During any given year, we'd be lucky to see even two truly spectacular animated features in mainstream cinemas. Meanwhile, this single program of animated shorts gives us at least three masterpieces that are gratifyingly impossible to choose from. If you're near a theater showing these shorts, go let the Academy know you want to see more of these (which you do, trust me).
Oscar-Nominated Shorts
Sanjay's Super Team - Animator Sanjay Patel helms Pixar's boldest visual endeavor: a TV-worshipping boy compromises with his Hindu-worshipping father by way of a supernatural battle between Hindu gods. The look of the second act is something special, with one foot in the Meander-based look of Disney's Feast, and another in the pop-art-inspired use of flat colors in Waltz With Bashir. The story, while strong, calls for a tidier resolution than those of previous Pixar shorts. On One Man Band, director Mark Andrews ditched an obvious pay-off and favored comical retribution over predictable morals. A win for Pixar on this short would be deserved but unnecessary.
World Of Tomorrow - The maker of "My spoon is too big!" brings us the program's first masterwork. I've seen it three times: its satisfactions take time to bloom. Don Hertzfeldt's first foray into digital stick-figure animation depicts a future where people live forever by transferring their consciousnesses to digital storage or impregnated clones of themselves. It's droll and quirky in equal amounts, especially when a third-generation clone named Emily, while trying to break the bad news of Earth's demise, is singsonged-over by her toddler-aged Prime. Hertzfeldt throws some delicious abstract backgrounds into the mix, and gives us a sobering reminder that we have far less time than we think.
Bear Story - The grandest visual treat in the program, director Gabriel Osorio Vargas weaves a tragic but sweet tale of CG bears via wind-up mechanical miniatures. On one level it is the simple story of a father striving to escape his imprisonment in the circus to reunite with his family. Fortunately, a friend familiar with Chilean history informed me going in that the presence of cold military figurines clue us in on the Pinochet regime setting, when families were separated, tortured, and murdered following a coup in 1973. The short's multitude of toned-down colors is extravagant, and rock duo Denver supplies an aching music box theme to accompany our glimpse into melancholy memories.
We Can't Live Without Cosmos - Unlike World Of Tomorrow, the satisfactions of this Russian import are immediate and beguiling. Like that film, however, it combines the morbid and the comical to great effect. I first saw it in the Animation Show of Shows in late 2014, and still remember the best sight gag: an astronaut sheds a bead of sweat underneath his helmet over an impending mission and instinctively tries to wipe it off. The story follows two brothers who ace their way through aerospace training together, only to meet with tragedy upon liftoff, as well as indifference from the higher-ups toward their communal spirit. Konstantin Bronzit is a shrewd visual storyteller, efficiently moving the story forward without insisting on it, and Tuyara Tikhonova's and Eugeny Zhebchuk's sound effects are collectively subtle yet all stand out and keep your focus from moment to moment.
Prologue - This very well may be the swan song of legendary animator Richard Williams, who worked for 25+ years on The Thief And The Cobbler only to have it taken away from him in the mid-'90s. This piece represents his desire to master, "the whole whammy," and Prologue is certainly one of the greatest displays of pure technique in recent memory. Unfortunately, it is needlessly gratuitous. The story depicts gruesome, bloody Roman combat (red is the most saturated color in the piece) and I wonder why this story was personal to Williams. But it proves he has mastered the human form, and whether he wins or not, he can go out on a high note.
Highly Commended
If I Was God... - Director Cordell Baker channels his inner Tim Burton - right down to the striped black-and-white shirt - and delivers a fanciful tale of maniacal classroom daydreams. The daydreams are a fun blend of cut-out stop motion elements that recall this past year's The Bigger Picture, but the narrator's deadpan readings don't match the underlying menace of the film's preteen protagonist.
The Short Story Of A Fox And A Mouse - The better of the two widescreen French entries in the Highly Commended category, a fox flirts with his potential rodent dinner, only to form a bond with him and join forces to keep one another safe in their snowy terrain. The designs are pleasingly naturalistic, but it adds little to the frenemy trope.
The Loneliest Stoplight - The best of the Highly Commended shorts, Patton Oswalt narrates Bill Plympton's latest short about a stoplight's up-and-down career at a barren four-way intersection overshadowed by the interstate. Though there are a couple of PG-13 elements thrown in, the watercolor images coupled with Oswalt's narration together lend a storybook-like quality to the piece.
Catch It - The weakest of the Highly Commended shorts, this many-hands French short is as basic and mainstream as it gets: a group of meerkats chase down a vulture who has stolen their fruit. I suppose the widescreen images of the saturated desert are nice, but the character designs are unappealing and the character animation too clunky. It's easy to see why it lost the nomination.
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