The Oscar Nominated Short Films 2015: Animation

Me and My Moulton: Me and My Moulton concerns a family made up of three young girls, one the oldest, one the middle, and one the youngest, dually noted by the youngest, and their parents, who are bound in a happy, brightly-colored neighborhood. They hunger to be like the children of their neighborhood, each one of them owning a bicycle and embracing the spring weather, while they do not own a bicycle. Their request to their parents is answered after their father tells them to wait a week or so for their new bicycle, which is being shipped all the way from Europe. In the meantime, we watch as the girls learn to get along with quibbling, to which they are given a monetary reward by their grandmother, who believes that a unified family is the strength of everything.

Me and My Moulton has some quirky hilarity to it, like the fact that the girls live with a family of modernist artists and sit on three-legged chairs for dinner and keep falling off, but the narration coming from the youngest prevents any kind of opportunity for the other sisters to get their say. As a result, their humanization is nonexistent, and we're left with a short that is a bit too uneven in its portrayal of gratefulness and a strong, central family bond. Nonetheless, as is a common theme with the Oscar nominated animated short films, there is a lovely animated style here that resembles that of a Flash cartoon in the best possible way.

The Bigger Picture: "I thought about sex every moment of my life until I was forty; now all I think about is death." - The Bigger Picture.

The Bigger Picture concerns a pair of forty-year-old men, who are coming to terms with their mother's illness, as she's about to be committed to a nursing home. The one brother struggles to care for his mother with little to no help from his other sibling, which leads to an expected discrepancy. Having just see this kind of siblings discrepancy play out amongst my family with the death of my grandmother in December, this short immediately hits close to home territory, and the fact it uses animation that looks as if it's pulled from those gigantic, decorative paintings that hang on the walls of homes in libraries and the homes of senior citizens' for added decor is wonderful and truly unique. The subversive animation style is unlike anything I've seen before, and the way that directors Daisy Jacobs and Christopher Hees find ways to manipulate their own style, one way specifically using live-action water during shower sequences, make for a short film that takes its eight minutes and wises utilizes every last bit. The fact that the short concerns the inevitable idea of watching your parents age is only all the more soul-crushing put to such unique and often grim animation.

A Single Life: A Single Live, the Netherlands' contribution to the Oscars this year, is the shortest Oscar nominated short film, clocking in at two minutes and length, and unfortunately, that's just a little bit too small to get this short film off the ground. Animated with a pleasant mix of what looks to be stop motion animation and computer animation, the short concerns a woman who finds her record player has the ability to transport her to different moments in her life, all the way from her infancy to her older years. By the time one figures out how this mystery works, the short is already over, and while it features a unique premise, its concision makes for an experience that's slightly forgettable.

The Dam Keeper: The Dam Keeper is the richest, most plot-driven short of this year's animated batch of Oscar shorts. Captured in animation that resembles the illustrations of a storybook you grew up reading as a child, The Dam Keeper concerns a pig who controls the dam of his town. The dam's job is to block out the darkness from casting an ugly, dreary shadow onto the neighborhood, and the pig's now deceased father taught him the ways to fight off the darkness. At school, however, darkness hovers over the pig like a dark cloud, as he's bullied profusely, one day, befriending a fox who loves to sketch and shows him liberation through means of animation.

It's as if the writing/directing of Robert Kondo and Daisuke Tsutsumi had past experiences with bullies as children and used animation as a tactic to set their mind free, making The Dam Keeper a short that could potentially bear a very heavy personal meaning. It also shows the way that while the physical darkness can be fought in this particular world that, like in the natural world, feelings of sadness and alienation unfortunately cannot, and through tender, affectionate writing and animation does The Dam Keeper helps us realize that, crafting a beautiful story and a wonderfully easy-on-the-eyes animation style.

Feast: Feast was shown in theaters before Disney's Big Hero 6, and serves as a nice vehicle for the fun-loving mayhem that takes place in that particular film. This short is a heartwarmer from start to finish, concerning an owner and his dog who bound over the foods they eat and the company they share while eating. This kind of connection to anyone who owns a pet is a familiar one, and it's a beautiful representation of a man/dog relationship. As expected, Disney hits the appropriate notes here, playing to ones emotions, childlike sense of whimsy, and cuteness factor in having a fun-loving dog chow down on whatever is placed in front of him. Despite all these clear and evident tactics, the short amazingly works and serves as the Best Animated Short winner for good, albeit simplistic, reasons.

Read my reviews of the shorts deemed "highly commendable" at the following link, http://stevethemovieman.proboards.com