This year, I was once again able to find a theater showing the collection of Oscar nominees for Best Animated Short. And once again, I recommend finding such showings wherever possible, if only because it’s an easy way to see all the nominees for a category and then make an opinion about them, all in one sitting.
And even if you don’t care about the awards, shorts compilations are a nice change of pace from standard full-length movies. For my part, I prefer the animated shorts, since cartoons have a tendency to be more lighthearted, though maybe this year’s crop has proved me wrong.
Dimanche/Sunday, directed by Patrick Doyon
I’m not sure what “Dimanche” is about, deep down. A young boy who is prodded around by his parents and can’t seem to do anything with himself but flatten coins on train tracks goes to a relative’s house, where he befriends a mounted bear head on the wall. This gloomily gray short is cute, and its depictions of people and animals are just sloppy enough to be endearing, but I’m left wondering what the point of it was. In any event, Patrick Doyon has a calmly surreal sense of humor, and it comes across well in “Dimanche.” It might not have been my favorite, but it certainly wasn’t bad.
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, directed by William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg
This is in some senses the most straightforward of the shorts. With a clear message and a classically presentational style, “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore” stands out as the short of highest technical quality. The story follows a young man–presumably Mr. Lessmore–who, after a tornado sweeps him into a magical land, comes into a house filled with flying books. As he gets older he becomes a friend, father, and even doctor to the countless books, finally passing on the house to a young girl who comes along. What this short might lack in cleverness it makes up in precision and structure, and I definitely appreciate the message about the joy of reading a real book.
La Luna, directed by Enrico Casarosa
“La Luna” is Pixar’s entry in the bunch, and much like “Lessmore,” it follows a cute storyline with a cuter conclusion. A young boy goes out on a late-night boat trip with his father and grandfather; it is his initiation into the family business of sweeping up small stars on the moon. He struggles to find his own identity in the process, as his father and grandfather both have distinct personalities that they try to impose on him. Like any Pixar production, “La Luna” is smart and surprising and humorous, but it treads the line between sweet and overly cutesy a bit too much. Thankfully, it doesn’t try to be too important or universal–or maybe it just didn’t have the time to reach that level of cheesiness in seven minutes. Whatever the case, it hits right, even if it packs a light punch.
A Morning Stroll, directed by Grant Orchard
This is the most bizarre of the shorts, and probably my favorite. “A Morning Stroll” tells the same story with three variations: While on his morning stroll, a man sees a chicken turn the corner, walk by him, go up a stoop, peck at the door, and go inside. In each variation the man changes, but the chicken stays the same, keeping its cool in the three different settings, and the settings are extremely different. With an eclectic mix of animation types, “A Morning Stroll” seems more like a show-off attempt by director Grant Orchard, but the humor and surprise ending make his showing off feel entirely deserved. Definitely the oddest short, but if it’s your type, you’ll love it.
Wild Life, directed by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby
The more I think about “Wild Life,” the more I like it. It follows the experiences of a young British man who leaves home to start his own ranch on the Canadian plains. Through his letters home, as well as documentary-esque interviews with acquaintances, interjected images, and side notes about comets, we see how his experience changes him, for better or worse. I would say the end is sad, but our knowledge of the young man by that point is such that his fate is almost liberating. Animated in an almost impressionist style of artwork, “Wild Life” is the short with the deepest soul-searching, as well as the only short with spoken words. It may not hit you immediately, especially since it starts to ramble in the middle, but by the end it pays off beautifully.
Danny Eisenberg is a 2010 graduate of the Bromfield School and is currently a student at the University of Pennsylvania.
