spoiler!) Godzilla’s scaled foot comes crashing down on our protagonist. Decades later, Newland joked that Bambi Meets Godzilla is the “film that ruined my career,” though he went on to work on Gary Larson’s Tales From the Far Side TV special.

Jokes aside, few students can say their school project played in theaters across the U.S. (in this case, before screenings of Philippe de Broca’s King of Hearts). The short’s magic is all in the timing. Of the total 90-second runtime, the film spends the first 48 listing the opening credits and the last 27 on the closing credits, leaving just about 12 seconds in the middle for the “action,” which is just Godzilla’s unmoving, monstrous foot, ensuring the life is truly squashed out of poor, poor Bambi. But the film lives on, getting a makeover in a frame-for-frame HD re-creation in 2013.

https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html