Such a beautiful and heartfelt animated short! It is a shame that this short didn't made it in Fantasia 2000 film. But fortunately, this short did make it on one of my favorite films, The Little Mermaid Platinum Edition. When I saw this short, my heart just melt and I cried from the scene where the girl died from cold winter and reunited her only beloved grandmother. "sniff", this story touches my heart deeply everytime I watch it.

This is one of my favourite short films and one of the best of Disney's old children stories animated. The music and the animation are among the very best I've seen for a Disney 2D production. The matchgirl looks so helpless, yet hopeful. Even with the original tragic ending you get a good feeling when she reunites with her grandmother once dead. I highly recommend watching this. If you don't have the Platinum Edition of "The Little Mermaid", you can easily find it in YOUTUBE and watch it there. Of course it's not the same, but it's smoething.

If there is a 'problem' with this short, it's likely that my expectations for it were too high. The Little Matchgirl is such a moving story. I mean, is there anything more tragic then the death of a child?

But watching the short, I recognized it as being good, but it didn't blow me into *great*... certainly when compared against some of the other shorts within the Fantasia canon.

I will give kudos to Disney however for not going with a warm and fuzzy ending. It's interesting to note that this short is part of the special features of "The Little Mermaid" DVD--another Hans Christian Anderson tale. For "The Little Mermaid", however Disney did makeover the ending so that our beloved mermaid didn't wind up dying at the end.

It is brilliant. That's all there is to it. I don't think my heart has literally clenched due to an animated film in such a long time, and it made me wonder why Disney doesn't do this sort of stuff more often.

The animation is beautiful, as is the environment, especially the contrast between the actual setting and the thoughts and memories of the little girl. I've missed this from Disney and so it was nice that they at least let us have a taste of what we had before all this technical 3D stuff.

What brings me to like it in its entirety is that the feeling this short invokes is that of both sadness and happiness. I like the fact that when it ends, I can go about the day without feeling neither overly depressed nor unemotional as if it didn't have an effect on me at all.

I'm very grateful this beautiful short film is available to the public after the plans for a third Fantasia film were scrapped. It's a startling contrast to the cheery The Little Mermaid on the same DVD it shares space with since the story isn't sugar-coated and there aren't splashes of bright colors all over. The Little Matchgirl is similar in ways to Tim Burton's Corpse Bride with its bittersweetness, the heroine's hope of freedom, and the use of soft greyscale tones to make the settings and characters well-suited for the somber story. The chosen music piece is the perfect theme to Matchgirl's emotions and memories.

The design for the Matchgirl has to be my favorite animated little girl design ever. She's simply precious.