One of the best tickets I buy at the movies is when I treat myself to the annual program of the Academy Award-nominated animated shorts. The short subject is such a lost treasure in the moviegoing experience, and yet, almost miraculously, there are still filmmakers out there doing marvelous, daring, and inspired things with the form.
This is one of the longest-tenured Oscars still handed out – they’ve been awarding them continuously since the 5th Academy Awards ceremony honoring achievements in film for the year 1932. The first winner was Disney’s Technicolor landmark Flowers and Trees – Disney shorts won the first eight Oscars in this category, before rivals like MGM and Warner Brothers came to prominence.
I always think that theater owners in America are squandering an opportunity by smothering audiences with commercials and not even considering throwing in a short subject like one of the ones described below. I know they don’t see the direct money in it, but what they overlook is that when Disney’s The Three Little Pigs came out, people were buying tickets just to watch it. An 8-minute cartoon. They didn’t care what the feature was. The biggest theaters in the country were advertising that they had it. Imagine the joy of theaters competing to book exciting cartoons as bonuses to fit in with the trailers. But that word is the problem, isn’t it? “Imagine”. Most theater owners don’t have much imagination, they treat their facilities like glorified vending machines.
But there is imagination, and variety, and more entertainment than you get out of two or three average feature films, contained in this event. Not to mention, it gives you grounds to form opinions on yet another category being handed out on the night of the big statue show.
Every year, when the running time of the collected nominees is not enough to constitute a feature-length experience, the distributor adds on a couple of “Honorable Mention”-style extras to bring it up to a roughly 90-minute program. This year, there were two beyond the five nominees. Brief summaries below, along with links to clips, trailers, or the film itself, where I can find it. All of the shorts in the program are also available for purchase on iTunes.
Madagascar – A Journey Diary (Entire Film Here)
I cannot begin to list the number of techniques and media used to create this piece – a series of impressions of a trip to the African island nation that includes city bustle, music, and hallowed cultural traditions. It’s a visual and aural riot, practically different in every shot in terms of types and combinations of animation; but that’s its purpose, to remind you of what is chaotic and overwhelming about the foreign, as well as what is beautiful and unforgettable. I’m noticing a particular trend of animators now applying classic two-dimensional artistic techniques inside the computer, so that three-dimensional effects can then stretch and shape and arrange them in new and novel ways. It’s amply on-display here, as well as in many of the other pieces.
Let’s Pollute! (Clip Here)
This short was my least favorite of the bunch – a spoof on old educational films extolling the virtues of conspicuous consumption and dumping with lots of vim and sprightly music. While there are laughs along the way from good timing and visual gags, it just didn’t seem like a sharp enough thrust – it’s a familiar message, and the spoof trappings just don’t feel at all current. Practically the only reason our generation even knows the language of those old films is through an ironic lens.
The Gruffalo (Part One, Part Two – There are Spanish subtitles, and the sound sync is off in Part Two, but what do you want for free?)
Visually, this half-hour BBC special, based on a beloved children’s book, is high-quality but relatively standard computer-animated fare. But its story – a fable about a clever mouse outwitting his predators deep in the woods – is ceaselessly charming and perfect for all ages. And the film brings together what, even in a feature film, would be considered a prestige cast – voices are provided by Helena Bonham Carter, John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson, and Robbie “Hagrid” Coltrane, among others.
The Lost Thing(Trailer Here)
This Australian work – narrated by the brilliant comedy-musician Tim Minchin – is one of those stories that hits my personal bulls-eye. A young man finds an indescribable something – mechanical octopus? Lobster in a giant teapot? – on a beach. No one cares about it, most don’t even seem to notice it, and it doesn’t seem to belong anywhere. So he takes it home, and begins a quest to learn where such things belong in this world, if they do at all. Whimsy and melancholy are flavors that can mix so well in the hands of a good storyteller.
Day and Night (Clip Here)
No one would fault Pixar if they had just carried on making flawless madcap entertainments like Presto; but even in the short subject arena you can see them treating projects like opportunities to grow. Creating a story, characters, dialogue, even conflict, out of the sounds and activities that happen when the sun is up or down (and the 2-D characters that act as windows into their separate 3-D worlds), the animation industry’s reigning Big Cheese pulled off a remarkable experiment that must have taken a great deal of faith to attempt.
Additional Shorts
URS (Trailer Here)
There’s such a distinctly-German kind of grimness, from the design to the narrative, of this dialogue-free short. It starts with a chair-bound old woman and a physically-mighty but spiritually-weary man presumed to be her son, and the despairing circumstances on their little farm. And it turns by an act of will into a journey of defiance against misfortune – with results both glorious and tragic. Its reach may exceed its grasp, but it’s good to see a 10-minute cartoon trying.
The Cow Who Wanted to be a Hamburger (Clip Here)
Bill Plympton’s brightly-colored, squiggly-lined adventure is far more wickedly subversive than anything you see in the nominated Let’s Pollute. It tells the story of a young calf who, hypnotized by a billboard for “Happy Burger”, decides with horrifying enthusiasm that he cannot wait to become one. Thwarted by the slaughterhouse men who deem him too young and light to pack into their truck, he puts ferocious dedication into overcoming this obstacle and achieving his dream, turning the notions of Hollywood heroism on their head in the process.