Awards Season Shorts Roundup via The Animation Showcase

I've been very grateful for the Animation Showcase over the years. It's a streaming platform that hosts a lot of incredible programming throughout the year, particularly animated shorts. They also sometimes throw features on there for a limited time, or live-action shorts, sometimes some cool BTS documentaries. A lot of great stuff. (The platform is for people who work in entertainment, so if that's you, check it out!)

As we get deeper into the thick of awards season, I'm working my way through some of the animated shorts on there that I haven't written about yet. Here's the first batch, all streamed via The Animation Showcase:

Anastasia Falileieva's I Died in Irpin provides a unique perspective on the war in Ukraine. Told with harsh drawings that look like pencil or charcoal, and that vibrate with energy (maybe fear), the film follows a woman who flees Kyiv with her boyfriend to stay with his family in Irpin. But once they arrive, she finds herself going crazy, feeling cooped up in the house, wondering why they aren't moving on to somewhere safer.

I Died in Irpin

The film reminds us that people experiencing war, and all of the horrors and trauma that go along with it, are also still subjected to so many more mundane stressors and anxieties. Like grating in-laws or a cheating partner. Falileieva finds a way of exploring it all, even worries that might seem a little silly (the protagonist doesn't want to shower for fear a bombing will happen and leave her naked in the streets). It's a bit of a brutal watch, but told with such clarity and a few stylistic flourishes (a pop of color here, some live-action footage there) that it's thoroughly engaging.

The Shyness of Trees is a student film with a bunch of directors (click over to the IMDb page for all their names), and a beautiful one, at that. It centers on an elderly woman who lives in a house that is overrun with plants, a woman who perhaps feels more at home surrounded by greenery than people. Often, she can be found in the backyard, naked, communing with the massive tree that looms there, so huge that sometimes it even stretches beyond the frame of the film.

The Shyness of Trees

This woman's daughter is checking in, worrying about her mother and the way she lives. But what's really bubbling under the surface is a fear that time is running out. Maybe the daughter is put off by the way her mother lives, but you sense that the fear might be more what that represents, a barreling toward the end, an acceptance of the light at the end of the tunnel, that warm embrace.

This film feels like a warm embrace itself. The animation is soft, round, glowing. And there's such a gentleness to how it proceeds, and a lightly magic touch that makes it quite impactful on the whole. While it (surprisingly) didn't make me cry, I could see this being a tear-jerker for a lot of viewers. If you want to check it out, it's also available to watch on Youtube.

Reid Baruty's Shadows excavates painful memories in an extremely vibrant manner. Based on interviews conducted with an Iraqi woman named Ahlam, the film gives shape, color, and -- yes -- shadow to memories of her life. She was married off at 13, became pregnant not much later, and had her child taken from her. She speaks so eloquently, thoughtfully, and vulnerably about these experiences, and Baruty, in turn, creates an evocative short from these memories.

Shadows

Ahlam is depicted as a 15-year-old girl making her way through an airport. She talks about wanting to be on a plane, and especially wanting to become a flight attendant. It's easy to imagine why: the freedom, the expansion of one's world, the sense of agency and authority as you help others navigate their travel. So many things that were taken from her in her young life, suddenly reclaimed.

The airport itself is a perfect setting for something like this, a liminal space that becomes a kind of purgatory between the life that she's lived and the life she envisions for herself. It's a place to pause, to remember. As she navigates the various hallways, open spaces, crowds, Ahlam is accompanied by a translucent blue deer, a manifestation of her vulnerability if she doesn't flee from her abusive husband and otherwise oppressive life. If she stays, she'll be devoured. She has to fly.

One of the year's best-looking shorts is Pierre-Luc Granjon's The Night Boots, which was animated using a fascinating pinscreen technique (for more, check out this great interview at Animation Magazine). The result is utterly visually striking. It looks almost like sand, soft and flowy and dreamy. The greyscale color palette also gives the proceedings a touch of darkness, like this easily could've tipped into horror if it wanted to. Who can say what lurks in the shifting shadows of this world?

The Night Boots

But it is not a horror film by any means, despite it being about a little boy who ventures out into the woods at night and meets a strange creature who seems set on showing him the monster who lives in the lake. There is so much imagination here, and a gentle approach to the storytelling that makes this feel like a bedtime story. The voice acting is superb, with the two main characters having such cute delivery, so many of their lines imbued with a hushed wonder, a curiosity, care. This is such a special short. It's no wonder it won the Cristal at Annecy.

They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and unfortunately, I didn't behold much beauty in Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski's The Girl Who Cried Pearls, a fable about greed that didn't land for me at all. Going into this, I assumed it would be very much up my alley. I'm such a sucker for stop-motion animation, and the somewhat grotesque art style certainly caught my eye. 

The Girl Who Cried Pearls

But there are some very odd decisions here, including with the animation. Most of the film is told as a flashback, a story being told by an old man to his granddaughter. In those flashbacks, all of the characters have a greenish hue, and their facial features don't move, which I guess is to make it clear they're characters in the story, narrative puppets having their strings pulled by the grandfather as he recalls his younger years. Even if the decision makes sense thematically, it's still a bit of an eyesore, and kept me distant from a film that (I imagine) is supposed to tug at your heartstrings.

On that front, I think it's also probably a mistake that this has dialogue/narration at all. Many short films go the silent route, and for good reason: the stories are often streamlined, elegant in their simplicity, and don't need dialogue to work. (Not to mention saving some money.) The Girl Who Cried Pearls is so over-written, leaving nothing to the imagination, holding our hand and sprinkling in details and asides that made me roll my eyes rather than get lost in thought. Add to that Colm Feore's limp performance as the grandfather, and this really became a chore to sit through, even with the interesting wrinkle at the end. A real disappointment, this one.

I'm a creature of habit, so I can certainly relate on some level to the Toast Hawaii-obsessed protagonist of DETLEV, from Ferdinand Ehrhardt. Detlev is an ever-shivering construction worker whose night shifts are made somewhat tolerable by the microwavable Toast Hawaii he buys at the desolate gas station. (This was my first introduction to Toast Hawaii, which looks to be a ring of pineapple attached to a piece of toast via a slice of cheese? Vomit-inducing, if you ask me.)

DETLEV

While the film starts in quite silly fashion, it gradually reveals itself to be a look at loneliness, and the strange ways we might navigate dark feelings on the way to finding meaningful connections. Those human moments where someone sees us can make the world feel like a livable place, and bring more warmth than any bit of comfort gas station food ever could. The way that this is depicted in DETLEV is weird, surprising, and sweet in its own off-kilter way.