Short and Sweet

Oscar Nominated Animated and Live Action Shorts

(PG-13)

originally published March 5, 2008

It’s a Super Size Me world, and small things are just trying to survive. Strangely, you’d think a society so strapped for time would be more amenable to entertainment that devoured less, not more of that precious nonrenewable resource. After watching the 10 films nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Short Film, Animated and Live Action, I realized many shorts are the equals of their full-length brethren, and as is the case with Oscar’s chosen ten, some are superior to movies twice and three times their length.

After years of indoctrination, we believe cartoons are naturally short; it’s a mark of how far we’ve come that the Academy now recognizes the Best Animated Feature Film. The most underwhelming of the animated shorts, I Am the Walrus, supplies 2-D visuals to a taped interview with John Lennon. In 1969, fourteen-year-old Jerry Levitan snuck into The Beatles’ hotel room and convinced him to answer some questions. Lennon’s frank answers are amusingly and politically visualized by writer-director-animator Josh Raskin, but the slight documentary holds little interest to anyone who is not a serious Lennonite.

Like I Am the Walrus, France’s Même les Pigeons Vont au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven) is not very memorable. Visually appealing, Samuel Tourneux’s cartoon brings to mind Pixar’s Academy Award winning Geri’s Game with a slight anti-religion bent and a kicker of a punch line. At fourteen combined minutes, neither I Am the Walrus nor Même les Pigeons Vont au Paradis taxes even the shortest attention span.

The most beautiful of the longer nominees, My Love (Moya Lyubov), hails from Russia and is an impressionist painting come to life. As a sixteen-year-old boy awakens to romance in Czarist Russia, he is torn between a sophisticated older woman and his family’s sweet young maid. My inability to understand the Russian language and my failure to procure a doctorate in Russian Literature may have hampered my fully assaying the narrative weight of My Love, but beauty is universal. Former Academy Award winner and three-time nominee Alexander Petrov says more about love in these thirty gorgeous minutes than any Hollywood romance does in ninety.

The most frustrating of the animated nominees is Madame Tutli-Putli. Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski painstakingly created a nightmare world out of Claymation and CGI. The timid title character’s trip is visual leaps and stylish bounds ahead of its fellow nominees. But it is so Lynchianly murky in its narrative that it provides little more than eye-popping awe. My favorite is the actual award winner, Peter and the Wolf. Suzie Templeton reimagines Prokofiev’s Classical Music for Kids with a postmodern twist. The wolf, a natural predator, isn’t the villain; the hunters with their bullying machismo and their guns are. Peter, the duck, the bird, the cat and the hungry wolf are still voiced by flute, clarinet, oboe, horns, drums and strings, but they now reside in a stop motion, Eastern Bloc world that is bleak and uplifting. This childhood classic has found its latest, greatest form.

As eye-opening as the animated shorts were, imagine my shock at the live action nominees, all five of which could have easily won the award. The only English language entry, The Tonto Woman, based on an Elmore Leonard story about a white woman kidnapped by Native-Americans who struggles to readjust to a life outside of captivity, never chafes under its Western-constrained pacing. Director Daniel Barber and actress Charlotte Asprey are ones to keep an eye on. Two Euro-comedy entries, Il Supplente (The Substitute) and Tanghi Argentini, bubble with effortless effervescence. I’d hate to spoil the satisfying endings of either, but know Guy Thys’s dance comedy, Tanghi Argentini, was as light on its cute, sweet, romantic feet as any film I saw in 2007. Watching the toughest of the live action nominees, Denmark’s At Night, can be a struggle. Writer-director Christian E. Christiansen’s drama about three beautiful young women (Julie Ølgaard, Laura Christensen and Neel Rønholt) seeking one another’s comfort through the long holiday season on a cancer ward is plenty heartbreaking, yet I would gladly have welcomed an extended visiting hour with all three.

As charming, touching and perfect as the other four nominees were, Le Mozart des Pickpockets (The Mozart of Pickpockets) deserved to win the Oscar. Writer-director-star Philippe Pollet-Villard’s enchanting crime comedy about two dimwitted thieves, Philippe and Richard (Pollet-Villard and Richard Morgiève), and the deaf homeless boy (Matteo Razzouki-Safardi) they adopt could have smoothly been transitioned into a feature. The climax provides the perfect beginning for a new dramatic arc; now I am simply left imagining the capers those three would concoct. The Oscar may have gone to Peter and the Wolf and Le Mozart des Pickpockets, but the real award goes to the collective filmgoer who should first thank the Academy for exposure to these 10 excellent short films.

Drew Wheeler