2020 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Animation
Hair Love: B+
Daughter: B
Sister: B
Mémorable: B
Kitbull: B+
Henrietta Bulkowski: B
The Bird & the Whale: B+
Hors Piste: B
Maestro: B
Things just get sadder from there, although I must admit I found Daughter, a 15-minute short from the Czech Republic, the most difficult to follow. In this story, a grown woman is regarding her father apparently on his deathbed, and we get flashback memories from both of them. This film has by far the most impressive animation out of any of the nominees, with stop-motion animation captured with camera work that feels like live hand-held camera footage. I was truly impressed by how this short film was shot—I just couldn't quite glean a clear picture of the story, or any kind of plot. I spent most of its run time basically lost.
Sister, an 8-minute short from China, presents a "what if" where the narrator imagines what it would have been like to grow up with a sister in a country that had a one-child policy for over thirty years. This is also stop motion but with what look like dolls made of fabric, and the issue it tackles is thorny at best: forcing women to have abortions is objectively a violation of human rights, but from the perspective of Chinese national pride, without the policy the country would not only not be nearly as prosperous as it is now, it likely would not be prospering at all. That's not an excuse by any means, and it's always good to consider the ramifications of a policy like this, and particularly the many misguided means of executing it.
Mémorable is yet another short film about the frustrating effects of dementia in a person's old age, a 12-minute French film featuring a man losing his memory and his wife who is increasingly frustrated with him. The man is a painter, and thus the animation style here is a sort of stop-motion with 3D figures made out of brushstrokes of paint. It's hard to explain, but the animation here is sort of too good, paintings brought to life in a way that has a sort of "uncanny valley" effect that just gave me the creeps.
The five Oscar nominees are rounded out by the 9-minute Pixar film about an unlikely friendship between a streetworn kitten and a pitbull, who we learn maybe halfway through is being used as a dogfighter. This film did indeed have the deepest emotional impact on me, as Pixar films often tend to do, but again, the animation here is almost shockingly rudimentary given the studio behind it. And who wants to be thinking about animal abuse when watching a Pixar short, anyway?
Starting off the four extra "Highly Commended" shorts is Henrietta Bulkowski, a 16-minute American short that also has its own very distinctive kind of 3D stop-motion animation style. The title character is an airplane obsessed young woman voiced by Christina Hendricks, who cannot be the pilot she wants to be because of a hunchback. She builds a plane in a landfill, where she meets a police officer with stunted legs voiced by Chris Cooper. Rounding out the all-star cast is Anne Dowd as the narrator. The story has a nice message about loving every part of yourself as a whole human being, but its execution is still a little odd and meandering.
The Bird & the Whale, a 7-minute short from Ireland, is animated entirely with oil paint on glass, and has arguably the prettiest animation of all these films. Once again though, the story is surprisingly sad: the chance meeting of a baby whale that has been separated from its pod, and a caged bird that is the sole survivor of a shipwreck. Together they struggle to survive, and I suppose it could be said they only both manage to do so on a technicality. The way this one ends is meant to be uplifting, I suppose, and yet I still just found it to be a bummer.
Hors Piste, French for "Off Road," is a 6-minute short and one of only two in this entire program that exists just for the viewer to have fun. The animation is slick and textured, the story amusing in a way that barely obscures the darkness of its humor. This is the misadventures of a couple clueless mountain rescuers attempting to bring an enjured skier down from the mountan, and basically finding countless innovative ways to injure him more in the process.
Maestro, by far the shortest film in this series at all of two minutes, is a French short with spectacular CG animation rendering a bird, and many other animals, singing a short opera and being conducted by a squirrel. Now, I truly hate squirrels, but in this case I can tolerate one for two minutes, if he's conducting an opera performance of forest animals.
Daughter: B
Sister: B
Mémorable: B
Kitbull: B+
[“Highly Commended"]
Henrietta Bulkowski: B
The Bird & the Whale: B+
Hors Piste: B
Maestro: B
For some reason in the past I tended to expect to enjoy the animated batch the best out of all the Oscar-nominated short films, and yet, in recent years it's the genre that tends to have the weakest batch overall. This year is no exception, although several of them feature impressively unique animation styles I have never seen before. On top of that, this year they are uniformly melancholy in one way or another. Among the five animated shorts in this program that actually earned nominations, without exception they deal with either death, disease, or some kind of violence. Amazingly, not even the one short by Pixar Animation Studios artists (in this case still 2D animation) stands apart from this theme. It even extends to two of the four "Highly Commended" shorts that are included, just to pad out the overall run time and make it feel worth going to a theater to see them. The other two of those extras are the only ones of the total nine shorts here that evidently have no purpose beyond just being fun, and those are . . . fine.
The first in this presentation is the 7-minute American short Hair Love, which is maybe the most light-hearted of all the five nominees, even though it features a woman (voiced by Issa Rae) who is a mother with cancer. It's because this woman is in the hospital that the story we see is of a man attempting to do his daughter's hair for the first time. Given that this is a black family, these are characters not often seen in animated shorts, and that alone makes it more worthy of attention. Overall I enjoyed this short film, even though the animation itself is not much better than adequate. The story is memorable and affecting, however, and once you see the other shorts it's up against, you see that this one is the most worthy of the award.
Things just get sadder from there, although I must admit I found Daughter, a 15-minute short from the Czech Republic, the most difficult to follow. In this story, a grown woman is regarding her father apparently on his deathbed, and we get flashback memories from both of them. This film has by far the most impressive animation out of any of the nominees, with stop-motion animation captured with camera work that feels like live hand-held camera footage. I was truly impressed by how this short film was shot—I just couldn't quite glean a clear picture of the story, or any kind of plot. I spent most of its run time basically lost.
Sister, an 8-minute short from China, presents a "what if" where the narrator imagines what it would have been like to grow up with a sister in a country that had a one-child policy for over thirty years. This is also stop motion but with what look like dolls made of fabric, and the issue it tackles is thorny at best: forcing women to have abortions is objectively a violation of human rights, but from the perspective of Chinese national pride, without the policy the country would not only not be nearly as prosperous as it is now, it likely would not be prospering at all. That's not an excuse by any means, and it's always good to consider the ramifications of a policy like this, and particularly the many misguided means of executing it.
Mémorable is yet another short film about the frustrating effects of dementia in a person's old age, a 12-minute French film featuring a man losing his memory and his wife who is increasingly frustrated with him. The man is a painter, and thus the animation style here is a sort of stop-motion with 3D figures made out of brushstrokes of paint. It's hard to explain, but the animation here is sort of too good, paintings brought to life in a way that has a sort of "uncanny valley" effect that just gave me the creeps.
The five Oscar nominees are rounded out by the 9-minute Pixar film about an unlikely friendship between a streetworn kitten and a pitbull, who we learn maybe halfway through is being used as a dogfighter. This film did indeed have the deepest emotional impact on me, as Pixar films often tend to do, but again, the animation here is almost shockingly rudimentary given the studio behind it. And who wants to be thinking about animal abuse when watching a Pixar short, anyway?
Starting off the four extra "Highly Commended" shorts is Henrietta Bulkowski, a 16-minute American short that also has its own very distinctive kind of 3D stop-motion animation style. The title character is an airplane obsessed young woman voiced by Christina Hendricks, who cannot be the pilot she wants to be because of a hunchback. She builds a plane in a landfill, where she meets a police officer with stunted legs voiced by Chris Cooper. Rounding out the all-star cast is Anne Dowd as the narrator. The story has a nice message about loving every part of yourself as a whole human being, but its execution is still a little odd and meandering.
The Bird & the Whale, a 7-minute short from Ireland, is animated entirely with oil paint on glass, and has arguably the prettiest animation of all these films. Once again though, the story is surprisingly sad: the chance meeting of a baby whale that has been separated from its pod, and a caged bird that is the sole survivor of a shipwreck. Together they struggle to survive, and I suppose it could be said they only both manage to do so on a technicality. The way this one ends is meant to be uplifting, I suppose, and yet I still just found it to be a bummer.
Hors Piste, French for "Off Road," is a 6-minute short and one of only two in this entire program that exists just for the viewer to have fun. The animation is slick and textured, the story amusing in a way that barely obscures the darkness of its humor. This is the misadventures of a couple clueless mountain rescuers attempting to bring an enjured skier down from the mountan, and basically finding countless innovative ways to injure him more in the process.
Maestro, by far the shortest film in this series at all of two minutes, is a French short with spectacular CG animation rendering a bird, and many other animals, singing a short opera and being conducted by a squirrel. Now, I truly hate squirrels, but in this case I can tolerate one for two minutes, if he's conducting an opera performance of forest animals.
Overall: B