Hollyshorts 2025: Round 4

Hollyshorts has come to an end, and, as always, I didn't get to watch nearly as much as I wanted. The program is always so expansive, time is always so short, but I'm glad I got to write about the animated shorts I saw this year, and I can't wait for the 2026 edition.

One of the shorts that played under the "Kids and Family Animation" section is Tuu Tuu Til, and yeah, it is clearly a short for kids. The pleasant narration sounds like a storybook being read aloud, and the charming animation feels like the pictures of a storybook come to life. Some of the rhymes are a bit questionable, but it's short and sweet and altogether enjoyable enough.

Tuu Tuu Til

My thing is, I still feel like I have no idea what a the eponymous creature (?) is. There's these little alligator-looking characters who are kind of running the show here, so I think it might be a kind of lizard, but I swear I just could not follow what I was being told. Maybe my brain is fried from work, maybe there's not actually anything to understand and this is all just kid-friendly gibberish, I don't know. But it left me feeling a little lost.

Nonetheless, when a short is only a few minutes long, is this nice to look at, and has such fun imaginative imagery (I particularly like the socks that poop rocks), it's hard to knock it too much for not making a lick of sense.

Last year, I played a video game called Pentiment that proved to be one of the most profound stories I've experienced in any medium. It introduced me to the concept of a scriptorium, where monks would make illustrations to accompany texts. So yeah, I was pretty delighted to find an animated short set in a scriptorium at Hollyshorts: Marginalia. It follows a young monk (hysterically, he looks like a kid with the classic bald-domed monk hair-do) whose illustrations aren't necessarily in line with the head monk's expectations. They're a little whacky, maybe a little risqué.

Marginalia

More importantly, these doodles are coming to life. It's fun seeing the various creatures, most of which look quite period-accurate (I say as if I know what period-accurate monk drawings look like, lol), move into action, and our little hero is adorable and easy to cheer for. The whole thing is only a few minutes long -- a fun idea executed well. I liked it!

Sarah Beeby's Gardening is one of the heavier shorts I watched through this year's festival, especially in the animated section. It deals with a woman navigating the aftermath of a sexual assault at a party. The overall feel is very surreal, a sort of Alice in Wonderland vibe with tints of M.C. Escher.

It's fitting that the short feels a bit disjointed. There's no way to know how a person will react to such a trauma, just as there's no right way to react to it. It's hard, of course, and looks different in every case. One moment, maybe you feel almost normal again. And then maybe the anger comes back, or the sadness, the dread, the fear. Maybe you find yourself in a bastion of safety in community, maybe you're frustrated by the way societal structures fail to bring justice, or to offer comfort. It's a lot, and this short does a good job of tackling a lot of that, diving head-first into the tangled weeds of something so horrible.

Gardening

Ultimately, Gardening didn't fully work for me. While I think its approach is smart and makes sense, it ultimately felt maybe a bit too abstract and wild. I think it works best in the moments where it settles in a bit, such as a desert-set scene where the protagonist connects with another woman who dealt with a similar situation. It's honestly just a matter of taste, and taking a look at the short's Letterboxd curve, I'm definitely in the minority on not particularly caring for this one. Regardless of my own thoughts on it, it's really cool to see an animated short tackle such a difficult and important subject, and I applaud Beeby and her collaborators for choosing this medium for this story.