Best Animated Short Film of 2019

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.

Best Animated Short Film of 2015

Bear Story is a wordless, computer-generated animated film about a bear who fixes a mechanical toy that he takes to the town square in order to earn money. When someone gives him money, he cranks up the toy and we learn about his own life. He was apparently kidnapped and forced to perform in the circus, leaving behind his wife and child. This film is essentially wordless, but the tale depicted by the mechanical toy is very clear in its sequence of events. To make such a toy in real life would be nearly impossible, I think, but the depth of the action and the range of characters it includes are just spectacular. This film has a melancholy tone for much of its running time, but that doesn’t detract from the emotional impact that this sentimental and moving film has.

During the screening of the Animated Short Film nominees that I attended, a disclaimer appeared about Prologue, warning that due to violence and nudity it would inappropriate for children and they should be taken out of the theater before it began. That message left me puzzled over what to expect, a feeling that didn’t necessarily leave after watching the film. The violence is indeed graphic, and there’s a lot of it since the story primarily involves a battle between two sets of warriors. The film is drawn in black and white, almost like pencil drawings, similar in some ways to the ones in a-ha’s famous “Take on Me” video. The artwork is well executed overall, the men’s bodies are nicely detailed (and two of them are nude and rather realistic), and the use of bright red to depict profuse amounts of blood is effective. However, the point of the story was lost on me. It feels almost like this was a sketch made to be a part of a longer narrative. We’re never told in this wordless film why these men are fighting or what different sides they represent. It’s too much of an enigma to enjoy, so you wind up just admiring the talents of the artists but little more.

Sanjay’s Super Team is a charming little tale of a young boy (the Sanjay of the title) trying to watch his favorite cartoon superheroes. However, his father wants to worship, and they struggle over who gets his way. The tension between popular culture and religion is somewhat downplayed here in favor of a story about the boy’s imaginative melding of the deities of his family’s religious faith with the adventure of the cartoon shows that he prefers. This is another wordless film that works best when the three figures from his father’s small altar become, in Sanjay’s fantasies, superheroes taking on evil in the world. It’s good to see Pixar, one of the giants in animation for decades now, taking on different cultures in their short films. Sanjay’s Super Team displays the typical look of a Pixar film with its bright, glossy colors, and it only takes about seven minutes to ground us in a captivating narrative.

We Can’t Live without Cosmos features two Russian cosmonauts who are competing to be shot into space. As the film progresses, we learn that they have wanted to be astronauts for most of their lives, and they have been together as friends—or perhaps more?—for many years. This is yet another wordless short, but the story is very clear and easy to follow. (By the way, what is going on with the short films without dialogue? This is getting to be quite the trend among nominees.) We get to see what kinds of tests they endure and how easily they can perform the tasks. They have such a sense of joy and giddiness that you come to root for them to succeed. It appears to me that the two men who are the central characters are in love with each other, and there are several homoerotic elements to the film, not the least of which is when the men share a bed together while fantasizing about traveling through space. There’s also an undercurrent of melancholy to this film as well, given its focus on the dangers of space travel, but I found it to be very charming overall. It’s not a spoiler to tell you that the title of the movie is also the title of a book that the two men have shared throughout their lives, and while I was watching the short, which clocks in at a brisk sixteen minutes, I kept wondering whether the filmmakers were hoping that the different meanings of cosmos (space, yes, but also the cocktail) would be on anyone’s mind.

World of Tomorrow is the one film among the 2015 nominees that involves characters talking, and they are very chatty, particularly one of them. It’s tough to explain quickly what the plot addresses, but here goes: A clone from a dystopian future contacts the girl from whom she has descended, Emily Prime. The “prime” designation, of course, refers to the fact that Emily was the first in a line of Emilys. The clone then transports the first Emily to the future so that she can learn about the horrific events that will occur in the future and about the dangers of such things as time travel. It’s all delivered in a rather flat, emotionless tone that doesn’t particularly suit the subject matter, and honestly, this short’s characters are rather crudely drawn—little more than stick figures, really—and they interact with (act in front of?) a lot of computer-generated backgrounds that float behind them. I suppose the message of the film, something about how much we desire to hold on to memories because they provide us comfort during difficult times, is admirable, but it’s tough to appreciate or enjoy much other than the comic statements by Emily Prime, who doesn’t fully understand what her clone descendant tries to tell her but who does comprehend sadness and loss in others.

Winner: Bear Story, a solid choice given the accomplished style of the film.

My Choice: We Can’t Live without Cosmos, a charming and offbeat tale with a richness of mostly unexpressed emotion.

Best Animated Short Film of 2014

The Bigger Picture, a short from the United Kingdom, is a very downbeat film. It concerns two middle-aged brothers and their ailing mother who needs to be committed to a nursing home. One of the brothers, Richard, does all of the work caring for her, but he remains perpetually underappreciated. The other, Nick, is a bit of a snob, to be honest, and quite unappealing, but he always takes credit for anything good that he does, no matter how small. The film gives a clear sense of the different personalities of the two brothers, one of whom is unemployed and a bit of a loser and the other being the one for whom everything seems to come easily. The short features a couple of moments of levity here and there, but I suppose a filmmaker would find it tough to make this material funny. At times, the short’s images look almost like paintings, crudely drawn perhaps, but they must have been large to match the actual sized furnishings on display. The attempt at reconciliation seems forced here despite knowing that this scenario is too common among siblings.

The Dam Keeper tackles the subject of how important friendship can be to someone being bullied. A little pig lives alone in a windmill that keeps darkness (pollution? bad weather?) away from his town. He took over the job from his father after the elder pig’s passing, and even though he is still in school, he has to reset the windmill twice daily to preserve the town. Sadly, all of the other animals in the school harass and tease the little pig; the reason is never clear although I guess the implication is that he’s a loner who prefers to keep to himself, and young people never seem to understand that impulse. The arrival of a new student, a little fox, changes the pig’s life when the two realize that they both like to draw. Although they would seem to be “natural” enemies—after all, a pig and a fox being friends?—but perhaps the message is that even opposites can have things in common. A misunderstanding separates them, and the pig doesn’t make it home in time to prevent the town from being immersed in darkness one day.  All is resolved happily eventually, and the fox and the pig enjoy their time alone in the large windmill. I don’t know how young a child could be and still understand the message of this film, but given how many young people we’ve lost in recent years to suicide because of bullying, I’m certain it would resonate with many, many people. You could easily “read” the friendship between the pig and the fox as the beginning of a budding romance, given that both of them are male, but most people would probably prefer to concentrate just upon their friendship.

Feast, a very polished entry from the United States, is a delight. A Disney short that aired before Big Hero 6 in theaters, it features the story of a puppy whose love of food propels the narrative. Unfortunately, what happens in its owner’s life determines what kind of food the little French bulldog gets. When it’s tiny and first rescued, the dog gets delicious scraps from the table, pretty much whatever the owner wants to eat since he’s a bachelor at the time, but when the owner gets a girlfriend (a waitress) the food switches to healthy food served with garnish. When the couple breaks up, the food doesn’t revert back to the meatballs and pizza the dog once enjoyed. The owner’s depression over the split prompts the dog, now grown bigger and seemingly wiser, to reunite the couple despite its fears that it will have to keep eating healthily. Later, though, the arrival of a baby in the house means the dog now gets to eat everything again, so he gets a happy ending after all. I would warn you not to watch this short if you’re hungry because the food, especially in the early scenes, looks delicious. What we’re watching here, of course, isn’t the story of the dog. It merely foregrounds the story of the couple’s relationship, but the choice to keep the dog as the central focus is a wise one. Anyone who loves dogs will enjoy watching the facial expressions on this one’s face.

Me and My Moulton tells the story of three sisters in Norway whose family life seems to them to be too different (i.e., strange) from their friends’ lives. Narrated by the 7-year-old middle daughter, this co-production of Norway and Canada brings into contrast the lives these girls lead as the children of architects when compared to their apparently wealthier neighbors. For example, everyone else in the area seems to have a bicycle, prompting repeated appeals to the girls’ parents to purchase them one as well. Unfortunately, the parents can’t afford an expensive bike and they can’t purchase one immediately, leading the narrator to bemoan why her parents aren’t more like everyone else’s. We learn, though, that the downstairs neighbors who seem to be so happy truly aren’t. Meanwhile, the girls and their parents live more simply and seem to enjoy each other’s company more. The arrival of the bicycle, the Moulton of the title, adds to the girl’s eventual realization that you should accept your situation in life. It might not be quite as bad as you imagine it to be. The animation for this short is rather simple, but the use of bright colors helps to heighten its impact. A few clever moments also add to the humor, especially the three-legged chairs that keep tipping over and depositing their sitters on the floor. The narrative doesn’t reveal anything particularly profound, but Me and My Moulton is enjoyable to watch.

A Single Life clocks in at little more than two minutes long and, to be honest, ended just about the time I figured out what was happening. A woman receives a 45 rpm single in the mail and puts it on her record player. When the record skips, if it moves forward in the song, she ages. If it skips backward, she becomes younger. That’s really it. Maybe there’s a message here about living in the moment rather than trying to move too quickly to your future or always trying to relive your past. However, given its quick running time, this short from the Netherlands doesn’t really have or take the time to have much of an impact. It’s cute and clever, but not much else. This is the slightest film in the category, and you have to wonder how the voters selected it over all of the other animated short films released in 2014.

Oscar Winner: Feast. This short is yet another example of the revived Disney tradition of quality short films to accompany its feature films.

My Choice: Feast. It’s beautifully drawn, which you cannot say about most of the other entries, and the story is beautifully resonant as well. 

Best Animated Short Film of 2013

Feral is really quite an ugly film. I thought it was poorly drawn and poorly animated, almost amateurish in its execution. I suppose some would call it experimental, but to me, the experiment failed. The film tells the story of a boy raised by wolves who is “adopted” and brought to civilization, only to have his adoptive father discover that the animal he has been raised to be still resides within him. I suppose it’s a meditation on our true natures and a bit of a rehash of the nature-versus-nurture debate. I just couldn’t find it all that interesting, and I even started to pay way too much attention to the child’s teeth, which he bares much too frequently. The murky nature of the wordless movie isn’t helped by the somewhat clichéd storyline, and the limited color palette (mostly just dark greys and blacks) makes for an unpleasant viewing experience.

Get a Horse! is a fun, lovely tribute to the history of animation, from flip books to 3-D technology. Mickey Mouse and Minnie and friends are enjoying an old-fashioned hay ride when they are attacked by Peg Leg Pete. This Disney short features such a fascinating mix of different styles from different eras, ranging from the black-and-white early versions of these characters and others in the Disney fold to the bright, glossy, brilliant colors used today. The clever way that the film incorporates the past and the present into its plot, especially during one particularly raucous session involving jumping in and out of the movie screen, makes this short perhaps the most fun to watch. It’s an absolutely charming film that tells a great story and uses our long-standing love of cartoons to captivate us.

Mr. Hublot might be an homage to the French character of Mr. Hulot, but this short is really a tightly focused examination of how seemingly innocent small actions can have a profound influence on our day-to-day existence. Mr. Hublot lives alone in what appears to be an abandoned warehouse building. Actually, all of the buildings in this film appear to be abandoned warehouses, but I digress. The film is set during some sort of mechanized future, and Mr. Hublot, who appears to be at least partially mechanical himself, suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder or anal retentiveness, which means that he has a very specific routine that he follows each day. Only when he adopts an abandoned robot dog does the rigid pattern of his life become more broken and actually happier. As the dog keeps growing bigger and bigger, Mr. Hublot has to keep finding ways to adjust, and the film keeps trying to make a sweet statement about making room for new experiences in our lives.

Possessions begins with a samurai trapped in a rainstorm seeking shelter in an apparently abandoned home. It’s a small structure, but one with a lot of life still inside it. All of the objects in the house are seemingly possessed—hence the title. There’s a series of umbrellas that the samurai repairs, covering up the eyes that peek through the rips and tears in the fabric. He’s attacked by yards of fabric and must sew the pieces together to fashion a beautiful robe. He’s also forced to confront a dragon made of junk that keeps emitting foul odors. Once I learned that this film was sort of a prototype for a videogame, I understood why I found it hard to stay awake while watching it. Despite being rather beautiful at times, it’s actually pretty slow moving, but I’m assuming the game console will help to speed things along.

Room on the Broom is another film from the makers of The Gruffalo, a short that was nominated in this same category in 2010. Gillian Anderson voices a witch who is traveling with her cat and encounters a series of animals who all want to join her on the broom. Eventually, the witch and the cat wind up with a dog, a green bird, and very fastidious frog riding along with them, and that makes for some difficulties taking off and landing and with keeping items on the broom itself. There’s also a dragon who chases them and causes a lot of havoc. Anderson doesn’t get to speak very much, and it’s the cat who steals the movie with its expressive face, particularly its marvelous sense of exasperation at having to share the broom with the other characters. This is a charming film, but it’s a bit repetitive and is obviously aimed at smaller children.

Oscar Winner: Mr. Hublot. This choice continues a trend in recent years of choosing dystopian kinds of shorts to honor. I found it to be an interesting film overall, but it doesn’t engage one’s heart so much as one’s mind. It’s mostly an intellectual exercise with, admittedly, a few delights.

My Choice: Get a Horse! is a loving tribute to the growth and development of animation since its beginnings in the 1920s. It’s a technologically advanced film which nevertheless seeks to set a nostalgic tone. This is a perfectly delightful little movie and the most fully realized vision of any of the nominees. I particularly loved that the black-and-white image that begins the film is displayed by plush red curtains of the kind you might have seen in a very upscale theater at the start of moviegoing.

Best Animated Short Film of 2009

French Roast portrays the dilemma faced by a middle-to-upper class man sitting in a cafe who discovers that he has forgotten his wallet and cannot pay for his coffee. He's already been accosted by a homeless man begging for change—actually, he's accosted several times throughout the movie by this same man—when he finds himself without any cash to pay the bill. So he keeps ordering coffee, and a strange cast of characters comes and goes around him throughout a very long, odd day. It's a cute movie, a French import, with very little dialogue, so the characters have to convey the emotions they are feeling without getting to say much. The central character is particularly expressive, and there's a little old nun who's quite hilarious.

The title character of Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty is a very loud old woman who's retelling of the fairy tale quickly devolves into an obvious rehashing of her own grievances against those who are younger and have better "muscle tone." She's allegedly telling her granddaughter the story in order to help the young girl fall asleep, but the grandmother figure is so incredibly obnoxious and frightening, it would be tough to rest around her. And her Irish brogue is almost impenetrable at times, making the plot itself somewhat tough to follow. The film's creators have certainly done a consistent job with her characterization here, but I don't think I'd want to see an entire feature with her at its center.

The Lady and the Reaper (La Dama y la Muerte) is a Spanish tale about the struggle between the Grim Reaper and a "doctor" for the soul of an elderly woman. The doctor's task is, apparently, to rescue people as they are being taken away by Death; if he manages to revive the person, then Death has to wait for another chance at the body. The Reaper is, naturally, reluctant to lose out to the doctor. The funniest sequence in this film, to me, is a series of deaths and revivals as the body of the old woman is yanked back and forth between the two men, and there are chase scenes that rival those of the old Tom & Jerry cartoons. This film, like French Roast, relies on very little dialogue, but unlike that other film, The Lady and the Reaper is much more action-oriented.

Logorama has a very clever idea as its premise. The logos for various companies are the characters or places. It's a world of nothing but brand names and images, and part of the fun of watching the film is seeing how many of them you can recognize. The Michelin Man is, for example, a police officer. Actually, there are several Michelin Men here, all of them cops and all of them rather foul-mouthed. Ronald McDonald is a criminal trying to escape capture who takes Big Boy hostage outside a restaurant frequented by the Pringles faces. Visually, this film is quite stunning to watch. The plot, however, is rather flat and disjointed. I enjoyed seeing such icons as the AOL man walking or running around the city created by the use of large logos, but aside from the visual delights here, I don't think the film holds up very well.

A Matter of Loaf and Death is the latest adventure of Nick Park's famous duo of Wallace and Gromit. They're working as bakers, with Gromit (as usual) doing the bulk of the work and keeping Wallace out of trouble (or rescuing him when he does get into trouble). Wallace falls in love with Piella, a former Bake O Lite girl. It's up to Gromit to prove—in his silent, long-suffering way—to prove that Piella is the person responsible for the deaths of twelve bakers and is now looking to have Wallace complete her "baker's dozen." As with the other Wallace and Gromit films, A Matter of Loaf and Death has wonderful sight gags, such as the method Gromit has to use to wake up Wallace in the mornings. And the puns are delightful. A personal favorite of mine is the poster for Citizen Canine on Gromit's wall. This is the only one of the nominated films to use stop-motion animation, and it's as much of a gem as the other Wallace and Gromit films I've seen over the years.

Oscar Winner: Logorama had to have been a surprise choice in this category. It is certainly inventive in its use of different corporate logos, but its plot was merely a rehash of any typical cop show of the past thirty or more years.

My Choice: A Matter of Loaf and Death is such a charming, delightful fun. There's so much to admire here visually, and the storyline is just dark enough to keep an older viewer interested. However, if you also like tender romantic moments, you can't do much better than the gentleness with which Park handles the scenes between Gromit and Fluffles, Piella's very sensitive poodle. (Fluffles has some of the longest and most expressive eyelashes you'll ever see, by the way.) Gromit is one of my favorite animated characters of all time. No one does a slow burn better than he does.

Best Animated Short Film of 2008

La Maison en Petits Cubes, despite the French title, was made in Japan. It's an intriguing story of a man whose home starts to flood, causing him to build another home on top of the existing one. Apparently, everyone does this, making the entire town a series of towers barely poking out of the water. When he drops his pipe into the water, he begins a journey back into his past as he stops at each level and reminisces about the time he spent there. It's a charming story, and (I suspect) it's also a parable about what we might be losing in the climate change the world is facing, what we leave behind when the world we knew starts to disappear. My only complaint is that this is the least visually appealing of the five nominees. The animation is a bit, well, ugly, frankly, but the story is a winner, the most fully realized of the five nominees. By the way, the title has been translated into Pieces of Love, Vol. 1, which I believe is a gross distortion of what the title actually means in French (something more like "the house of little boxes").

Lavatory—Lovestory is an unusual tale of a woman who oversees a public lavatory—she takes the "fee" you must pay to enter—and how she begins to realize that she has a secret admirer. A series of vibrant bouquets appear when she is not looking (which is often, especially when reading her magazine filled with fantasies for women), and she begins to wonder which of the men who come in and out of the lavatory might be attracted to her. This film is the simplest in terms of its animation, really little more than line drawings, and the only colors are the ones used for the different bouquets. Most of the production crew is Russian, apparently, but all of the words that appear on screen (such as the title of the magazine the woman reads) are rendered in English. This is a charming story, delightfully romantic, but a bit of a trifle perhaps.

Oktapodi is the shortest of these films at only two minutes, but it's a very rich two minutes. In this French film, two octopi (octopuses?) in love are separated when one is taken to be the special on the menu that night at a restaurant. The remaining octopus escapes from the tank at the pet store and begins a wild journey trying to retrieve his lover from the hands of the boy who has stashed her in a cooler to remain fresh until dinner time. The colors of this one are luminous and not a second of the short time is wasted. A real gem of a movie, and one that gives you the feeling that you'd like to watch even more of these two interesting characters.

Presto is the tale of a magician's rabbit who just wants a carrot. He keeps getting thwarted in his attempts to eat his lunch, a luxury that the magician has already enjoyed. If you saw WALL-E in the theatres, then you've seen this animated short. It's clever, as you would expect from the folks at Pixar, and very slickly produced. The film manages to find as many ways as possible to allow the rabbit to punish the magician for failing to feed him properly, and all with the use of a wizard's hat much like the one Mickey dons in Fantasia. (Yes, of course, I know there's an homage at work here.) While watching this one again, I was reminded of that old Bugs Bunny cartoon where he and the magician keep getting zapped by a magic wand. I suppose there are far worse comparisons that could be made, given the high standard that those Warner Bros. cartoons had.

This Way Up, an entry from the United Kingdom, tells the story of the most unlucky of undertakers on the most unlucky of days. After picking up the remains of an elderly woman, the two men (apparently, father and son) experience a series of mishaps, all triggered by a chain reaction the younger man starts in the woman's home. The Rube Goldbergian start to the film sets the tone for much of the slapstick that follows. The most intriguing of those mishaps involves the two men seemingly on a journey toward hell with the "ghost" of the old woman riding her coffin as if it were one of the boats at Disneyland's It's a Small World ride. Funny, if a bit macabre at times. I kept expecting even worse things than what did happen, but this one seemed to generate the most laughs from the audience of which I was a part.

Oscar Winner and My Choice: La Maison en Petits Cubes, It’s both the most ambitious and successful of the nominated films. As an aside, I also thought the speech by the director was entertaining, especially his shout-out to the band Styx.