Short Stop: Zoo calls for empathy, unearths truth in its haunting, haunted world

Tariq Rimawi's Zoo, a haunting animated short that is vying for Oscar contention, is a great example of how to use every moment well. Short films often get overlooked, considered an afterthought. When people try to envision a more streamlined Oscars ceremony, one of the first suggestions is usually to jettison the three shorts categories. I find those suggestions so frustrating and insulting. So many of today's celebrated filmmakers had their start with short-form content, whether narrative films or music videos. Many of our great directors still direct shorts from time to time -- Wes Anderson and Pedro Almodóvar are a couple examples. And if you seek out short films, you often find some of the boldest, most interesting, and most emotionally immediate filmmaking out there.

That's certainly the case with Zoo. Clocking in at around 8 minutes, it's incredible how much this film accomplishes. Animated in a striking black-and-white that recalls Persepolis, Zoo tells a humble story: a boy wanders the war-torn remains of a zoo in search of his soccer ball, and a place to play with it. Along the way, he encounters a tiger cub, who becomes his companion and friend.

As the title suggests, the setting is the thing here. With all the jagged lines and violent cross-hatching, Rimawi's zoo is a haunting and haunted place. The buildings are all shells. The bars on the cages are bent and broken. There are mountains of detritus everywhere, most of it of indeterminate origin. And the animals themselves, well...aside from the afore-mentioned tiger cub, they're all dead. The corpse of a monkey hangs on a tree, connected to the branch by a rope. A crocodile's lifeless jaws are held open by a stick, leading to one of the film's most memorable images -- as the boy passes by that cage, it looks like he's about to be eaten by the creature.

It's an evocative setting, and one that raises many questions. Were the animals always dead, displayed as taxidermied specimens in this strange zoo? Did they die here in captivity, their remains staying on display because something needs to fill these cages? How long have they been there? When was the last time visitors gathered at these enclosures? It must have been ages ago.

I find myself grappling with how much to say about where the film goes, and how it ends. Is it possible to spoil something this short? Is it my responsibility to try to avoid spoilers, when the core of what this short is, what it means, what it's doing, lies in its final moments? I guess I'll say, if you plan to seek this out (and you should) and would rather not know, stop reading here.

As the boy's journey to find a safe place to play comes to an unfortunate end, he finds himself in need of help for his new tiger friend, injured after he follows the soccer ball into a dangerous part of the zoo. The boy carries it to a gate in a massive wall, guarded by a looming security camera. Help comes in the form of an almost tank-like vehicle, which whisks the tiger cub away but leaves the boy behind. It feels like it could be a happy ending, or maybe a bittersweet one, at least. Until the final reveal: the wall isn't keeping the boy out. Rather, it's part of his cage. The massive wall encompasses the entire zoo, the boy's entire world, and the tiger is now free of this enclosure, but the boy is not.

On its own, that's a gut-punch of an ending. But then some startling words come up: "Inspired by the True Story of the Worst Zoo in the World." Which, of course, sent me Googling, and discovering that that phrase refers to a zoo in Gaza, from which many animals have been rescued. And so, the full impact of Zoo finally hit. The reality that while so many people are forced to remain in Gaza as Israel attempts genocide, animals get rescued. Those animals are considered innocent and worthy of safety, while the human lives are not. Palestinians are considered guilty just because of their nationality. It made me think of the year's best documentary, No Other Land, which shows the plight of Palestine as its residents are stripped of more and more rights: their homes bulldozed, their cars taken, their relatives shot in the street.

That Zoo is able to speak to these horrors in such a creative and evocative way, coming from an unexpected angle to unearth truth, is remarkable, and admirable. It's a potent reminder of the power of good story-telling, and the empathy that can be generated by great art. That's maybe the biggest reason I love movies in the first place: their power to put me in other people's shoes; to let me see the world through other eyes; to hear stories that are so distant to me, but still resonate with me, because we're all human. I'm grateful to Rimawi and his crew for choosing to tell this story this way, and I hope the film finds its way to more audiences, and thus touches more heart.