Robert Reynolds This short was nominated for an Academy Award. There will be mild spoilers ahead: The story of the little match girl is one of Hans Christian Andersen's most well-known tales, so the plot of this tale is hardly new. It's been animated several times, but this is one of the better ones. Columbia studio's animation department did an excellent one in the 1930s which is the best one I've seen. This is a close second.The backgrounds and animation on this one are as good as one has come to expect from Disney. The story is told without dialog and has been set in Russia. It's faithful to Andersen's tale. It's bittersweet and the ending can be seen as sad, happy or a mixture of the two, depending on the viewer's perspective. I see it as a sad ending myself.Very well done short which was included on the Platinum Edition of The Little Mermaid. It's well worth watching and most recommended.

Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de) It took Roger Allers over 10 years after "The Lion King" to come up with his next animated masterpiece. "The Little Matchgirl", however, was very much worth the wait and delivers emotion from start to finish in its short seven minutes running time. You all know the Hans Christian Andersen story of course. It's as relevant as ever, so pointless to say a lot more about it other than in its center is a little girl who tries to sell matches to make some money in order have a warm Christmas. Will she succeed? In her very own way, she does. I won't go any further into detail as you should experience the heart(break) put in this one as well.This is a definite contender for my favorite short film of the 21st century so far. The animation is excellent. The girl looks as convincing as the snowy environment she's in and all the people she meets until the hearty lady who finally leads her to salvation. The ending (and also everything before including the freezing, the little girl's longing for happiness and beloved ones) never fails to make my eyes wet. It's a wonderful piece of art and one of the main reasons why I love animation that much. Everybody should see it and the Academy has rarely been more wrong in refusing Allers and the film their well-deserved Oscar, but that shouldn't keep you from watching "The Little Matchgirl"

Dawalk-1 This short only gives another good example of what to be thankful for and a blessing to count on that holiday. That's exactly what I love about this: The lesson/message/moral there is in the end. Which is some of us should consider ourselves fortunate enough not to be in that situation and go through what the little Russian girl had to go through and struggle to survive on the streets daily and/or nightly. With her having to try to get by, selling matches to the passersby. This is definitely one that goes out to the homeless.A poor, little, Russian girl is a match vendor and she goes about her routine attempting to sell matches on a wintry night. Hoping to use the money she could've received possibly to buy some food I imagine. Sadly for her, there are no takers. Afterwards, she heads into the alley and settles under a makeshift tent. She then uses up her matches and every time she lights one, she imagines other things that she could've been doing at that moment, such as having a nice dinner. The visualizations are her only means of escape, if solely temporarily. Another vision she has is that she either returns home or visits the house of her grandmother. A third involves her in a sleigh ride. Youtube was once again the first source of where I saw this months ago and one commentator said that the girl was dumb for wasting all of the matches that she had and that the commentator was glad for the girl's eventual misfortune, and demise. To that commentator, I'd say/type:" I don't think it would've really made much of a difference. Even if the girl hadn't used up all or any of her matches, she still wouldn't have been able to withstand the weather/climate that night. But since she did use up all of the matches, the fires she made with them simply burned themselves out after a while and she still didn't endure the winter anyway. It was inevitable and bound to happen either way, a no-win situation. Other than you saying 'it was her own fault', I wonder if you were in her situation but you saved all of your matches, would you be able to bear the cold? And how would you feel if somebody said the same that you said about her fate? Making a dense comment like that and failing to think ahead and logically before commenting? "We have no idea for sure accurately how nor why the girl ended up being so poor and getting on the streets, but how can nobody continuously feel for her after the aforementioned case that I mentioned above? Anyway, I recommend this because it's wonderfully told with actions instead of dialogue, plus since like probably the late '50s or early '60s, we've been getting one new Disney 2D animated short per year. So, it's a real treat that even after Home On The Range in 2004, we still got the Disney 2D featurettes, if not full-length feature films, in a time in which animation is dominated by the 3D/CGI style. I wish there were more than one Disney 2D cartoon short per year though, even if that's better than none at all, but still. It's a real tearjerker that will tug at your heartstrings. I never got teary, but I'm also sad for her and wish the conclusion of this would've been on a happier note, like somebody or some people in the animation crew suggested and would've liked (as the other Disney films had traditionally or usually avoided somber endings) . Each time anyone watches this, it's important they bear in mind that the point of this is to be grateful for what they have and not take everyday things for granted. Not having to strive the hardships and shortcomings like she did and literally weather the (snow) storm or at least try to do so.

SevenStitches I first saw this film streamed on youtube.com and had no idea that it was a Disney short. Sure it had Disney's beautifully fluid animation (in 2D no doubt, just like old times), but unlike Disney of late, it told a deeply emotional tale with inventive visuals and no compromises in its themes. Its based on the Hans Christian Anderson fable of a small Russian girl selling matchsticks on a harsh winter's evening, when no one seems to care less. Alone and without shelter, she rides out the night lighting her matchsticks for warmth in a street corner, allowing herself to be transported to hospitable, warmer places of fantasy.By the end, i was deeply moved by what i'd seen, but as the credits rolled, i was astonished; directed by Roger Allers; executive produced by Roy E. Disney?! Who would've thought that the company currently responsible for such tat as "The Wild" and "Chicken Little" are still capable of such profound work as this? I thought that this kind of animation only existed in Japan. Apparently, Disney is still alive somewhere under all that commercialism. In a western culture that thrives on bland, generic animated comedies (fot the most part), in short and feature length, seeing this, and from the company that seems to have finally submitted its guard to that culture, is a breath of fresh air (to use a well worn cliché).Get "The Little Mermaid" Platinum DVD release and give it a glimpse, the only place your likely to see this in an acceptable format. This is an improvement from Disney, hands down, not just on their most recent stuff, but from all their modern works. While the majority of the 90's showcased impressive and at times classic examples of Disney's animated division working at their best, no other film from their modern catalogue tackles such real ventures in human desperation and suffering. True, this is mostly due to the source text. But several of Disney's other adaptations of literature containing disturbing and tragic content have all but washed out those elements, so while the result was still universally great entertainment in an innocent way, it definitely missed out on the more emotionally rich possibilities that Japanese animation mines frequently, and Disney itself used to acquire from time to time in their earlier classics (Dumbo and Pinocchio to name a few). Not so here, Disney seems to have acknowledged this revelation from the east. In fact "The Little Matchgirl" is actually comparable to the profoundly depressing Studio Ghibli war time anime, Isao Takahata's "Grave of the Fireflies", in its sophistication, while also remaining fairly inexplicit to appeal to all but the youngest audience. Stuff like this has very rarely found its way into western animation, and pretty much never in the ones released as mainstream features. This may be only a short, but if Disney can somehow stick to this path of much more sophisticated and imaginative movie-making and implant that thinking into their feature output, we may well see their next Golden Age in animation sooner than planned. Fingers crossed.