Best Animated Short Film Nominees for the 93rd Academy Awards (2021, listed in order of appearance in the shorts package)
NOTE: For viewers in the United States (continental U.S., Alaska, and Hawai’i) who would like to watch the Oscar-nominated short film packages, click here. For virtual cinemas, you can purchase the packages individually or all three at once. You can find info about reopened theaters that are playing the packages in that link. Because moviegoing carries risks at this time, please remember to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by your local, regional, and national health officials.
Continuing with one of my favorite Oscar-time traditions, here is an omnibus review of this year’s Academy Award nominees for Best Animated Short Film. This is an older category than many might believe to be, with some of the first nominees and winner including ‘30s and ‘40s fixtures: Disney’s Silly Symphonies, Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes, MGM’s Tom and Jerry and Happy Harmonies. These days, the category tends to be more democratic (perhaps not so much this year), but certainly more experimental. Here are the nominees, as they appeared in the order of how they appeared in the short film packages released to theaters and virtual cinemas in the United States:
Burrow (2020)
Burrow, directed by Madeline Sharafian (story artist on 2017’s Coco, writer on Cartoon Network’s We Bare Bears), is the eighth in Pixar’s SparkShorts series, in which Pixar’s junior animators craft a short film on a limited budget and timeframe. This is the film that played in front of Soul for those lucky enough to view that film theatrically. This dialogue-free, hand-drawn film stars a young rabbit, looking to dig out and furnish her own home – complete with a bathroom-disco (or something like that). Her best-laid plans, however, seem dashed when she keeps digging and running into other animals’ underground abodes in this area. Not that these animals seem to mind the intrusions too much. The rabbit, so anxiety-driven in her eagerness to project a picture of self-assuredness, soon realizes that these nearby animals she fears to have disturbed are all neighbors, a community ready to lend a paw for the newcomer.
Sharafian credits her sense of impostors’ syndrome when first working at Pixar as the film’s primary thematic inspiration. With only a bare number of lines, the rabbit expresses a vast array of emotions, endearing the audience to her self-dramatization and youthful insecurity. Drawn flatly but nevertheless suggesting some depth, the cutaway animation depicting the burrow neighborhood recalls Richard Scarry’s books and other such colorful ensemble illustrations found in children’s picture books. Burrow is a worthy addition to Disney/Pixar’s animated short film legacy, despite the lack of innovation and obvious low-budget appeal (it uses the third movement of Mozart’s Oboe Concerto as its soundtrack), and seems like something that could have been made during the heyday of Silly Symphonies or Warner Bros.’ Merrie Melodies.
My rating: 7/10
Genius Loci (2020, France)
From the Latin term meaning “the spirit of a place”, Adrien Mérigeau’s Genius Loci is the most difficult, abstract film of this year’s slate of nominees. Genius Loci stars a young black woman named Reine (Nadia Moussa), a solitary soul who embarks upon, while walking the streets of Paris at night, an existential revelation. Reine, who is supposed to be babysitting her nephew that evening, decides to have a small adventure instead. She will find this experience and this Parisian neighborhood disorienting and chaotic, in many of the ways that life in a sprawling metropolis can be. The film’s sound mix clangs, whispers, vibrates, and echoes into Reine’s soul, injecting feelings of harmony, but mostly those of displacement. The distant rumbling of traffic is subliminal here, crescendoing and decrescendoing to control the film’s tension. Throughout, Mérigeau provides a fragmented narrative (do not fixate on the plot) and the protagonist’s intangible, occasionally abstruse, narration. Spiritual and existential loss colors Reine’s ambling, as well as a sense of modern France’s racial otherizing that makes the city feel unwelcoming, if not antagonistic.
Mérigeau (background cleanup on 2009’s The Secret of Kells, art director on 2014’s Song of the Sea) collaborated with Belgian comic illustrator Brecht Evens (production designer on the excellent Marona’s Fantastic Tale from 2019) for the film’s dumbfounding backgrounds, as well as storyboarding the changes in aesthetic as Reine continues her journey through Paris. Marona’s influence is felt keenly throughout Genius Loci – from the lack of recognizably human figures among strangers to Reine and the ever-changing color scheme. Unlike Marona, Genius Loci commits to watercolors (or computerized animation meant to resemble watercolor paints) during the film’s entirety. The watercolor animation serves to loosen the character animation and the backgrounds’ definition, and serves as a paragon of expressionist animation. Genius Loci will bewilder audiences, challenging them to understand Reine’s painful attempt to find belonging and solace in a place that disallows such reflection.
My rating: 8.5/10
Opera (2020, South Korea)
Opera, directed by Erick Oh (an animator at Berkeley-based Tonko House, which crafted the 2014 nominee The Dam Keeper), is an independent South Korean/American production that owes more to Sandro Botticelli and Hieronymus Bosch than anything ever seen in animated cinema. This is a cinematic fresco teeming with activity, intended more as interactive art than for a movie theater. The setting is a pyramid filled with souls living, laboring, luxuriating, dying. As the camera pans downward from the godlike or prophet-like figures occupying the top, it later zooms outward, all timed alongside a day-night cycle. Opera’s story is that of human history, distilled in eight minutes of repetitive activity. The design of Oh’s film is as a museum installation – projected on a wall or the ground (the only instance Opera has been screened as such was at the Ars Electronica Animation Festival in Linz, Austria) – that loops continuously, and, if one looks closely enough at the pyramid’s sections, there are loops within the film’s loops. If viewed in a museum, Opera does not pan selectively as it does if projected in a theater or a home media screen.
Pieced together in between Oh’s other film projects over four years and a pandemic, Oh and his animators (some of whom participated voluntarily, without pay) concentrated on different sections of the pyramid at a time, synchronizing the action in a specific section to match the surrounding areas – and, ultimately, the film as a whole. Opera contains intricacies impossible to realize on first, second, third viewings. Even in its limited, virtual cinema form, it engulfs the viewer in its hierarchical animation, the intentionally simplistic character animation serving to universalize the drama of its beings’ existence. It is rapturous art, the sort that defies description, and undoubtedly will echo across Oh’s subsequent films.
My rating: 8.5/10
If Anything Happens I Love You (2020)
For some American viewers, I imagine that this title alone has already spoiled the film’s content even without seeing any footage. A Netflix production directed by Will McCormack (co-writer on 2019’s Toy Story 4) and Michael Govier (bit roles in American television), If Anything Happens I Love You is the only nominee in this category directed by individuals with no background in directing animation. McCormack and Govier met at acting school; acting remains their primary profession. Without dialogue, the film opens with two parents eating dinner at opposite ends of the table. They seem aloof, their minds elsewhere. The background is spare, with only a jumble of pencil sketches making sense of any barriers enclosing them. Flexible, animated silhouettes appear from their bodies – sometimes arguing vigorously with each other, at times shadowing the person and attempting to call their attention. Grief overhangs their household, expressed through a largely monotone palette, minimalistic designs and backgrounds. The background artists exclude any detail unnecessary to the story.
Written and crafted in collaboration with (so as to not spoil the film, I am about to opaquely write about this film’s intentions) a prominent, deep-pocketed political non-profit so as to shear the film of any thematic excess, If Anything Happens I Love You has, unlike its fellow nominees, broad support among certain prominent actors in Hollywood. Laura Dern is the executive producer and various actors – including Chelsea Handler, Rashida Jones, and Lesley Ann Warren, among others – have openly contributed or advocated for this movie. The visualization of the parents’ pain, even without dialogue, brings the viewer into a space unfathomable to most, unbearable for those who know too well. The use of the King Princess song “1950” meshes awkwardly with what is being portrayed on-screen at the time. But the character animation – McCormack and Govier’s experience as actors endows the couple with indelible humanity – and its visual discipline carry the film to its heartbreaking conclusion.
My rating: 8/10
Yes-People (2020, Iceland)
Icelandic film Já-Fólkið (Yes-People) is the epitome of cheap European computer-generated animation. Directed by Gísli Darri Halldórsson (a former Cartoon Network Studios character animator), Yes-People – the Best Icelandic Short winner at the 2020 Reykjavik International Film Festival and the Children’s Choice Award winner at 2020’s Nordisk Panorama – is a largely aimless movie following the zany lives of the people who live in an apartment complex. That is all I have to say about the film’s narrative. The sketches it draws in each character’s life always feel disjointed and disconnected from all the others – save one scene of the elderly couple fornicating loud enough for their downstairs neighbors to hear. Halldórsson describes his film as a mosaic of personalities, but even a mosaic has a thematic consistency that unifies its disparate parts.
The desaturated colors of Yes-People are meant to resemble old photographs. As much as I respect what Halldórsson is aiming for, the results make the film look muddy, half-rendered – like a knockoff Pixar short from the early 1990s. Inspired when Halldórsson described to some of his Irish friends about the different tonal meanings of the word “Já” (“hello” in Icelandic), Yes-People only has one repeated word of dialogue throughout: “Já”. Is this supposed to be funny? Philosophical? I am not sure; and I am not sure the film knows it either. Reading some of Halldórsson’s interviews following his Academy Award nomination, he mentions that the film’s positive response from Iceland and Scandinavia might be culturally specific, as opposed to other parts of the world. As to what those cultural differences might be that prevented me from liking this film, I hardly have a clue.
My rating: 6/10
^ All ratings based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).
For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.
Three other films played in this package as honorable mentions: Kapaemahu (2020; 7.5/10), The Snail and the Whale (2019; 6.5/10), and To: Gerard (2020; 6.5/10).
From previous years: 85th Academy Awards (2013), 87th (2015), 88th (2016), 89th (2017), 90th (2018), 91st (2019), 92nd (2020).
