The Golden Fish

This film has no dialogue, but the music track contains so much wow and flutter that its painful to hear. However, this Oscar-winning short has never been released for the public to view as far as I know, having searched for it ever since the advent of recordable movies - ie: video and DVD. I finally found this copy as a free download from Columbia Pictures Corporation and the film is so delightful that it is worth the strain of the discordant music track to watch it. It would not lose too much to view it with the sound turned off. I have done my best to clean the film by adding colour and sharpness and as far as possible tightening some bad edits on the original, but unfortunately there was nothing I could do about the music. There are some charming scenes such as the fish in its tank trying to avoid being taken by the ugly man who won it, but rushing into the net when he realises it's the boy who's going to take him away, and the cat replacing the fish in its bowl in a later scene... One can quite understand how the film won its Oscar for Best Short Subject in 1960 and also the International Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival the year before...