Best Animated Short Film Nominees for the 89th Academy Awards (2017, listed in order of appearance in the shorts package)
As is tradition on this blog, here is an omnibus write-up for the Oscar-nominated animated shorts. The omnibus write-ups for the Best Documentary Short Film and Live Action Short Film nominees should appear before the 26th. From a personal standpoint, I have seen better films nominated in this category, but I don’t recall Animated Short being this competitive (hence the closeness of the scores you see below).
A viral sensation on Vimeo when it was released there on October 14 last year, Andrew Coats and Lou Hamou-Lhadj’s Borrowed Time has often been mistaken as a Pixar film. Coats and Hamou-Lhadj are Pixar animators and friends from their New York University days, but were allowed to release the film independently through the company’s co-op program (allowing them to use Pixar’s resources). Here, an aging sheriff in the old American West returns to the scene of his greatest personal trauma. Alternating between the overcast present and scenes from that past trauma, Borrowed Time is a mood piece where the protagonist has spent a lifetime unable to forgive himself. Though Pixarian in design, this short is unsuitable for younger children and its visuals are not what drives its success.
Instead, Borrowed Time serves to internalize the character’s immense regret in just five or six minutes (excluding credits). This is a difficult task, and the effects are a bit inconsistent and perhaps too strongly manipulative. But in its conciseness, sound design, and music by Gustavo Santaolalla (2005′s Brokeback Mountain), is an extraordinary achievement. A film that Coats and Hamou-Lhadj worked on in their spare time between 2010-2015, it is an American animated film violating the constricting limits on which mainstream animation studios have deemed to be artful.
Patrick Osborne has previously won an Academy Award for Walt Disney Studios, with hand-drawn/computer-generated hybrid Feast (2014 short), and his newest film, Pearl, is one for the history books. Pearl is the first film ever nominated for an Academy Award that was specifically intended for virtual reality (VR). There are two versions of the film available – one for those watching in cinemas and one for those with VR headsets (the VR version can seen here – you don’t need a VR headset to view it, but it would make your viewing experience less confusing). For those seeing the cinematic cut, Osborne directed Pearl using his head movements.
Osborne’s film opens with a young woman finding an old car in a scrapyard, recognizing it as her father’s. She enters it, finding a tape recording of her father’s song, “No Wrong Way Home” (this song – music by Alexis Harte and JJ Wiesler, lyrics by Harte, and performed by Kelley Stoltz and Nicki Bluhm – is played for almost the entirety of the film), on the driver’s seat. She presses play, and there is a flashback as we see Pearl and her father basically live many of their years driving their beloved car – their home – around. The love between father and daughter leads to destinations that must have seemed impossible when they first ventured out in the world together. It animated style takes adjustment and the narrative is conventional. But by the film’s end, daughter and father have grown before our eyes, and we celebrate all they have achieved.
Attached to 2016′s Finding Dory, Alan Barillaro’s Piper is Pixar’s entry in this category this year. Building off the visual innovations seen in The Good Dinosaur (2015), this short film takes photorealism in animated film to astonishing heights. Here, a baby sandpiper awaits feeding time when her mother urges her newborn to join the flock to find food along the shoreline. This first adventure ends with the baby sandpiper cold and ruffled by a wave, but she will venture out again – with the assistance of some hermit crabs – to realize she has little to fear from the water.
With the production team conducting research on various beaches around the San Francisco Bay Area (including near Pixar’s headquarters in Emeryville) and at the Monterey Bay Aquarium (which inspired the look of the Marine Life Institute in Finding Dory), some of the behavioral and feathery details on the sandpipers are some of the best animated effects seen in any Pixar production of any length. Harking back to the traditions of the finest animals-in-nature Walt Disney animated short films of the 1930s as well as Pixar’s traditions of making quality short films about birds, this is one of the best short films Disney’s subsidiary has crafted – and, certainly, it is the crowd-pleaser among its four other rivals.
No film studio has been nominated more times in Best Animated Short Film than the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Over decades, NFB has produced and distributed a variety of animated short films daring to redefine what animated cinema may show. Bulgarian-Canadian Theodore Ushev directs Blind Vaysha, a film where the title character can see the past in her left eye and the future in her right eye – blinding her to the present. Actress Caroline Dhavernas narrates, and an unorthodox score is provided by Bulgarian musician Kottarashky. The film was animated in the style of a centuries-old linocut block printing using a Cintiq tablet to hand-draw the images. Ushev, hoping to simulate the aesthetic found in linocut, prevented himself from pressing the “undo” button on his computer – “once your hand carves it, it is gone.”
Its rudimentary, imperfect artistry is in contrast with the technical preciseness one comes to expect from animated films, feature- or short-length. With over 12,000 individual drawings in the final product, this folk tale utilizes very few colors – all of them earthly and dominated by browns and blacks. The film’s personal anxieties for the future and the damaging nostalgia for the past parallels Frank R. Stockton’s short story, “The Lady, or the Tiger?”, for Vaysha’s dilemma. Pondering the choice of blinding one of her eyes, an impossible choice must be made – a choice not to be revealed, but reflected upon by the audience.
Pear Cider and Cigarettes (2016)
At thirty-five minutes, Robert Valley’s biographical Pear Cider and Cigarettes is a narratively ambitious animated short film. Valley – whose distinctive, angular visual style is inspired by Peter Chung (Æon Flux) and Jamie Hewlett (creator of Gorillaz) – adapts two graphic novels about the life of his lifelong friend, Techno. Techno, a fun-loving, hedonistic young man whose addiction to booze, beats, and babes leads to a spiritually empty, self-destructive adulthood where he eventually ends up in Guangzhou, requiring a liver transplant that might be unsafe, let alone illegal. What, initially, appears to be a moralizing film turns into a commentary about idolizing a friend, promises broken, and unbending, platonic loyalty.
Also written and potentially narrated by Valley (no narration credit is provided, but I’m assuming it is Valley as of this writing), Pear Cider and Cigarettes suffers from repetitive lines from the narration – making it perhaps a few minutes longer than it should be. Animated entirely in Photoshop and funded via two Kickstarter campaigns, Pear Cider and Cigarettes utilizes an interesting narrative structure and soundtrack of twenty-two 1980s rock songs to provide a backdrop to Techno’s unsustainable lifestyle. For those who will never understand those drinking and partying as hard as Techno, Valley’s film – despite its cyclical narration and exposition and the your-mileage-may-vary tone of said narration – is an exercise in empathy, a tribute to a beloved friend, no matter his many flaws.
^ Based on my personal imdb ratings. Half-points are always rounded down.
This is the second write-up for 2017′s 31 Days of Oscar.
