Dcera (translated into
English as Daughter) comes from the Czech Republic. At fifteen
minutes, it’s the longest film in this category, and it also features perhaps
the most complex (and most opaque) plot of the nominees. This short film
features no dialogue, but a couple of flashbacks are meant to help explain the
sequence of events. A daughter is visiting her father in a hospital when a bird
crashes through the window. The wounded bird reminds the woman of a time when
she was younger and brought another wounded bird to her seemingly uncaring father
(who was busy trying to make a meal for them). They’ve obviously become
estranged, but the movie is unclear as to why. Surely, the father’s lack of
interest in caring for a wounded bird cannot have led to their separation from
each other. The other flashback seems to be from the perspective of the father,
who’s accompanying his daughter to the train station and trying to make her
feel happy. It doesn’t work. While Dcera is touching and quite
sad, it’s also kind of ugly, frankly. The paper-mache figures—even the versions
of the younger parent and child—are rather grim-looking.
In
just seven short minutes, Hair Love manages to invoke a full
range of emotions: joy, sadness, frustration, you name it. The premise is
simple: a young girl wants to have her hair done like her mother has done it in
the past. She has a lot of hair to work with, and she can’t seem to manage it
herself. She enlists her hapless father to help, but he fails miserably and
keeps trying to get her to just wear a cap instead. However, the video tutorial
on his wife’s blog about hairstyles for black women gets him through the
process successfully. It’s when we find out why the girl’s mother isn’t
available to help that the short achieves a poignant but hopeful climax. By the
way, Issa Rae is the voice of the mother, and it is such a pleasure and a
comfort to hear her familiar tones. Hair Love is one of the most
accomplished and powerful short films in the category.
Kitbull is the most
charming and delight of the entries. It’s a brisk nine minutes about a stray
black kitten that’s hiding out in what appears to be an abandoned pile of junk.
His quiet is interrupted by the arrival of a pitbull who’s being trained by its
owners to fight. The kitten is very leery at first, but a game of swatting around
an orange bottle cap allows the two animals to begin bonding. After the dog is
severely hurt in a fight, the kitten nuzzles up to the pitbull, and they both
seem to acknowledge the need to escape from the dog’s cruel owner (complete
with butt crack, an intriguing little detail). The kitten is particularly
hilarious. The filmmakers have obviously studied cat behavior quite carefully.
It screeches, hits the bottle cap, runs around a lot, falls to the ground,
purrs, hisses, and hides—all within seconds. Kitbull manages in
its short running time to play with a full range of the audience’s emotions
quite effectively.
Memorable, a short film
from France, is quite an interesting statement on artistic expression.
Obviously influenced by the style of painter Vincent Van Gogh, the filmmakers
have created a series of clay animation characters. A painter suffering from
neurological decline (most likely, Alzheimer’s or a similar form of dementia)
keeps forgetting the people in his life and even the names of common household
objects. He even fails to recognize his own reflection in the bathroom mirror.
Most sadly, he’s forgotten his wife, who was once his frequent muse. He
confuses her for the housekeeper and asks her to pose for him. The painting is
quite abstract for such an impressionistic film overall. The melancholy tone of
Memorable is replicated in the blue colors in the palette of the
characters and their surroundings. It’s an intriguing film, but it surprisingly
doesn’t seem to have the strong emotional resonance of the some of the other
nominees.
Sister is a
co-production of China and the United States, and it is perhaps the most
overtly political of the nominees. A brother describes his relationship with
his younger sister. She’s characterized as a bit of a troublemaker, and they
fight and disagree a lot, especially over which cartoon to watch. The
stop-motion short uses figures made of some kind of fabric (wool?), and that
makes for some interesting moments, such as when the brother tugs on his sister’s
umbilical cord and it comes streaming out of her navel. He also pulls on her
nose, and she looks like Pinocchio for a moment. It’s only when the narrator
flips the story by talking about China’s one-child policy and its impact on his
family that we realize the truth of his reflections. Sister is
mostly shot in black-and-white, a somewhat fitting choice given the clarity of
the argument that it ultimately makes.
Oscar
Winner:
Hair Love, a lovely choice, especially since…
My
Choice:
Hair Love. When you can encapsulate so much narrative in such a
short period of time and make the audience care so deeply about the characters,
you’ve accomplished something quite amazing.
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