Three separate selections of this year’s Academy Award nominated short films are screening at theatres this awards season. Whether you’re a miniature movie fan or just an awards season obsessive these distinct shorts programs all offer unique titles including live action narratives, documentary films and even abbreviated animated films.
We love a great animated shorts program, and this year’s Oscar nominees offer a killer slate of curt cartoons. Joanna Quinn and Les Mills’s “Affairs of the Art” is a study of family and obsession told through the circuitous tales of Beryl – a 59-year-old factory worker re-discovering her love of art making. This is Quinn’s fourth short based on her Beryl character, but it’s the first to introduce viewers to Beryl’s supremely eccentric family. There’s some fun storytelling here, but the real highlights are Quinn’s gorgeous hand-drawn imagery and the filmmakers’ accurate identifying of the hallmark of true artistry: compulsion. In Hugo Covarrubias and Tevo Díaz’s “Bestia” audiences endure a surreal and increasingly disturbing exploration of the day-to-day life of a secret police agent in the military dictatorship of Chile. The cracked psychology of a country and its citizens is revealed as alarming details emerge from the seemingly banal reality of an anonymous woman and her loyal pooch. “Robin Robin” is a Netflix production helmed by Dan Ojari and Mike Please. The directing duo deploys a talented cast of voice actors – including Gillian Anderson and Richard E. Grant – in this delightfully designed stop-motion animated tale about a clan of mice who rescue a robin’s egg from a menacing cat. “Robin Robin” is a musical featuring a number of memorable songs over its half hour run time, and it’s also a Christmas story that ties the wish-granting power of the holidays to themes of family, loyalty and growing up. On the opposite end of the animated short spectrum from “Robin Robin” is “The Windshield Wiper” – an adult-themed story written, designed and directed by Albert Mielgo. Mielgo uses keyframe animating to create what looks like a blend between video footage and cartoon imagery – the film’s look and philosophical themes both recall Richard Linklater’s rotoscope masterpiece, Waking Life. “The Windshield Wiper” boasts the best onscreen text messaging sequence we’ve ever seen in a movie, and this film reminds us that animation can be seriously engaging when it engages serious themes like modern dating, suicidal tendencies, the multi-faceted sensuality of cigarette smoking, mortality, and the answer to the question “What is love?”
Live action shorts aren’t just abbreviations of their feature film siblings. Like novels and short stories these are two separate art forms despite their similarities. The great strength of – and biggest challenge for – short cinema is its capacity for distillation. An Oscar-nominated Kyrgyzstan/Switzerland short offers an intense cultural drama stripped of narrative artifice: Maria Brendle and Nadine Lüchinger’s “Ala Kachuu (Take and Run)” tells the tale of a young Kyrgyz woman whose dreams of university life in the city are challenged by the Kyrgyz culture’s marriage traditions. “Ala Kachuu (Take and Run)” is more emotionally harrowing than I knew a short film could be thanks to some great ensemble acting playing against dramatic exteriors. “Please Hold” does a whole lot with very little, turning this one actor drama into a satire of the self-serve corporate prison economy of the near future. K.D. Dávila and Levin Menekse’s short impressively recalls Sorry to Bother You, but with a full dose of A Scanner Darkly techno-paranoia.
This year’s selection of Oscar-nominated documentary shorts offers true-life stories that deliver plenty of drama and insight without the luxury of feature length run times. Matt Ogens and Geoff McLean’s “Audible” profiles the Maryland School for the Deaf’s champion high school football team. This short’s epic intro turns the stock pigskin-cinema scene of the dramatic halftime locker room speech on its head before handing-off a moving movie about growing-up on and off the field. Jay Rosenblatt’s “When We Were Bullies” is a Ross McElwee-esque movie memoir about the director and an elementary school friend – the pair are reunited by a strange coincidence before they reconstruct their mutual memories of bullying another boy in fifth grade. This film is nostalgic without being overly sweet, and it brings a fresh perspective and nuanced understanding to a painful subject. Ben Proudfoot’s “The Queen of Basketball” tells the story of pioneering lady basketballer, Lusia Harris. The daughter of Mississippi sharecroppers, “Lusi” would sneak out of bed late at night to watch her pro basketball heroes on television after bedtime. She was also tall. In her book, Sum It Up, University of Tennessee legend, Pat Summitt – Harris’s Olympic teammate – described Harris as “the first truly dominant player of modern women’s basketball, 6-foot-3 and 185 hard-muscled pounds of pivoting, to-the-rim force.” Harris was the only woman ever drafted by the NBA, and this film’s award nomination has been made more poignant since Harris passed away on January 18.