Hollyshorts 2025: Round 2

A lot of know the torture of spending interminable hours in a hospital, not as a patient, but as a loved one waiting for someone to recover, or watching them and knowing they never will. It's a unique sort of hell, one that's captured decently well in Transferable. This is a bit of a hard short to write about without spoiling the game, since it's one of those that feels like it's a pretty exact expression of a "what if" statement. 

Transferable

The broader hook is that a woman is lying in hospital, a grisly infection slowly spreading through her body. It looks like something out of a horror movie, tendrils creeping further and further, a nurse marking how far they've come along her fingers. The woman's husband watches in horror as their kids sleep on the couch in the room. It's a scene that instantly rings familiar, even if you haven't experienced it exactly yourself. You really feel the weight of the husband's decision, see the pain in his eyes. It's so hard to watch someone you love waste away, and to have to make choices on their behalf.

Transferable has a cool painterly look to it, very digital-art-ish. The characters have big, expressive eyes. It's a nice blend of CGI and something more handmade-feeling. I didn't really gel that much with it otherwise, but I will give it props for keeping me on my toes. I thought I understood where it was going, then had another idea, then finally realized what it was I think right when it wanted me to. So kudos there.

The final shot was a little confusing to me. The way I read it feels like it makes no sense, so I think maybe it was more of a general, "We all lose people we love, and it's so sad and so enormous a thing that it's impossible to really fathom." I don't know. Not really my cup of tea, but I'm more of a coffee guy, so c'est la vie.

Easily one of my favorite shorts I've seen all year, Ovary-Acting is one of those lightning-in-a-bottle shorts that just works. Directed by Ida Melum and written by Laura Jayne Tunbridge, it takes aim at the pressures that come with being a woman of child-bearing age. Suddenly, so many eyes are on you, questions are being asked, everyone is emphasizing the tick-tick-tick of the so-called biological clock. Ovary-Acting sends up the whole thing with pizzazz and humor.

Ovary-Acting

Eva is at her sister's baby shower, and as a 34-year-old, childless woman, she's getting questions about when she's going to have a little one. Maybe she should freeze her eggs? It's a lot. So she takes a breather in a bathroom where she comes face-to-uh...face(?) with her personified reproductive system, who is very colorful character. She's horny, peppy, and serves up a mean musical number. It's delightful stuff.

It helps, too, that the short is such a pleasure to look at. It's stop-motion with the loveliest, softest-looking characters. Super plush. I feel a little weird that I now want to have a uterus plushie, but that's where this one left me. It's just a top-to-bottom charmer that's smart, light on its feet, and timely. It speaks to issues that are as pressing as they've ever been without feeling didactic. Instead, it's textured, nuanced, and so much fun. I love this short so much!

As someone who has a lot of anxieties about getting older, Retirement Plan hit me like a freight train. It's a simple and thoroughly pleasant short. A man (voiced beautifully by Domhnall Gleeson) talks about his plans for retirement, and we see those plans in action -- sometimes going smoothly and wonderfully, other times, not so much. So much of it will ring true for pretty much anyone watching -- that's when we'll have time to read more, to learn a language, to exercise more, to travel the world. It's a gentle nudge to live in the present, to live your life now, to not put off until tomorrow what you could be doing today. Life is beautiful, precious, so short, terribly short, why wait to do what you want to do?

Retirement Plan

It's so fitting that Gleeson is the voice that carries us through this, as it gave me a similar feeling to About Time, another bonafide life-affirmer that makes me absolutely weep. I didn't weep here, but tears were shed amidst my frequent chuckles. Gleeson's lovely delivery -- soothing for the most part, with a little twist here and there -- pairs so nicely with the simple animation that almost looks like something out of an educational product: bold lines and slow movements. There's a meditative quality to it, fitting since it's quite likely to make you reflect on how you're living your life, and how you might want to change.

I get a weird amount of mileage out of the phrase "Ships passing in the night" (I don't know why), so it makes sense that I responded so much to McKinley Benson's Two Ships, which is simply lovely. It centers on a couple who have opposite schedules. The man wakes up in the middle of the night to go about his business, while the woman keeps more typical daytime hours. We see their two schedules collapsed into one space, see them occupying rooms together even though they're each alone.

Dialogue-free, this is pure visual story-telling, with only a couple hand-written notes providing additional context (more to enhance the romance than anything, I would say). The man moves around shrouded in nighttime blues, while the woman walks in the bright white light of the morning. As they cross paths through these shared/un-shared spaces, their light follows them. It's like a delicate dance, silent and serene, a solid undercurrent of yearning. They just have to make it to the weekend, when they can actually spend some time together, sleep in. It's a simple but clever idea, executed beautifully.

Two Ships