Animated short films let moviemakers take creative risks and wow viewers with bite-sized tales, and even have an entire Oscars category. Like feature-length animated movies, so many aspects go into making an animated short film. This includes everything from storyboarding and producing the animation itself, to the music and the editing.
One of the most important aspects to produce is the script. If you’re considering making an animated short film yourself you’ll need to do just this, but it can be difficult to know where to start. Fortunately for you, this guide explores exactly how to write a script for an animated short film, as well as giving you vital background information on the genre to help with the process.
The term ‘short film’ as a whole has several definitions. According to film industry data analyst Stephen Follows , it was historically defined as a movie “being on just one or two 35mm film reels, i.e. 22 minutes long.” However, nowadays some believe it’s any film under 60 minutes, the Oscars define it as those under 40 minutes (though the average running time of nominee movies is 22 minutes), and the Cannes Film Festival says they should be just 15 minutes long. All in all, the average length is 13 minutes and 31 seconds.
An animated short film has no set structure, although, like the majority of screenplays generally, most follow the Three Act Story Structure . This is simply a story with a beginning, middle and end, or a setup, expansion and payoff. Usually, the middle part takes up around 50% of the film, while the other two take up 25% each.
Easily one of the most famous animated short films of all time — if not the most famous — is Luxo Jr . The two minute movie is synonymous with Pixar, and depicts a larger lamp (Luxo Sr) looking on as the smaller lamp (Luxo Jr) plays exuberantly with a ball that it accidentally deflates. Deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress in 2014, it was also the first ever CGI film nominated for an Academy Award.
This Wallace & Gromit short was released in 1993 as a sequel to 1989 film A Grand Day Out, and follows a sinister penguin using Wallace and Gromit’s robotic “Techno Trousers” to steal a diamond. The Wrong Trousers won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1994 and garnered two further sequels: A Close Shave (1995) and A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008).
Scooping the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film at the 88th Academy Awards, Bear Story was also the inaugural Chilean winner of an Academy Award and the first Latin American animation to even be nominated for an Oscar. The film follows an old, lonesome bear telling the story of his life to a young cub through a mechanical magical diorama.