Best Animated Short Film Nominees for the 97th Academy Awards (2025, listed in order of appearance in the shorts package)
This blog, since 2013, has been the site of my write-ups to the Oscar-nominated short film packages – a personal tradition for myself and for this blog. This omnibus write-up is done in memory of two now-shuttered theaters that were very important to this tradition – the Nickelodeon Theatre of Santa Cruz, California (2012 and 2013) and the Regency South Coast Village of Santa Ana, California (2014-2020, 2022-2024).
If you are an American or Canadian resident interested in supporting the short film filmmakers in theaters (and you should, as very few of those who work in short films are as affluent as your big-name directors and actors), check your local participating theaters here.
Now, here are the nominees for the Best Animated Short Film at this year’s Oscars. In decades' past, this was a category that was the province of Walt Disney Animation, Warner Bros., and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Familiar names such as Tom and Jerry, Mickey Mouse, and various Looney Tunes characters populated the nominations and wins. With the shuttering of MGM and Warner Bros.' original animation studios and more recently the withdrawal of Disney and Pixar animated shorts from cinemas, this is among the most democratic of all Oscar categories.
The write-up for Live Action Short is coming soon (you can read my omnibus write-ups to Documentary Short here). Non-American films predominantly in a language other than English are listed with their nation(s) of origin.
Magic Candies (2024, Japan)
Based on Korean author Baek Hee-na’s picture book of the same name (and its prequel book, I Am a Dog), Magic Candies is the only entry among these five that hails from a major animation studio. Directed by Daisuke Nishio for Toei Animation, Magic Candies represents a radical aesthetic (CGI that appears to be stop-motion) and thematic departure from a studio best known for Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, Digimon, and One Piece. Curiously, it is a rare Japanese nominee in this category*. Dong-Dong is a lonely boy who plays marbles by himself, and often wishes he had someone to play with. After mistakenly purchasing colorful round candies thinking they were marbles, he begins to experience strange developments when sampling the candies. With the candy in his mouth, he is able to communicate with someone or something whose colors correspond with the candy – resulting in some of the most inventive and sublime visuals of this set. Magic Candies’ diversity of motion – from Dong-Dong’s face steaming like a locomotive, an anthropomorphic sofa, an elderly dog’s gait, and a flurry of autumn leaves – would be impressive regardless of whether this would be traditional cel animation, stop-motion, or CGI.
Though the film’s third candy should appear later in this work because of its emotional undercurrents, Magic Candies – which arms itself with the narrative logic of a fable – has a gentleness to it that never feels the need to proclaim its moral. If this was an American short film, it would likely engage in some high-octane hijinks in order to arrive to its conclusion. Instead, in Nishio’s Magic Candies, Dong-Dong learns how to be proactive, to not always assume people and things will always be the way they are. From there, the world – in all of its wonderful complexity – will open up to him. In a culture where individualism is subordinate to the collective, this is a remarkable film about how an individual learns how to communicate – not only to connect with others, but to enrich one’s own life.
My rating: 8/10
In the Shadow of the Cypress (2023, Iran)
In more than nine decades since this category was born, there have only been two nominees from Iran. Both have come in the last two years, with Our Uniform (2023) and Shirin Sohani and Hossein Molayemi’s In the Shadow of the Cypress. Employing minimalistic hand-drawn design, the film opens somewhere in coastal Iran. A captain and his grown daughter live in a small shack. Sometimes, after an episode of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), he will retreat to his ramshackle wooden ship barely floating off the coast. There are some implications that the father been violent towards himself and his daughter for a while. But just before she decides to leave, a whale beaches close to home. Together, they attempt to help the whale back into the ocean, but the captain’s violent flashback to a moment during the Iran-Iraq War results in a panic attack (impactfully edited alongside its nightmarish visuals), and he retreats to his offshore ship to convalesce. The daughter, without any help from her father, attempts to save the whale – an obvious metaphor for the father's troubles, but an effective one nonetheless.
This film, which debuted at the 2023 Venice International Film Festival and qualified for the Academy Awards by winning Best Animated Short at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival, began production in 2017 and perhaps encountered the most obstacles on its path to completion. The pandemic, Iran’s lack of reliable internet, international sanctions, and the theocratic government’s inability to support artists (all twelve animators on this project worked part-time) resulted in an environment that could have easily proven insurmountable to Sohani, Molayemi, and their team. All credit to them that it did not.
In interviews, Sohani and Molayemi note that that the visuals of the ocean, the beach, and the boat came before they finalized the story. Both co-directors’ fathers were veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, and the two wanted to honor them and the many voiceless Iranian veterans and their families – for whom they say Iran’s dictatorship has utterly failed, despite using militaristic iconography to legitimize their history and authority. In comparison to the other Iranian film at this year’s Academy Awards, In the Shadow of the Cypress avoids The Seed of the Sacred Fig’s (2024, Iran/Germany) morally absolutist ending. It does so by electing to show understanding and forgiveness for those who are in control of neither their past or present.
My rating: 8.5/10
Yuck! (2024, France)
As Yuck! (the first of three films in this category distributed by independent French studio Miyu Distribution) opens, we see numerous families enjoying their beachside summer holiday in southern France. Among the adults and teenagers, romance is in the air. Interrupting their public displays of affection are a coterie of children exclaiming “Beurk!” (“Yuck!” in French) at the sight of couples kissing – the French might be known for their game, but it appears that even French children believe in cooties. The film ultimately concentrates on two of those children: a boy named Léo and a girl named Lucie. Director-writer Loïc Espuche’s Yuck! never says how Léo, Lucie, and the others know each other – whether they are close friends or otherwise. But as the vacation draws on, Léo and Lucie start expressing interest in the other. The film’s simplified 2D backgrounds and details accentuates a character’s pink-glowing lips when they express such interest. Whether this is puppy love, a curiosity to try, or something deeper is not something that Espuche is interested in either.
Espuche (supervising animator on 2019’s Marona’s Fantastic Tale, a regrettably underseen film) came up with the idea of Yuck! (Beurk! as the original French title) when he screened his previous short film to a theater of children. In that film, during a scene when a departing soldier kisses his fiancée, the entire theater went beurk at the sight. Yuck!, like Magic Candies, is an emotional time capsule of a film that opens up memories on how viewers may have felt towards romance as children. But unlike Magic Candies, Yuck! has less to say about this aspect of growing up – of one’s first brush with romantic desire and mutual affection, and how exciting it feels before one learns about heartbreak. And as such, it makes the worst use of its thirteen minutes as the shortest short film among its nominees.
Surely, Yuck! would receive an extra point or two from me if the Messi and Ronaldo fans did the deed. We would have had world peace – guaranteed.
My rating: 7/10
Wander to Wonder (2023)
A Belgian, British, Dutch, and French, co-production from Miyu Distribution, director-writer Nina Gantz’s Wander to Wonder takes place in the shed/makeshift television studio of a fictional 1980s children’s puppet television show of the same name. The three puppets – Mary (Amanda Lawrence), Billybud (Terence Dunn, also the composer and Gantz’s husband), and Fumbleton (Toby Jones) – delight with the show’s human host, Uncle Gilly (Neil Salvage). In the film’s first third, the narrative is told through tapes of past shows. Abruptly, Gantz reveals that the beneath the puppet exteriors are sentient miniature humanoids and the footage in the film’s opening act is of Mary rewatching old VHS recordings of the show. Uncle Gilly has passed on suddenly, and it is unclear how long the three have been without the man who kept them all together.
Qualifying for the Academy Awards by winning Best International Short Film at Anima (a Brussels-based animation-only festival), Wander to Wonder mixes influences from the U.S. and Britain: Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, The Flumps, and The Wombles. There is some painstaking stop-motion work occurring here. Given how small Mary, Billybud, and Fumbleton are, moving their eyelids or even their fingers requires incredible precision. Typically, stop-motion characters are larger than most viewers believe, but Gantz wanted to keep the Wander to Wonder trio life-sized (in this case, only a few inches tall). Their fluid movements seen across Wander to Wonder are striking to behold – and each of the three characters moves in their own way across a detailed, beautifully-lit set.
Principally, Wander to Wonder is a story of grief and how Mary, Billybud, and Fumbleton respond in their own ways to Uncle Gilly’s death. Juxtaposed with the absurdity of Billybud and especially Fumbleton’s behavior, Wander to Wonder has a tragicomic tone that I admit is not to my tastes (Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared fans might say otherwise). But the underlying intent and its bittersweet, yet optimistic, ending is enough to overcome much of my trepidation towards it.
My rating: 8/10
Beautiful Men (2023, Belgium/France/Netherlands)
Another Belgian-Dutch-French co-production, another nomination for Miyu Distribution! Director-writer Nicolas Keppens’ Beautiful Men won the Alexeïeff – Parker Award at the 2024 Annecy Film Festival (the most prestigious animation-only film festival of all, located in the French Alpine resort town of the same name; this award is the equivalent of a Best Director) and qualified for the Oscars by winning Best Narrative Short at the Ottawa International Animation Festival shortly after. Here, we meet three bald or balding Flemish brothers – Steven, Bart, and Koen – as they travel to Turkey for hair transplants. Keppens gives the brothers roughly equal screentime, but the messy editing and narrative structure prevents the audience from learning more about each of the brothers beyond a single defining behavioral trait (Steven the aloof depressive, Bart the confrontational one who doesn’t necessarily believe in wearing pants, Koen the diplomatic glue holding their brotherly love together). Certain jokes fall flat because we have not spent enough time with our protagonists – the one in a bathroom stall in particular.
Compared to the two most recent animated shorts in this category that addressed aging – Late Afternoon (2017) and Mémorable (2019, France) – Beautiful Men adopts to perspective at mid-age. This is a worthy, undercovered area to explore in cinema, but Beautiful Men approaches the topic aimlessly. Nevertheless, Beautiful Men does approach its material with a unique sensitivity, potentially helped by the fact that Keppens, in a previous life, worked at an Istanbul hotel that had a close relationship with a hair clinic. It captures middle-aged men at a vulnerable juncture in life, but they are unable to articulate how that vulnerability pains them. That inability to express their pain renders all three brothers – unusual for a short film, animated or otherwise – as passive characters. Though the brothers (whose stylized round heads emphasize their follicle challenges) have traveled to Istanbul, they do not drive the plot as much as circumstance and dumb luck do – that is not screenwriting expediency, but a keen observation from Keppens. Similarly, there is minimal character growth here. That is by design, emblematic of this moment in their lives.
My rating: 7.5/10
^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog. Half-points are always rounded down.
* Though Japan has a reputation as an animation hub, it has had very little representation in Best Animated Short Film. Previous Japanese nominees have included: Mt. Head (2002), La Maison En Petits Cubes (2008; the sole winner), and Possessions (2013) – none of which are in the style of traditional anime. I suspect that the television-heavy market for original video animation (OVA) has rendered some potential contenders as ineligible (movies that debut on television are ineligible for Academy Awards).
From previous years:
85th Academy Awards (2013) 87th (2015) 88th (2016) 89th (2017) 90th (2018) 91st (2019) 92nd (2020) 93rd (2021) 94th (2022) 95th (2023) 96th (2024)
There were no honorable mentions provided alongside the nominees this year, as has occurred in most years.
For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.
