by Nathaniel R
"Once Upon a Studio" brings decades of Disney together
We love animation but we know we give it short shrift here at the site. So let’s rectify that, at least in miniature during this final quiet moment before the official Oscar nominations. I've recently seen all but one of the finalists for Animated Shorts (the missing piece: I'm Hip by two-time Oscar nominee John Musker). Though no one asked, I've ranked them in ascending order of preference after the jump. It's worth mentioning that to get to the finals you've already bested nearly 100 other contenders so the overall quality is high. I say that so you aren't offended if #14 is your favourite, which it very well might be! Each person's personal rank would surely vary.
Okay, now on to the nostalgia exercizes, sentimental messages, surreal head trips, disturbing images, and slapstick antics...
14 ONCE UPON A STUDIO Dan Abrams and Trent Correy, 9 minutes
This promo reel takes its ‘coming to life once humans aren’t looking’ cues from Toy Story and Night at the Museum and other members of that subgenre. Hundreds of Disney characters from the early mascots (Mickey, Donald, Goofy, etcetera) to brand new (Asha from Wish and Mirabel from Encanto) pop out of framed photos to come together for a ‘family’ portrait at Disney Studios. A few hijinx ensue. The animation was surely difficult mixing the eras of 2D and 3D styles but essentially it's a commercial for Disney+; this isn't the Cleo awards, it's the Oscars! Still if nostalgia is strong it could place. It was the most popular short on Letterboxd this year for example!
13 BOOM Gabriel Augerai, Romain Augier, Charles Di Cicco (France), 5 minutes
In this short, squawking birds panic when their volcanic island begins to erupt. Two of the birds attempt to save their four eggs but they’re mighty dumb birds! It might be unfair to compare this to the superb Oscar-winning Pixar short For the Birds (2000) but the laughs just aren’t huge. Wisely Boom doesn’t overstay its welcome. All in all, an amusing trifle.
12 DOG APARTMENT Pritt Tender (Estonia) 14 minutes
In this unsettling but sort of cute (?) stop motion nightmare, a ballet dancer lives in a hateful apartment that, you guessed it, is dog-like. He leaves (presumably each day) to find sausage links for the ravenous barking sink in his dingy studio. Filled with morbid and amusingly strange sights, it leaves an aftertaste of despair and perversity; it left me thinking about how much money I've paid in rent at horrible apartments while living in the big city.
11 27
It's difficult to imagine Academy voters nominating this one. That said it is authentically felt and would feel right at home in a collection of "adult-oriented" animated shorts. We need more animation for adults to remind people that animation isn't a genre but a medium. In the short an unemployed young woman keeps getting into trouble with her family and the police and smokes, dances, or masturbates away her frustration with her aimless life.
10 and 09
WAR IS OVER!
PETE Bret ‘Brook’ Parker (US), 7 minutes
The animation in War is Over is beautiful and you'll tense up every time a bomb goes off mid-air near an adorable messenger pigeon who is carrying chess moves between soldiers on opposite sides of the war. Meanwhile Pete is about a little kid who was designated female at birth but prefers to be called Pete. He meets some resistance but also finds some allies when he tries to play with the boys Little League team. It’s a sweet short about gender identity. Both of these shorts seem competitive for nominations. They're beautifully animated if not particularly challenging; it's easy to imagine voters falling for their anti-war and pro-tolerance messages.
"Pachyderme"
"A Kind of Testament"
08 and 07
PACHYDERME
A KIND OF TESTAMENT
On the more challenging front, we have these two expressive but sometimes opaque shorts. They couldn't be more different in temperament. Pachyderme, is a richly colored painterly short about a quiet traumatized girl visiting her grandparents. It approaches its mysteries like emotional shadows. Meanwhile the more extroverted A Kind of Testament is a purposefully perplexing confessional about a woman who discovers animated shorts of herself online made by an older animator who shares her name. It's like watching a lucid dream unfold, intermittently amusing and scary but above all else bizarre. Sometimes its both at once as when the older woman argues obtusely with the younger woman about her fashion choices while the younger woman is panicking about her dying dog.
06 LETTER TO A PIG Tal Kantor (Israel) 17 minutes
We've all experienced the grandeur of the renaissance of black and white live-action cinema. Turns out it's also strikingly effective in short form. In this haunting short, a Holocaust survivor visits a classroom to talk about the pig that he feels saved his life while he was hiding from Nazis. At first this confession makes the uncomfortable students giggle and "oink" but soon at least a few of them are very caught in the story. The inky images fade in and out of clarity -- color sometimes intrudes -- as if the man's real memory's and the chidren's imagination are wary neighbors that don't know what to make of each other. My only hesitation is that the meaning and emotions fade in and out of clarity, too. Why does the student react this way? Why does her fantasy become violent, turning on the pig, only to soften again?
*
If I had a ballot... barring the possibility that I'm Hip is super (again, it's the only one I missed) these are the ones I'd probably have voted for.
05 OUR UNIFORM Yegane Moghaddam (Iran) 7 minutes
Our Uniform feels almost giddy in its construction as an Iranian girl speaks about her old school uniforms while the animation plays out on fabric sometimes in very clever ways. It's imaginative and cute and the perfect length for what it's doing which is not without substance. Trivia: It's the first time an Iranian production has ever made the finals in this category.
04 NINETY-FIVE SENSES Jared Hess and Jerusha Hess (US) 13 minutes
I thought I'd hate this one but.... surprise! In this unexpectedly moving short an old man and prisoner (voiced by Tim Blake Nelson) reflects on his life while talking about sight, touch, smell, taste, and sounds. As someone who was never particularly into the Hess brand -- Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre etc -- this was shockingly enjoyable. The amusing riffs didn't feel easy, trite, or forced and the cumulative emotional affect was fluid and welcome. I hope it's nominated!
03 WILD SUMMON Karni Arieli and Saul Freed (UK) 14 minutes
Technically this could double for a Documentary Short contender (though it's not in that category). This treacherous and riveting nature essay charts the life course of a female wild salmon from her birth in a pebble nest to her return to the same river -- the same exact spot even -- to lay her own eggs and die. The memorable narration comes from Marianne Faithfull but the master stroke is portraying the salmon in "human" form. That makes the fates of almost all of the wild fish as nerve-jangling as a well executed horror thriller.
02 EEVA Luija Mrzijak and Morten Tsinakov (Estonia) 16 minutes
I'll admit when I screened this one I was grumpy ("oh great another wordless 'surreal' comedy") but it won me over fully from its singularity to its cryptic happenings and truly memorable style. It revolves around a woman attending a funeral but what she's feeling is fluid and elusive -- nothing? too much? all things in the wrong order? Her feelings are also dangerous as she reeks havoc on everything in her path. Expertly paced, its a dizzyingly escalation for the entire running time one of those rare shorts that gets better every minute. It's images and recurring visual motifs (a woodpecker, a naked man, a fire) are still coming back to me days later.
01 SMOKE Rita Basulto (Mexico) 12 minutes
A visually thrilling, even astounding short about one young boy and his mother in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. It’s stop motion mix of three dimensional puppets and two dimensional cut-outs -- and the way they reflect both point of view and focus -- feels purposeful and potent. Guillermo del Toro is a fan and so are we!
My Oscar predictions were...
But it's always difficult to guess what lands in the short categories!
- Smoke (Humo)
- I'm Hip
- Letter to a Pig
- War is Over!
- Wild Summon
alt. Once Upon a Studio and Our Uniform