Hollyshorts 2025: Round 1

Hollyshorts is, to my mind, the premiere festival for short films. It's all shorts, all the time, with a massive program spanning genres, mediums, and countries. I always love diving into their offerings, usually sampling one or two shorts from one section, then hopping to another. There's always something exciting to find.

For my coverage of the animated shorts, I'll plan to publish my thoughts/mini reviews in batches. This is the first batch -- yay!

I'll start off with a short that feels like an instant classic, Snow Bear from Disney veteran Aaron Blaise. He worked on classics like Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast, and co-directed the Oscar-nominated Brother Bear. The eponymous snow bear looks like he walked right out of Brother Bear, and his expressiveness recalls those longer-ago classics. Some of his facial expressions had me thinking of Jungle Book -- he's so cute, so funny.

Snow Bear

Snow Bear follows this bear's journey to find a friend. He starts off attempting to swim with some whales, then wistfully watches birds flying overhead. Finally, he decides to take matters into his own paws, and the short becomes something like Cast Away by way of Frosty the Snowman. It's super-sweet, dialogue-free, and accompanied by a soaring, gorgeous score. There's a perfect escalation of humor and emotion -- it's so easy to get invested in this story, to cheer for this character.

It's one of those shorts that's a perfect marriage of every element. The hand-drawn animation is so beautiful, and I love that the lines of the characters have that roughness to them, the sketch-y pencil texture that you can still see, feels like you can reach out and rub them. I can't pretend to know much about awards season, but this certainly feels like an animated short that will at least make it to the Oscar shortlist. It deserves to.

Hermano Hermana is an example of time used right. It clocks in at only a few minutes long, but it has such emotional texture, a strong sense of history, of personal meaning, that it leaves a lasting impression. Told in gorgeous black-and-white, shaky/rough stop-motion animation, the shorts finds a brother and sister reuniting in a cemetery. Exactly who they are and where they are in their lives/deaths isn't immediately apparent, but through their conversation -- and accompanying slides of family photos -- it seems that it's a long-time-coming reunion for the siblings, one of whom died young, the other who lived a longer life and is now getting used to the afterlife, with all the strangeness it entails. 

Hermano Hermana

I could see some viewers wanting more from this. Because it's over in the blink of an eye, I get that. I wouldn't have minded a few more minutes. But the brevity feels like it's kind of the point: how quick life flashes by, how soon it's over, how much life is contained in the dash on a headstone, if we're lucky. For me, Hermano Hermana feels like a perfect little thing that achieves exactly what it sets out to do, an exercise in familial exhumation and, hopefully, catharsis.

It's always exciting to see animators delve into unique mediums, and that's certainly the case with Kate Nartker's striking Whose Woods are These, which is hand-woven from over 500 feet of fabric, meticulously crafted frame-by-frame. I can't remember ever seeing anything quite like it, though it feels like it maybe springs from a similar creative ethos as something like Loving Vincent or The Wild-Tempered Clavier. 

Per the Letterboxd description, this short "reimagines the mysterious disappearance" of Nartker's great-great-great-great-grandmother. I didn't glean that from watching, as the short feels more like a mood piece than anything. We follow a woman walking through the woods, see some wildlife who are observing her or just doing their own thing, it's pretty sparse narratively. Which is fine, even expected, when it feels like the larger concern of the short is to use an innovative technique. Shorts are a great playground for trying something new and daring, which this certainly is.

Whose Woods are These

My issue is, I found Whose Woods are These to be pretty hard on the eyes. The overall look feels a bit like well-worn camcorder footage of an old, pixellated video game or something. You can tell what you're looking at pretty easily, but the images are harsh, rough. It's a strong aesthetic choice, one that I'm sure will vibe with many people. It just didn't for me, which is fine. So ultimately, this wasn't my jam, since the style grated for me, and the substance was spare. But it was a cool exercise to behold nonetheless.