‘Tummy Trouble’: Wrong Rx for an Oscar? : Animation: Some of the creators of Disney’s first short cartoon in 25 years complain that the film academy is biased against traditional cartoons.

The brouhaha over the motion-picture academy’s alleged snubbing of Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” and Michael Moore’s “Roger & Me” has overshadowed the Oscar exclusion of the most widely seen animated film of 1989, Walt Disney Pictures’ “Tummy Trouble.”

The first Roger Rabbit cartoon and the first short cartoon Disney had released in 25 years didn’t receive a nomination in the animated-short category.

“For years, artists in the industry have complained about the death of the studio short cartoon,” said one of the “Tummy Trouble” animators, speaking on the condition that he not be named. “Here’s the first cartoon short from Disney in 25 years, and it’s ignored: What kind of message does that send?”

Film industry observers believe that the presence of “Tummy Trouble” on what amounted to a de facto double-bill was a major reason “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” brought in a whopping $130 million at the box office. Disney’s decision to include the short on the home video of “Honey” supports that theory.

Like “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” “Tummy Trouble” was a fast-paced homage to the great Warners and MGM shorts of the postwar era. Several of its animators complained that the short-films branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences seems to dislike traditional cartoons.

“The attitude there is that if a film is anything like a traditional cartoon, it’s not suitable for an award,” said one artist who attended the qualifying screenings. “ ‘Tummy Trouble’ laid a big egg there: It’s too much like something they worked on years ago, so they feel it’s not original enough to get an Oscar.”

A non-Disney animator who served on the screening committee felt that the decision reflected the weakness of the film, rather than a bias against cartoon humor.

“The film makers didn’t trust the audience,” he said. “The pacing was too fast and they didn’t set up the jokes properly. But basically, it just wasn’t funny--nobody at the screening was laughing.”

With 13 Oscars (including the first eight in a row) and 43 nominations, Disney dominated the animated-short category during the 1930s, ‘40s and early ‘50s--the heyday of the American cartoon. But when the Hollywood studios closed their animation departments during the mid-’50s, independent artists and foreign studios began winning Oscars. Since 1959, when John and Faith Hubley won for “Moonbird,” a dreamy evocation of their children’s fantasies, the academy has tended to honor animated films, rather than cartoons, including the unconventional work of the Hubleys, the National Film Board of Canada, Zagrebfilm and Frederic Back.

In recent years, several films that evoke the freewheeling insanity of the great Hollywood cartoons have received Oscar nominations, notably “The Big Snit” in 1986 and “The Cat Came Back” in 1989.

None of this year’s nominees for animated short resemble a Warner Bros. or MGM short. The manic pace of “Tummy Trouble” contrasts sharply with the grim stop-motion animation in “Balance,” the painterly elegance of “Cow” and the quirky charm of “The Hill Farm.”

The “Tummy Trouble” animators who feel snubbed this year may well find their situation reversed next year. Disney plans to release two new short cartoons in 1990: “Roller-Coaster Rabbit,” the second Roger short, is being completed at their Florida studio and will open with “Dick Tracy” June 15. A featurette based on Mark Twain’s “The Prince and the Pauper” starring Mickey, Donald and Goofy, is slated to debut this fall with “The Rescuers Down Under.”