My first year watching the Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts was 2009, and that set is still my favorite. It was the year of La Maison en Petits Cubes, Oktapodi, and This Way Up, all of which I still revisit occasionally on Youtube. I was hooked after that and have watched the new batch almost every year since. The level of creativity in these shorts consistently wallops that of feature-length films. The incentives structure allows for it: filmmakers don’t have to “sell” the movie as much to get it funded and are thus less hamstrung in the creative-risk department.
That first year, another thing that really set them apart for me was their general abstention from words: no dialogue, no narration. They were just stories in pictures. One was Japanese, one was French, one was British, but it didn’t matter; all were equally intelligible. There’s something thrilling about absorbing ideas from another culture and knowing that nothing has been lost in translation. In college, I remember reading translated poems for class, and I always left wondering what I was missing. Short films remind me of poems in that they’re often obsessively crafted, nuanced, and packed to the brim with meaning. That means a lot can be lost in a translation layer. But with these films that are free of narration and dialog, I know I am getting the original, and I love that. Only one this year used that technique, and, unsurprisingly, I liked it the most.
That said, each still had something to say, and a few of them were visual marvels. I might add that they were also all better than last year’s winner, which I won’t even link to because I want everyone to stay awake at least until they get through this.
Our Uniform (Iran)
Iran’s submission this year had far and away the most innovative animation technique with its heavy use of fabrics. Vehicles traveled around on tangled measuring tape, swerved around buttons, dodged pins. We see thread swim around in a piece of cloth. In one cheeky scene, a row of teenage girls’ coming of age is represented when a fold makes their bosoms grow. Truly innovative stuff.
The content itself wasn’t as much of a single story as it was reflections on adolescence in Iran: the limitations on what they could wear in public, how the narrator and her friends occasionally flouted those rules, and examples of some of the ideas that they were indoctrinated with (which may be jarring for some western audiences).
Letter to a Pig (France/Israel)
This one starts with a flashback. A boy runs from men with guns. He hides in the muck of a pig pen, and when his pursuers enter the pen, one of the pigs shields the boy’s hiding place with its body, allowing a narrow escape. When we return to the present, we see the story is being told by an old man to an impatient, uninterested classroom full of teens. The old man shares that he’d written a letter to that pig, thanking it for not giving him away. The kids giggle. But they stop when he shares that, many years later, he’d spotted one of the men who’d chased him, and despite the man being “old now” he “took his revenge” (what kind of revenge is unspecified).
This revelation kicks off the more expressive part of the film, wherein one particularly attentive girl in the audience starts to fantasize about a similar situation but this time with her and her classmates present.
The kids in her fantasy grapple with questions of trauma and vengeance. It’s plain that the old man exacting his revenge has not healed him. So, how then do we heal? Is it even possible?
Even if it’s not super direct about what the answers are, the film asks tough questions about the Holocaust and similar world-breaking tragedies. The animation here is exquisite, using unfinished line drawings on a white background for most of it, then breaking into detail and darkness when emotions run high. The longer I sit and think about this one, the more I’m convinced of its quality. I would not be surprised to see this take home the Oscar.
Pachyderme (France)
By first appearances, this is a nostalgic look back at a woman’s childhood trips to the countryside to visit her grandparents. She describes the smell of the home, its tidiness, the trips to the lake with her grandfather, and the scary sounds at night. But slowly a realization creeps in that this is about something far more dark and serious.
The animation is fairly simple compared to its peers, but it is nonetheless haunting, having been subtly hinting at the film’s secret the whole time.
Ninety-five Senses (USA)
Here is another film that isn’t what it seems to be at first. We get the impression that an old man is reflecting back on his life through the lens of the five senses: discussing things he’s seen, then things he’s smelled, etc. That technique is somewhat interesting on its own, and if you can pair some cool animation with it, you’ll have yourself a decent short. But this one doesn’t stop there. What pushed this into the territory of being very good was its unexpected shift in subject matter. We find out this isn’t just any old man, but an old man in a very specific situation, and we are left to sort through our feelings about him and the systems that put him here.
THE WAR IS OVER! Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko (USA)
I was worried about the pigeon from the jump. Bombs are going off everywhere on the battlefield as it flies across to deliver its message: a little slip of paper with a coded chess move on it. It turns out that two soldiers from opposing sides have a game going, a la Magneto and Professor X, except they’ve never met and neither can manipulate metal with his mind.
Despite its title-telegraphed thesis, its straightforward animation, and its relatively simple plot, this is an exemplary short film. It tells a beautiful story that shows how stupid war can be for the people told to fight in it, reminding us that there can be whole, feeling-having, compassionate humans on the other side too. All this is done without using any narration. We see the story taking place and the reactions on the faces of the characters, and that is more than enough to gather its significance. This is the medium in its most efficient form.
Wild Summon (UK)
Salmon have it pretty rough! Note to self to not be reincarnated as one.
This honorable-mention environmentalist short covers their journey from their birth in the river to their adulthood in the sea, and their miraculous voyage back upriver to where they were born. For an angle, the filmmakers have used the interesting, if simple, tactic of replacing the salmon with humanoids. The film begins with a shot of a dead person in pink diving gear, lying face down on a rock, which registers a little shock to the system. That discomfort carries through the film, as we see little diving-gear humans become ensnared in plastic bags and fishing nets, fall prey to bears, and have their throats unceremoniously slit on a fishing boat before being thrown in a barrel to finish dying.
We forget (at least I do anyway) that sometimes things we eat have been alive in the same way we are, and the technique used here serves as a question: would you feel okay with this if it were people? Of course not. Why? Well, that’s something to grapple with. But we should maybe consider not overfishing.
I’m Hip (USA)
A narcissistic cat sings a song that isn’t very good. The animation is in a mildly interesting throwback style. At least it’s short.
