Oscar shorts program puts big stories in small packages
The Academy Awards’ shortest nominees explore childhood, memory, the immigrant experience and adorable pets.
- Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi
- TRAPPER KEEPER: The Oscar-nominated animated short The Dam Keeper.
The short films nominated for the Academy Awards should be a bigger deal. Most audiences probably treat them as “Who knows?” categories in their Oscar polls, when they ideally deserve more prominence in the wider cultural conversation. Today’s media, particularly social media, are saturated with short video, to the point where you can go to a gas pump or an ATM without seeing a little movie.
Until the Oscars opt to give shorts some kind of on-line push, they’ll fly under the radar, but at least get in-theater screenings with The 2015 Oscar Nominated Shorts, which offers separate programs for live-action and animated contenders (but not the short documentaries this year). Every year the nominees offer superb work alongside relative duds, and even if I’m often a little let down by the live action shorts, I’m always impressed with the animated entries. It’s like a reverse of the cachet enjoyed by live action versus animated features.
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Sometimes the live action shorts stumble while trying to make an emotional punch in a short period of time. The Phone Call stars the highest-profile performers of the nominees, with Sally Hawkins’ crisis hot-line volunteer taking a call from a distraught Jim Broadbent. Both actors give affecting performances, with Broadbent conveying enormous nuance with little more than his voice over a phone line, but “The Phone Call” tries too hard.
It doesn’t lay it on as thick, though, as Boogaloo and Graham, in which two adorable brothers raise two adorable chickens against the backdrop of the Troubles in 1970s Belfast. Despite good intentions, the film loses balance when trying to make extreme tonal shifts.
Two other entries fare better with tales of female protagonists. In Israel’s Aya, the title character (Sarah Adler) spontaneously decides to step in as the driver for a Danish musicologist (Ulrich Thomsen) she meets at the airport. After the clever “meet cute,” the pair warily flirts while the audience wonders if Aya will tell the truth. The 40 minute running time passes a bit leisurely, but the film builds to a sharp revelation that inspires you to reassess everything that came before.
Switzerland’s Parveneh generates almost painful amounts of empathy for the titular teenager, an undocumented Afghan working in snowy Switzerland. Parveneh (Nissa Kashani) attempts to send money home, crosses paths with a rebellious young woman and gets a crash course in cultural differences. The film forfeits a little of the first half’s carefully created realism, but it’s an affecting story about the plight of immigrants and the bridging of societies.
The French-Chinese entry Butter Lamp is by far the best, but may lose to more sentimental fare. Director Hu Wei shows a photographer taking portraits of poor families in rural China. Wei’s camera stays motionless as we see people posed against such artificial backdrops as tourists attractions and tropical beaches. There’s no real plot, but every moment is packed with information about the manipulation of imagery and social changes in China, leaving you excited to see what the director will do with a feature.
Of the animated shorts, the most familiar is Feast, which was attached to Big Hero Six in its theatrical release. The off-beat love story unfolds from the point of view of a Boston Terrier pup eating scraps shared by his single-dude owner — and, soon enough, his new girlfriend. Like a riff on Lady and the Tramp’s spaghetti scene, this film’s combination of dogs and food is both shameless and hard to resist.
The brisk A Single Life presents a cute premise involving a vinyl 45 record, although it ends on a surprisingly sour note. The Bigger Picture imaginatively depicts the sibling rivalry between two brothers with an ailing mother and surreally blends two-dimensional animation with stop motion. Me and My Moulton offers a funny, bittersweet childhood memory from previous Animated Short winner Torill Kove, and conveys the fluid nature of how emotion and recollection blur together.
The standout entry, however, is Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi’s The Dam Keeper, with an animation style reminiscent of colored chalk and a subject that lightly evokes Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. In a village populated by animals, a young pig operates a windmill that keeps clouds of black pollution at bay. The job renders the pig so sooty his schoolmates mercilessly mock him, until he befriends a fox who makes charcoal drawings — showing that the very thing the pig hates can have a positive, creative variation.
Building an emotionally rich world that operates by its own rules, The Dam Keeper is the kind of short film that isn’t just impressive, but feels like a privilege to watch.