Anthology Film

An Anthology Film is a feature film composed of vignettes or Short Films. Generally, the shorts have nothing to do with one another, but occasionally there is a theme, Framing Device, or plot running through the stories, connecting them together. In animation, this kind of film is often called a "package film."

Anthology films are made for various reasons. They give short films exposure they wouldn't otherwise get, since shorts are no longer run by themselves in most cinemas. Anthologies also allow animation studios to practice and experiment without committing millions of dollars to a project. They allow a writer to explore a theme in multiple ways, or show the ways different directors will approach a subject. And sometimes, it really just makes for a neat story.

An anthology film is different from an anthology of shorts in that all the films were intended to be released together. Fantasia is an anthology film; a collection of Silly Symphonies is not.

Here's the Other Wiki's list of anthology films, but feel free to add examples below.

Animation

 * Disney has made six package films, four of which were made during the war years. The company lacked the staff to make one big feature film, but still wanted to keep the animators busy and make movies, so the opted to release shorts. Disney's feature-length package films are:


 * Saludos Amigos
 * The Three Caballeros
 * Make Mine Music
 * Fun and Fancy Free
 * Melody Time
 * The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
 * Fantasia, though not officially regarded as a package film, basically fits the format in that it consists of multiple unrelated segments tied together with narration.
 * Fantasia 2000 also fits category, naturally.
 * The Reluctant Dragon sort of falls into this, featuring several different animated and live-action segments under the guise of a "behind-the-scenes tour" of the Disney studios as they existed in 1941.
 * The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh could also qualify, although it's more of a Compilation Movie.
 * The upcoming Winnie the Pooh feature counts as this too.
 * Disney has also released several DTV package films, like Mickey's Once Upon a Christmas.
 * Allegro Non Troppo, a parody of Fantasia, follows a similar format.
 * The Animatrix
 * Batman: Gotham Knight
 * Genius Party
 * Halo Legends
 * Heavy Metal
 * Meikyuu Monogatari
 * Memories
 * Robot Carnival

Live Action

 * After Sex
 * Aria
 * Cat's Eye
 * Coffee and Cigarettes
 * Creepshow
 * Creepshow 2
 * Dead of Night
 * Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)
 * Four Rooms
 * If I Had a Million
 * Monty Pythons the Meaning of Life and How To Irritate People
 * Necronomicon: Book of the Dead
 * New York Stories
 * Night on Earth
 * Paris, je t'aime and its American counterpart, New York, I Love You
 * Pulp Fiction
 * Tales of Manhattan
 * Tales of Terror
 * Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her
 * Trilogy of Terror
 * Twilight Zone the Movie
 * Three
 * Three Extremes - Horror anthology with three Asian directors.
 * Sin City, the movie.