The Movie Sleuth's resident animation specialist, Dana Culling, weighs in on the Oscar nominated animated shorts.
In many ways, animation can tell the stories which live
action actors – and budgets – are unable to tell. It can go as far inward,
outward, toward the infinite or infinitesimal in scope as the human imagination
allows, all with the intentions of those who create with palette, computer or
clay. It is limited only by our own capacities to explore our own realities,
and create according to our imaginations.
Stylistically diverse, with narratives spanning from the viciousness
of an ancient battlefield to the barren future of mankind, this year’s Oscar
nominees for best animated short film are a testament to the genre’s abundant
perspicacity. While feature-length animation has decidedly taken a turn for the
mundane in many respects in recent years, short films continue to be fertile
ground for artists who seek to define more than market share and
post-millennial buzzwords.
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These five films represent among the very best in the
year’s short animation, each deserving of its nomination in its own unique way:
Sanjay’s Super Team
(USA)
Director: Sanjay Patel
From the storytellers at Disney-Pixar comes this
seven-minute CGI romp through the imagination of a young first-generation
Indian boy, as he attempts to connect to his father’s private Hindu ritual
during his Saturday morning superhero cartoons. Through the genuine heart of
the studio’s best stylistic traditions, it has a good chance at winning the
Oscar; its influences are broadly both Western and Eastern, marrying the graces
of Indian art with the flashy, sleek artistic styles of television animation
and Pixar’s own brand of computer-generated family films. It tells its story
without dialogue in a colorful internal world, wherein young Sanjay learns that
the cultures of his heritage and of the country in which he is being raised can
come together in surprising, and beautiful, ways.
World of Tomorrow
(USA)
Director: Don Hertzfeldt
Hertzfeldt is known for a sense of nihilism throughout
his simple stick-figure films, and, indeed, his World of Tomorrow delivers a bleak view of futurism wherein human
beings have given up much of their corporeal existences to attempt finding
meaning in the realms of the purely esoteric, digital, or psychological – and,
in such a world, still manage to find very little of it. Protagonist
Emily is a
distantly-related clone of “Emily Prime”, a young child brought into this
aimless future by her emotionally crippled and empty adult counterpart. Through
Hertzfeldt’s dour humor and simple – yet deeply profound – art style, the
cautionary tale speaks volumes to our modern obsession with the lives we live
on screens.
Historia de un Oso
/ Bear Story (Chile)
Director: Gabriel Osorio Vargas
Animated gorgeously in an amalgamation of steampunk and
arthouse pathos, this 2014 Chilean animated tale is a thematic odyssey both
personal and global in scale. An elderly bear spins his life story as a circus
animal, forced from his home into a life of juggling on bicycles in the big top
by faceless drones with whipping sticks, and spends his life trying to get back
to the family from whom he was torn and, upon returning to his home town, is
unsure of what he will find. The metaphor is heartbreakingly real, even as the
animated figures playing out the anecdote are made of clockwork and viewed
through a theatrical guise. With nuance and elegance, Vargas brings to life the
very spirit of perseverance and the lessons left by history. While the
Academy’s clear Pixar favoritism may make Sanjay’s
Super Team a shoe-in for the statuette, it is this quietly indomitable
fable which may actually deserve to win.
We Can’t Live
Without Cosmos (Russia)
Director: Konstantin Bronzit
As the most traditionally animated of the
Oscar-nominated shorts this year, Bronzit’s film begins almost as a buddy
comedy set in the intensity of astronaut training, as two lifelong friends
begin work side-by-side to achieve their shared dream of traveling to space. A
mix of humor and sadness imbue the short with warmth and heart, as fantasies
and childhood whims take the form of reality and all of its harsh truths. In
its final moments, it takes on an almost confounding sense both of loss and of
hope – and yet retains the very sparks of wonder and humanity which formed the
bond between its two main characters.
Prologue (UK)
Director: Richard Williams
Animated in pencil hyper-realism by Williams himself, the
brief Spartan-Athenian conflict between four men wielding spears and arrows is
a visual feast – and a harrowing lesson in the futility of war. Striking at the
heart of human brutality, Williams spent years crafting the incredible detail
in this film. Contrasting the serene peace of nature with the sudden appearance
of men intent on violence and destruction, Prologue
is brief and terrifyingly real. A little girl, stumbling upon a field of
corpses, carries with her the mortal horror contained within the arbitrary
instances of carnage that make up the drama of human combat. Williams wastes
little time on exposition, and that seems to be precisely the point – in its
guttural death rattle, the film echoes every century’s fallen soldiers and the
vacuum of abstract politics which killed each one.
Predictions: Sanjay’s Super Team, with its
family-friendly culmination and familiar Pixar warmth, will likely take the
award home. Prologue is far more
striking, visually – but its imagery may be too disturbing to endear it to as
many. Historia de un Oso has both the
sentimentality and perfect storytelling and visually gorgeous animation – it
isn’t likely to win out over Pixar, but there is hope.
-Dana Culling