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thecaffeinebookwarrior · 1 year

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My Personal Ranking For the Oscar Nominated Animated Short Films of 2023

I got to watch these shorts in a local theater yesterday, and it was quite a spectacular time.

Note: I am not ranking these based on the quality of the film, but based on how much I personally liked the film. There is definitely a difference. I have come to terms with the fact that I sometimes don’t personally like media that is Objectively Good, and sometimes get unfortunately invested in things that are questionable quality.

With that out of the way, let’s delve in.

1. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse

I, too, am surprised that this was my favorite of the short films. Dare I say, I feel a bit basic. Perhaps I’ll hang up a Live, Laugh, Love sign next.

I’m especially surprised, because I actually have more critiques regarding it than I do with other short films that I liked less. Specifically, the dialogue could sound like platitudes, which is a pet peeve of mine with any media.

But it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s among the most beautiful animation I’ve ever seen, and seeing it on the big screen was nothing short of an emotional experience.

The animation and designs made me love each character, and made the dialogue -- which, in a less beautiful film, might have been enough to put me off liking it -- feel heartfelt. I can’t praise the creative team behind this film enough for the manner in which they brought these characters to life. The voice performances are also commendable.

Perhaps most importantly, it put me in touch with my inner child. Wizard of Oz, Jungle Book, James and the Giant Peach, Spirited Away, Kubo -- there is a timeless impulse among children, it would seem, to be befriended and loved by benevolent talking animals or fantastical creatures.

It is perhaps because of my inner child that I love this film so much. My childhood self might have been oblivious to the beautifully simplistic depth of Ice Merchants, the blink-and-you-miss-it beats that make The Flying Sailor so meaningful, bewildered by My Year of Dicks, and existentially terrified by An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake, but my desire for a big white talking horsey is timeless and powerful.

Where to watch it: Apple TV+

2. My Year of Dicks

This one is just. So unspeakably funny. And, despite the fact that I’m a raging Sapphic who’s never been interested in the dicks available to me, I found it intensely relatable.

This may be a controversial statement, but I find that mainstream Hollywood’s attempts to nail down the Female Gaze are often more obnoxious than the Male Gaze itself. Partially because it often revolves around what male executives think The Modern Woman(TM) finds appealing, rather than an actual understanding of the female experience. The Male Gaze, at the very least, feels somewhat organic and based in the personal experience of the filmmakers.

This -- this felt like the Female Gaze. A truly organic trip through the psychology, impulses, and emotions of a fifteen-year-old girl. It treated its female protagonist not as unknowable, but as relatable, with the five unpleasant male characters she was approaching as Other -- each in five wildly entertaining ways. And it was glorious.

The way the main character dramatized her experiences -- making full use of the animated world in which she lived -- was something I could relate to viscerally. I’m reluctant to mention anything else about the plot, as I truly encourage everyone to just experience it firsthand. It’s heartfelt, exquisitely ‘90s, and a beautiful animated tribute to teenhood and questionable decisions.

Where to watch it: Vimeo, Hulu

3. Ice Merchants

Such a beautiful and emotional experience. I would say that this film demonstrates that less is more, but really, it demonstrates that the illusion of less is more. In reality, this film is teaming with detail, from the beautifully textured ice and misty landscape below, to the subtle indications of the characters’ recently experienced loss.

I was so entranced by the visual beauty and surrealist elements of this film, it took me a while to grasp its actual storyline: subtle clues, presented by a yellow mug, indicate the loss of the ice merchant’s wife and the mother of his son, and the cold world in which they live comes to represent their grief.

Without giving much away, the film ends with a view of a spring landscape, representing the eventual thaw of this grief as father and son begin to heal.

Where to watch: YouTube

4. The Flying Sailor

This beautiful and strange animation is based off of a true story, in which a sailor was flung 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) by the Halifax explosion in 1917, and lived to tell about it.

This film is essentially the sailor’s life flashing before his eyes as he soars, naked, over the exploding landscape. We get to know his character through the blink-and-you-miss-it moments that we witness of his life.

My favorite moment of the film was when he lights a cigarette at the same instant a ship in the harbor (unbeknownst to him, full of dynamite) catches fire. His -- and our -- quiet shock as we realize what we’re looking at is haunting. He even steps on the match, as if in a subconscious effort to put out the blaze, just as the contents of the ship explodes and nearly ends his life.

Where to watch it: YouTube

5. An Ostrich Told Me The World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It

Just because I rank this film last doesn’t mean it isn’t good. It’s incredibly good, and an inventive way to portray a character’s existential crisis through a stop-motion medium.

Ultimately, this is a story about a man realizing how meaningless his life has become while working at an unfulfilling office job. But that makes the film sound way more mundane than it actually is. The way in which this existential crisis is portrayed is through the main character realizing that he and his fellow workers are all stop-motion puppets, after he is visited by the titular ostrich.

And I do like it a great deal, but the reason for it subjectively ranking below the other films is the simple fact that the other films left me with a more positive emotional feeling. This one...is kind of terrifying.

I wonder if the director was inspired by the 1965 stop motion The Hand, in which a gloved human hand is used as a source of horror in the world of a stop motion puppet. In a similar manner, human hands look uncanny in this film when contrasted with the main character and his puppet world.

Anyway, go watch it and have an existential crisis of your own. I recommend it.

Where to watch it: Vimeo

Have you seen the animated shorts? Let me know your personal ranking!

#oscar nominated short films #the boy the mole the fox and the horse #ice merchants #the flying sailor #an ostrich told me the world is fake and i think i believe it #long post for ts #film

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dweemeister · 1 year

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Best Animated Short Film Nominees for the 95th Academy Awards (2023, listed in order of appearance in the shorts package)

This blog, since 2013, has been the site of my write-ups to the Oscar-nominated short film packages – a personal tradition for myself and for this blog. This omnibus write-up goes with my thanks to the Regency South Coast Village in Santa Ana, California for providing all three Oscar-nominated short film packages. Without further ado, here are the nominees for the Best Animated Short Film at this year’s Academy Awards. The write-ups for the Documentary Short and Live Action Short nominees are complete. Films predominantly in a language other than English (or in two cases here, with dialogue) are listed with their nation(s) of origin.

So completes this year’s omnibus write-ups for the Oscar-nominated short films.

An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It (2021)

In 1953, director Chuck Jones tortured Daffy Duck with the whims of an unseen animator (revealed to be Bugs Bunny) in Duck Amuck. Fast forward almost seventy years and a film of a similar concept comes in Lachlan Pendragon’s An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It. Pendragon, who directed, wrote, animated, and voiced the main character this film as an undergraduate student at the Griffith Film School in Brisbane (where he is now a PhD candidate), frames hapless toaster telemarketing salesman Neil as under fire from his boss (Michael Richard) due to a lack of sales. As the workday continues, he begins to notice peculiar aspects of his fellow coworkers and the office that make him question what is going on. Accidentally sleeping at work through the night, he encounters an ostrich (John Cavanagh) in the elevator who then claims the world Neil lives in is, “a lie”. What follows is a meta-breaking, existential short film deriving its comedy from the character’s realization of the stop-motion artifice of his life.

A winner of the Student Academy Award from last year and a nominee for Best Graduation Film at Annecy (the premier animation-only film festival), Ostrich uses what I am assuming is Pendragon’s hand in place of Bugs Bunny’s glove and paintbrush. Shot entirely during the COVID-19 lockdown at home in the living room, this is a one-man animation job. For most of its ten-minute runtime, the viewers see the film through an in-film camera monitor – allowing us into Pendragon’s workspace. Meanwhile, in the background that comprises the margins of the frame, we witness the rigging, wiring, and animation handiwork that is occurring at twenty-four frames per second. The impressive character design and the clearly-delineated pop-off faces and jaws provide a remarkable assist to Ostrich’s comic timing and Neil’s acting (which Pendragon admits that Neil’s reactions take inspiration his own behavioral habits). The film’s metaphor is perhaps not as well developed, but one can make the argument that Ostrich is a blistering take on this stifling office environment and champions an exploration and investigation of all possibilities in one’s earthly life and in existence. One imagines we will see more from Pendragon, who is at the very beginning of his career and wishes to make a feature someday.

My rating: 8/10

The Flying Sailor (2022, Canada)

Making its debut last year at Annecy and from National Film Board of Canada (NFB; who, as a studio, are the second-most nominated ever in this category behind Walt Disney Animation), Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis’ The Flying Sailor is an experimental take of the story of Charlie Mayers. On December 6, 1917, a French cargo ship and a Norwegian merchant vessel collided in a strait called the Narrows, just off Halifax, Nova Scotia. A fire began on the former ship, which carried with it high explosives. The resulting explosion was the most violent peacetime accidental explosion ever on Earth – killing more than 1,700 and wounding around 9,000 in the immediate area and from the shockwaves. Mayers was actually onboard the deck of one of the ships, but Tilby and Forbis move him to the docks, watching on as an inquisitive spectator instead. As in real life, the blast is enough to quickly tear off all his clothes, and he spirals skyward. It is here that Tilby and Forbis send Mayers flying in slow-motion, almost balletically spinning as the film delves into his unconsciousness.

His life flashing before his eyes, we see hazy glimpses of the sailor’s memories – his childhood self at play, his mother, the rough-and-tumble life of being a sailor. Along with My Year of Dicks, The Flying Sailor is one of the first films in this category to make use of mixed media since Mémorable (2019, France). It opens with juxtaposing our hand-drawn sailor with the ships – as if in the style of the opening of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood – hurtling towards each other. But once the explosion occurs, the film, too, explodes with a clash of styles. Showcasing hand-drawn, computer-generated, and live action footage, Tilby and Forbis’ choices are reflective of the instant disorientation following the blast. The film’s penultimate moments are an orchestral cacophony from composer Luigi Allemano as the sailor returns to our earthly existence. This is perhaps the only film of these five that absolutely needed to be a short film. It presents its direction, completes its business, and concludes.

My rating: 8/10

Ice Merchants (2022, Portugal)

By earning Portugal its first-ever Academy Award nomination, João Gonzalez’s Ice Merchants – a production of the Cola Animation collective – already has a place in Oscars history. In his third film as a director following The Voyager (2017) and Nestor (2019), Gonzalez transports audiences to an impossible, dreamlike place and imbues his film with a metaphor of loss and how family routines can be an extension of grief. In a cliffside house suspended by hooks and ropes live a father and his son. Living thousands of feet above the town below, they jump off their porch daily, parachuting to safety in order to sell the ice. They return home after selling their wares and purchasing whatever they need in town by using a pulley system that probably takes ages to ascend and descend. In the rarified, chilly air, father and son go about their lives peacefully, continuing their lives amid the shadow of loss.

Garnering award wins at Cannes, the Chicago International Film Festival, and the Annies, Ice Merchants is among the most-awarded short films ever prior to an Oscar nomination. According to Gonzalez, the idea of the cliffside house came as he was dreaming or was about to fall asleep – a development that has, thus far, fully informed the visual conceits of his entire filmography. Prior to starting the formal animation for Ice Merchants, Gonzalez himself modeled the entire house (including the swing, interiors, and pulley system) 3D and started composing the score (Gonzalez is a pianist, but required his friend, conductor/orchestrator Nuno Lobo, to transpose for various instruments). Unusual in that the film’s narrative and themes spring from the score rather than the other way around, Ice Merchants adopts an everyday melancholy reflected in its strikingly limited color palette. Those colors include shades of red, orange, a dark blue or green for backgrounds only, and two brief but noteworthy instances of yellow. All these decisions – visually, musically, narratively – combine in a breathtaking conclusion that unleashes a wave of emotions. That mastery of cinematic control leads me to write something longtime readers know I do not say lightly. Ice Merchants is the best nominee in this category since Bear Story (2014, Chile) and World of Tomorrow (2015) were nominated together seven years ago. By extension, it is one of the finest animated short films of the young century.

My rating: 9/10

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (2022)

Adapting Charlie Mackesy’s 2019 picture book of the same name, Peter Baynton and Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse made an enormous splash when it aired on BBC One on Christmas Eve as part of the BBC’s annual slate of Christmas specials. It qualified for an Academy Award nomination by virtue of a nominal one-week theatrical release in Los Angeles County on September 23, 2022. Here, the Boy (Jude Coward Nicoll) has lost his way in a wintry forest when he encounters Mole (Tom Hollander). Mole is a cheerful, friendly sort that enjoys a good cake. But the Boy believes himself to be lost, is searching for a home, and wishes to be a kind person. Along their travels they encounter starving Fox (Idris Elba) and the lonely Horse (Gabriel Byrne). For the duration of this movie, the Boy and his animal friends speak to each other in platitudes of positivity, reassurance, and perseverance for what is most likely chronic depression or seasonal affective disorder.

The Boy might just be the most beautifully drawn of this year’s nominees. Its painterly watercolor backgrounds seem as lifted from a picture book; the residual sketches on each of the characters are a beautiful expressionistic touch (I especially like the ends of the Boy’s hair and Fox’s tale, as well as the curvatures to denote Horse’s leg musculature). My sense of visual wonder lasted all but five or so minutes. Because once the Boy has a few conversations with Mole, the film’s thirty-seven minutes seem all the more interminable. The film’s dialogue – and my goodness, no one speaks like this in real life – is trite, straight from the crowd that might have a “live, laugh, love” embroidery unironically hanging on their wall. Each character appears as if they are trying to one-up the other in their AI-generated speech*, as if each Very Important Line of Dialogue is attempting to be the penultimate or final line in a children’s picture book. I understand how this might be impactful for those with major cases of depression and seasonal affective disorder, but the film’s messaging and horrific script is sheer overkill.

My rating: 6/10

My Year of Dicks (2022)

A winner at Annecy, Chicago International Film Festival, and SXSW, Sara Gunnarsdóttir’s My Year of Dicks adapts Pamela Ribon’s comedic memoir Notes to Boys: And Other Things I Shouldn’t Share in Public (Ribon is the sole screenwriter on this film). This is not about people named Richard. It is 1991 in Houston. In the first of five chapters, we find Pam (Brie Tilton) – a fifteen-year-old who wants desperately to lose her virginity sometimes this year – narrating a diary entry/letter to her first boy, David (Sterling Temple Howard, “Skater Dude” from 2020’s Two Distant Strangers). David is a skater boy who has filed his nails into sharp points and his teeth in a similar way. As one can imagine, this romance does not work out and Pam cycles through the next four chapters awash in heterosexual hijinks (some readers will interpret the use of “heterosexual” here as a pejorative, but I say it as only an observation) with Wally (Mical Trejo), Robert (Sean Stack), best friend Sam (Jackson Kelly), and Joey (Chris Elsenbroek).

Alternatively hilarious and excruciating (see: the scene where Pam’s father gives her The Talk) to watch, one-half of the film’s genius lies in Ribon’s adapted screenplay of her memoir. Ribon (a co-screenwriter on 2016’s Moana and 2018’s Ralph Breaks the Internet), who saved all of the letters she wrote to all her crushes when she was a teenager, adapts that writing to form an honest, secondhand embarrassing story. The central ideas play like a grown-up Helga Pataki from Hey Arnold!, sans used gum bust of her beloved. My Year of Dicks’ resolution is genuine, as is a non-judgmental depiction of teenage female sexuality‡. In a roundabout way, it is a deconstruction of the idea that the only way for girls to achieve full womanhood is through sex and sexual appeal. And like The Flying Sailor, My Year of Dicks employs a litany of styles of mixed media that help it succeed. Though its rough rotoscoping (a time-tested technique in which animators trace over live-action footage) is the dominant style, there are some fascinating breaks here: most interestingly, a scene involving a metaphoric angel and devil over Pam’s shoulders and interludes of shôjo anime (which probably was not on the radar of Houston teenagers in 1991). A sidesplittingly funny film, My Year of Dicks nevertheless retains a sliver of nostalgic poignancy to keep it grounded.

My rating: 8/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

From previous years: 85th Academy Awards (2013), 87th (2015), 88th (2016), 89th (2017), 90th (2018), 91st (2019), 92nd (2020), 93rd (2021), and 94th (2022).

* This begs a question. Should programmers of AI chatbots receive credit for their work when, inevitably, we have a film written by one?

‡ This line of thinking was certainly more prominent in the 1980s-2000s than it has been over the last decade, as teenage sex in the U.S. is down considerably from those times (the reasons are many).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

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