Jimmy the C (1977)

the audience applauded

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

This short was nominated for an Academy Award. There will be mild spoilers ahead: I run the risk of writing a review which might take longer to read than the short takes to watch if I make this a long review, so I'll try to be brief. Set to a Ray Charles recording of "Georgia On My Mind", a claymation caricature of Jimmy Carter in the Oval Office lip syncs his love for Georgia (complete with a peanut chorus singing backup).There are at least two rather odd visuals in the short which make the peanut chorus look positively normal. They must be seen to be believed, so I won't spoil them here. This is a delightfully twisted animated short and I love it to bits.It has been online and available to watch over the years and is well worth the time and effort to track down and watch. Most recommended.

This film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short. I guess it was a rather slow year, as the film seemed amazingly ordinary to have received such a high honor. Or perhaps it was just a product of the times given the subject matter. The entire four minute film features the music of Ray Charles singing "Georgia on my Mind" and features an adequately animated Jimmy Carter, among other things. The entire film is made using claymation animation and while it's pretty crude compared to later versions of this technology, some of this is probably because it was such an early example. Later, the animation became smoother and the models themselves more finely detailed and realistic. Watchable, but that's about it.

The concept is simple. A cartoon Jimmy Carter is the visual of Ray Charles' voice singing "Georgia." It's all there in excruciating detail--the syrupy smile, the tears of sentimentality. It is laugh out loud funny and you just wish it were longer. The song by itself is wonderful just as straight audio. But the fun with using Jimmy Carter as a foil doesn't take anything from that. It's the gut punch of juxtaposition that makes it work so well. It has been years since I first saw the little gem, yet it remains as vivid as if it were yesterday. I would love to own it, just so that I could play it again like a favorite song.