'Oscar Nominated Short Films 2015: Animated' Review

The Oscar Nominated Short Films 2015: Animated program is chock a block with wonderful animated shorts. For once, every single nominated short is almost undeniably charming, if not outright wonderful. Audiences who live near theaters screening Oscar Nominated Short Films 2015 are in for a treat, but may come away from the theater with mixed impression thanks to a number of mostly unimpressive runners-up, which strive for greatness but fall short for a variety of obvious reasons.

Still, audiences who wish to learn more about this year’s nominees – either just to be informed, or to make an informed choice about whether or not to head to the theaters before this year’s Academy Awards ceremony – will want to take a look at our review of the nine films on the docket. But trust us, the good most definitely outweighs the bad.

Check Out: ‘Oscar Nominated Short Films 2015: Live Action’ Review

The Nominees for Best Short Film: Animated

The Bigger Picture

Astonishingly animated against full-sized sets, using three-dimensional and two-dimensional styles simultaneously, The Bigger Picture is – absolutely – the most inspired presentation amongst the nominees. The story, about two brothers dealing with the failing health of their mother in very different ways, is equally as complex and hard to label.

For that reason, many audiences may find themselves appreciating the craft of The Bigger Picture, and latching onto the larger emotional beats of director Daisy Jacobs’ story, but having difficulty deciding what to take away from the film? Is it just an experiment? If so, is it a good one? I would argue that it’s a dazzling depiction of emotions that are difficult to express and often contradictory, just like the animation styles used to put this film together. The Bigger Picture is a rousing success.

The Dam Keeper

Halfway between an adorable storybook and a stinging, quasi-apocalyptic examination of inner darkness likes The Dam Keeper. The sweeter side of Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi’s gorgeously animated fantasy eventually wins out, but the battle is hard enough to make his film as challenging as it is freaking adorable.

A young pig is the sole worker at a dam that keeps misery, in the form of a killer fog, out of a fairy tale metropolis populated by anthropomorphic animals. He is also just a child, and has to endure the typical cruelty of bullies at school. When a new child arrives in town and actually befriends the pig, he thinks he may have finally found a friend. Or maybe not, and maybe the whole world must burn.

I am perhaps exaggerating the mean streak of Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi’s film. The Dam Keeper isn’t so much a cautionary tale as an inspiring story about hanging onto your positivity in the face of strife. That Kondo depicts the onset of negative emotions as an all-consuming natural disaster gives his hopeful conclusion more weight. The character designs are so mindbogglingly cute that Kondo and Tsutsumi could have settled for tugging our heartstrings throughout The Dam Keeper and gotten away with it. Instead, he creates a powerful juxtaposition that elevates his film to greatness.

Feast

Many audiences may already be familiar with Feast, the animated short that played before theatrical screenings of the Disney’s blockbuster Big Hero 6. So many audiences may also be aware that Patrick Osborne’s film is, essentially, perfection. Told from the perspective of a dog, whose life revolves around food, Feast depicts our hero’s increasing worry that his master’s new health food-obsessed girlfriend will bring ruin his dinner forever.

But when the girlfriend finally leaves, the dog – named Winston – realizes that his life didn’t revolve around food, and instead has always revolved around the happiness of the person closest to him. Feast eventually reaches a swelling dramatic climax that raises the hairs on the back of your neck, and it skillfully builds to its satisfying conclusion with endearing animation and exciting storyboards. If you haven’t seen Feast already, you will love it.

Me and My Moulton

It may be difficult to know exactly what to make of Torill Kove’s animated short Me and My Moulton. The flat yet colorful animation evokes European picture books, but the narration combines the ironic observations of an adult with the subjective, often immature emotions of youth. Eventually Kove’s unusual storytelling wraps you up through the sheer force of its consistency.

It’s a little too whimsical to stir strong reactions, but bemusement is as valid a reaction as any, and you will be bemused by this little slice of life tale of three sisters who are embarrassed by their parents (their dad is the only man in town with a mustache), and who yearn only for a bicycle that they don’t entirely expect that their parents will get for them.

A Single Life

The shortest Oscar-nominated animated short, at very trim three minutes, amounts to little more than a clever joke. Fortunately, directors Marieke Blaauw, Joris Oprins and Job Roggeveen are very, very clever.

In A Single Life, a young woman receives a record in the mail, but discovers that by skipping the record she can jump to later moments in her life. It’s only fun for about a moment, as the horror of suddenly turning elderly, and becoming the victim of a torturous skip in the record, raise the tension to amusing heights.

A Single Life is simply conceived but does just about everything that can be done with its amusing premise. It exists mostly to entertain, although the heroine does elicit some genuine sympathy by the end, and on as entertainment it works extremely well.

Other Animated Features on the Program:

Bus Story

A young woman always dreamed of being a bus driver. Her lack of ambition is intended to be adorable, but as Bus Story piles humiliation onto our heroine it seems increasingly like she’s either naive, ignorant or a glutton for punishment. Or maybe the world is punishing enough on its own.

Directed by Tali, Bus Story never quite finds a tone to call its own. It’s a little mean but clearly well intentioned, making it hard to determine if we’re supposed to be embracing the cynicism or rallying against it. By the end of the film, the heroine has committed an act that so many consider deplorable that she may never regain your sympathy. She certainly lost mine. There’s a quirky charm to the execution but Bus Story‘s failure to become distinct is a very serious problem.

Duet

Disney animation legend Glen Keane (Beauty and the Beast) presents a beautifully animated musical overture about newborn children who glide through lives of adventure and eventually into each other’s arms. The four-minute short has a breathtaking quality that deserves to be experienced but despite its short running time, it’s a little too easy to think a little too hard about the content and find some faults. By the end of Duet, the hero appears to own a 30-year-old dog, which is undeniably implausible, and the absence of hardship in either of the characters’ lives leaves Duet feeling too idealistic for its own good.

Footprints

Oscar-nominated animator Bill Plympton (Your Face) returns with Footprints, an impressively intense tale of a man whose window was broken by an unseen assailant, who then traverses the globe in search of the destructive beast that only increases in power as the man fantasizes about what it looks like.

Footprints achieves great levels of momentum, and the ending is perfect, but the textures to Plympton’s animation shift so rapidly, and with such rhythmic regularity, that you may find yourself – as I did – feeling a little nauseous before long. It’s a pity, because otherwise Footprints would have been a great animated film.

Sweet Cocoon

Sweet Cocoon simply doesn’t work. The animation is colorful and lively but the story doesn’t appear to have been thought through very well, trading basic logic and receiving, in return, a not particularly funny fat joke.

A very large caterpillar is having trouble fitting into its cocoon – already a problem, since that’s not how cocoons work – and two helpful insects desperately try to fit the caterpillar inside of it, like an overweight person trying to put on a pair of pants ten sizes too small. There are some clever concepts, but only in the service of a not particularly funny larger gag (no pun intended), and by the time Sweet Cocoon finally seems to be leading to something, it turns out to be just a mean-spirited punchline.