Oscar Nominated Animated Short Films 2011/2012

There was a packed house for this one, just as there was for last year's edition. A disappointment and comedown from the works of 2010, the bunch of shorts (5 nominees, 4 highly commended) one gets in this package is largely joyless and unsatisfying. No worthwhile entertainments or advances in animation abound. I'm overly tough on these, perhaps, but all the same, I can be utterly receptive when one of these knocks me back.

The only time that I was ever surprised and invigorated in this whole program came at the end of the bizarre, interestingly structured "A Morning Stroll" by Grant Orchard and Sue Goffe, which has to be the strangest short nominated for an Oscar this year. It shows an event in three different time periods, 1959, 2009, and 2059: a chicken walking past a man, knocking on a door, and entering into the blackness of a safe apartment. Apparently drawn from some New York Times story, the film appears to be a lame-ass "oddity," but, over its seven minutes, it charts the fall of man and the rise of zombification. There will be blood. I'm not sure I totally bought the thin plot or the trite vision of the future, but I was surely jarred in a way unlike anything else in either program. B

Some nice animation was put on display in Amanda Forbis' and Wendy Tilby's "Wild Life," which undermines its amusing yet somewhat aimless story with frequent and completely unnecessary messages about what comets are and how they behave. Apparently this is done to establish a metaphor that's finally carried out at the end, but it's so weakly pulled off that the film suffers mightily for it. An Englishman moves to Canada and deceives his folks back home by saying he's a cowboy. Instead, he sits around, progressively drinking more and more and falling into decay as the winter draws nearer. The voice acting is a pleasure here, and the brush-stroke quality to the film's look is splendid, but things never really feel together. I suppose that's the point, but the lack of overall cohesion (despite intense and annoying repetition) doesn't bode well. B-

I saw it at Telluride in 3-D last year, and thus I suppose some of the magic had worn off. But I wasn't that enthusiastic about Enrico Casarosa's people-who-talk-in-guttural-noises Pixar flick "La Luna" in this environment. Not only that, but the troubling phallic symbolism I saw the first time was all the more flagrant this time around. I may have a dirty mind, but it can't be just me who's noticed this (hint for those who end up seeing this program: it involves the point of a star and a hammer). We get the initiation of a kid into a timeless ritual that involves humans at play in the celestial realm. Just like every other Pixar film ever made. You'll enjoy it, probably. I'm downplaying it for sure. I'm just not that big on it anymore. B-

"The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore" by William Joyce and Brandon Oldenberg is just as annoying as its character's ridiculous name, supposedly about what reading can do. Ultimately, though, it's really just a stream of images that have been drained of meaning. Dude in New Orleans who bears a striking resemblance to Buster Keaton gets displaced in Hurricane Katrina and finds a library out in the country somewhere where books fly and come alive and communicate by flipping pages. Certain scenes completely throw out meaning for the sake of a gag. I can sense there's some sort of passion here, possibly fueled by the disaster that happened, probably trying to show how people got through the aftermath by turning to the written word. That's all fine and good, but I'm not sure what it really says about that tragedy. C

At the back of the pack is "Dimanche," Patrick Doyon's child-POV tale of a Sunday with the most typically rough-hewn animation you can imagine. The gags, if charming, feel entirely secondhand, and, dreadfully enough, people talk in the blabbers which lazily depict the adult as seen from a kid's eye. The less said about this one, the better, though people seemed to like it a lot in the theater. C-

I don't really feel like writing up the four "Highly Commended" films, but suffice it to say, aside from "The Hybrid Combo", none seemed to be anywhere near worthy of a nomination. I was annoyed, baffled, and nonplussed by the other three.

Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts - 2011/2012

The live-action nominees this year were a weaker bunch than last year's, relying for the most part on pure emotion to try to guide half-baked plots and decent technical facets into a successful product. They also confirmed an unsettling trend in the nomination process. The lack of thematic diversity over the last couple of years has been frankly stunning. The new template seems to be: 1) heavy-handed film (either about Irish-Catholicism or the Holocaust), 2) film about imminent death, 3) quirky New York set film, 4) film set in 3rd world (preferably with 1st world/3rd world conflict), and 5) a(nother) Irish film. This isn't worth getting upset over, just as the best picture race isn't, I know. I should try to see more short films, which are readily available outside of this package. But many will only see 5-10 short films this year (including the Animated ones, which I'm hoping to see soon as well).

Anyways, on to the actual meat of the review:

The best of this lot, the "quirky New York set film," "Time Freak" by Andrew Bowler, isn't even all that original. "Primer" and countless Youtube videos have gone here before. But the charm of the actors, the intense specificity of the idea, and the devotion to hard sci-fi logic, works some form of magic that I appreciated. Stillman (Michael Nathanson) and Evan (John Conor Brooke) are roommates. Stillman's been gone for 3 days, so Evan takes a trip over to the storage room where he's has been working tirelessly, to see what's been going on. Evan comes to find some disturbing truths about the nature of his pal's work (which hasn't been used in the way he originally thought it would be) and the seductive nature of getting things right via time travel. The ending, a silly punch-line, and the overall brevity of the short, detract from a solid short, one more challenging than your usual Internet comedy bit but still relatively harmless. B

One of the two Irish films is Terry George's "The Shore", which explores the time/space-fractured love triangle of Jim (Ciaran Hinds), Paddy (Conleth Hill), and Mary (Maggie Cronin). Jim, in the midst of the Troubles, left Ireland for San Francisco, leaving his fiancee Mary with his debilitated best friend Paddy. Now, 25 years later, he's making a return to Ireland, not intending to revisit the wounds of the past. But his daughter Patricia (Kerry Condon), learning of his long-buried friendship, urges to make a gesture to the people he thinks he "betrayed." The result is at times powerful and touching, but drastically diminished due to a lack of shading, a cheap and stupid undertone of comedy, and a wispy ending. Bolstered instead of padded, this could have been much better. B-

Drawing from the likes of Roy Andersson and Aki Kaurismaki, Hallvar Witzø's singularly titled imminent death dramedy "Tuba Atlantic" is ultimately touching but often very unassured and forcedly quirky. When Oskar (Edvard Haegstad) learns he's gonna pass in just under a week, he doesn't do a whole lot. He just wants to talk, or a least make a gesture, once more to a brother he hasn't spoken to in a few decades. That, and to continue killing seagulls. He has someone to keep him company, Inger (Ingrid Viken), part of some program called "Death Angels," designed to help people through their last days. They have a typical indie sort of bond that at times works better than the norm, but feels too banal to really succeed. Same goes for Witzø's short as a whole. This is not a voice that I'd really care about hearing a whole lot more from, but for the time being, this is decent. B-

The last respectable film in the group I had intensely mixed feelings about. Max Zahle's "Raju" is an interesting rumination on human conscience as well as parenthood, but it also peddles some troubling 3rd-world stereotypes. It follows the adoption of the titular character (Krish Gupta) by two upper-class Germans, Jan (Wotan Wilke Mohring) and Sarah (Julia Richter). Just before they get around to leaving, Jan loses Raju in a market. The two are devastated, and, while Sarah lies bereft in their hotel room, Jan goes on a search that leads to some horrifying ends. The moral aspects of the short fascinated me, and will possibly do the same for other viewers, but I was left with a bad taste in my mouth throughout, especially at the ending, which championed the German father as some sort of 1st-world saint. Add to that the fact that the filmmaking is at times pretty lazy, and you have yourself a problematic little film. At feature-length it would probably be intolerable, but here, it's distilled fairly enough. B-

And then we have the only real dud of the group, "Pentecost" by Peter McDonald, which actually is the first film in the compilation. The style is close to Tanel Toom's similarly themed "The Confession" from last year, but while that film was sensitive and well-acted, this is a broad, cliché doodle that comes to mean absolutely nothing at the end. An altar boy named Damien (Scott Graham) makes a gaffe and is punished (he doesn't get to watch soccer games). But he gets another chance at the behest of his father, and... that's basically all there is to say about the plot, which is as depthless as the Catholic types that populate the film. Curios like this can work, but not when they're this sloppy and idiotic. C-

Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts 2010/2011

More capsule reviews, this time the nominated animated shorts along with a couple of special mention, "highly commended" films:

Bastien Dubois' "Madagascar, a Journey Diary" is an 11-minute college of every different animation style you can imagine, a film that can only be seen to be appreciated. It doesn't exert that much of a pull and the audience member feels a bit disconnected, but it's powerful as an evocation of a country and (presumably) what that country is all about. The film probably should be seen more than once to be most properly received, as it blows past you, incorporating souvenirs from the trip as centerpieces in the drawings and more. That being said, it can't quite keep up with itself, getting a bit repetitive by the time it reaches its close. Even though it has a nice stream-of-consciousness feeling about it, I wish it been slightly more refined (and a bit less show-offy). Yet, it really does more for animation than any of the other nominees. B+

Deserving a nomination but only garnering a "Highly Commended" citation, Bill Plympton's "The Cow Who Wanted to Be a Hamburger" is jarring, arrestingly simple 8-bit hilarity. The title does accurately describe the film, but it makes it sound like less of a film than it actually is. What we get is an original work that only succumbs to trying to be allegorical at the end of its jam-packed 6 minutes. The (wrongheaded) cow training sequence is the piece de resistance. B+

If you've ever played the computer game Spore, where you create creatures just like the ones in this film, "The Lost Thing" by Andrew Ruhemann and Shaun Tan may seem both like less of novelty (in the way that "District 9" seems less original when you factor in its similarities to "Halo") and also may work its weird effect doubly well. It has relatively sentimental insights (something along the lines of "The Last Book in the Universe"), but it also refuses to surrender to an uplifting ending and creates an interesting if mildly hamfisted view of the apocalyptic future (evoking the album cover for "Hail to the Thief" as well as "1984"). It follows an unnamed fellow (Tim Minchin) who stumbles upon an unidentified object on a beach and tries to put it back in its place. This is another film that requires closer study, as it puts a lot in and one might not to get all of it out in a single viewing. B

Max Lang and Jakob Schuh's "The Gruffalo" is somewhat of a sentimental favorite for me, since I am automatically charmed by monsters like one shown in this one (see: "Where the Wild Things Are," which you may have noticed is the source for my avatar). Locked into rhyme and also feeling a bit intolerable at times, "The Gruffalo" didn't always work for me. But it's pleasantly drawn and has great voicework. It's a story-within-a-story, told by Mother Squirrel (Helena Bonham Carter) to her little squirrels (Sam Lewis and Phoebe Givron-Taylor), about a mouse (James Corden) who goes to get food and encounters predators (Tom Wilkinson, John Hurt, and Rob Brydon). He uses the threat of a Gruffalo as an alibi, and although they (and he) thinks he's making it up, it turns out to be oh so real (and voiced by Robbie Coltrane). It is a humorous short, something you can't say about all of the movies up this year. B

"Day and Night" from Pixar's Teddy Newton I had harbored resentment for since I saw it before "Toy Story 3." It's not quite as bad as I remembered it to be and definitely skillful, though it is too clever by half. It just seems from its idea (two whatchamacallits representing the two halves of the day who want to experience the other's enjoyments) and brevity that it was quickly thought up and quickly put together, and I'm still not quite sure how I feel about that. Also, it ends on a strange decadent note, having one thing relishing the hot woman it now has, the other savoring its newfound Vegas. Not too sure about that one. B-

"Urs" by Moritz Mayerhofer, the other "highly commended" short, is, except for its remarkable drawings, pointless. It involves an old man bringing his unwilling wife over a mountain (done in a jagged style evoking "Metropolis"). I was pretty bored with it. As a friend noted, it could be portraying some sort of legend, but that explanation doesn't really make it any better. C+

Finally, "Let's Pollute" is 6 minutes of needless agitprop about the environment. Sloppily animated and blunt as hell, it repeatedly tells you to destroy the planet instead of to try save it. It makes a mild dent, admittedly, and plays a bit better than I let on, but that it blocked "The Cow Who Wanted to Be a Hamburger" from a nomination is ridiculous. C