Rounding out the Oscar-shortlisted animated shorts

With Oscar season in full swing (nominations come out in less than a week!), I thought it was about time to write about the Oscar-shortlisted animated shorts that I haven't already covered on this blog. Thanks to the Animation Showcase for always being on top of it with making these available to us industry folks.

Konstantin Bronzit's The Three Sisters is, if you can believe it, about three sisters who live in adjoining houses on a small island. Provisions arrive by boat, gulls rule the rooftops, and life is simple, drab. The sisters inhabit that drabness, dressing in muted colors and going about their uneventful lives, the mundane ins and outs of a routine that never changes.

Until it does.

After an unfortunate incident with some gulls, the sisters have to put one of their houses up for rent, which leads to the island gaining a new inhabitant: a swarthy, tattooed, smelly sailor. The sisters seem a bit put off at first, but their new neighbor proves to have an allure of his own. After all, he is a man. So goes what is likely the most eventful week of the sisters' lives, one that brings a bit of color to the island, a little fun, even some chaos.

The Three Sisters

The short has a nice rhythm to it, a steady steam of dun-dun-duns punctuating the sister's metronomic movements, the days breaking the runtime up into tidy chunks. The animation is appropriately simple to match the proceedings: nothing too fancy, but with definite charm.

Harold and his purple crayon got nothing on Agata, the protagonist of Sylwia Szkiłądź's wonderful Autokar, and her blue pencil. Agata is on a bus journey from Poland, where she's lived with her father and grandparents, to join her mother in Belgium. It's a daunting journey for a kid to take on alone, but along the way, she makes some new friends, and finds herself a little braver.

This short is so beautifully animated. There's a almost doughy, stretchy quality to a some of the characters (namely the human characters), while others feel sharp and nightmarish. While Agata looks like a normal little girl (maybe pulled out of a Tim Burton production with her pale skin and expressive eyes), the rest of the characters on the bus are anthropomorphized animals, some quite scary looking. The whole journey has a dreamy feel that constantly teeters on the edge of being a nightmare: there's the potential for danger as the bus makes its long journey.

Autokar

That dark edge and possibility of danger, along with all the animal characters, give Autokar a sense of being a fairy tale, one that's perhaps being conjured in Agata's imagination to make sense of her intimidating adventure. Perhaps it's good that she spends so much of the ride distracted by the loss of her beloved blue pencil (with its squishy snail eraser); it gives her something to focus on to help her navigate everything else.

With its gorgeous compositions that shift and swirl, its unique character designs, and its specific setting, Autokar is a real winner.

The Quinta's Ghost, from director James A. Castillo, brings to life the four-year period during which Francisco de Goya lived inside La Quinta del Sordo, an old house in which he painted the Black Paintings, which are the stuff of nightmares. The short is narrated by the house, which is curious about her new tenant, happy to have life back inside her walls, and horrified to watch his descent into delirium.

The Quinta's Ghost

For a short about a famous painter, The Quinta's Ghost is appropriately eye-popping. The imagery shifts into haze and shadow at times, some of the figures sturdy, others built from more haphazard lines, ugly and impossible shapes. There's a shift toward madness partway through, after which the visions of monstrous creatures and mysterious phantasms begin in earnest. It's effective horror, with so many unsettling beats and striking visages. You can't help but feel for Goya as he reacts, eventually, the only way he knows how: with a brush in his hand. He starts to paint as a way to make the nightmares stop, which also, ironically, makes them immortal. We can still witness them today, and wonder at what drove him to such strange and vivid imagery. This short does a magnificent job of taking a stab at what happened within those haunted walls.

An old man takes a swim in the sea, and ends up flowing in and out of memory, in Florence Miailhe's gorgeous and evocative Butterfly. The film is inspired by the life of Alfred Nakache, a famous swimmer who lost his wife and daughter in the Holocaust, but survived Auschwitz himself. It's a beautiful ode to him, made with so much thought and feeling. Even at only fifteen minutes, it captures so much of his life, really bringing you into who he was, and why.

Butterfly

The film looks like a painting come to life, one of those things where you can see the brush strokes. It feels like you could reach out an touch them, feel the texture beneath your fingertips. I almost wanted to touch the screen, and I wouldn't have been surprised to find speckles of sage green or deep blue on my hands if I did. It's such a gorgeous film, and that painterly feel is so appropriate for how the film flows in and out of the memory. As Alfred swims, every stroke is wont to take him back into the past, to different points in his life that happened on, in, near the water. A childhood bath, a swimming competition, the first time he saw his wife performing in a synchronized swimming routine. 

Of course, not all of the memories are happy. He also recalls swimming at the Olympics which Hitler hosted, where he was ridiculed for being Jewish. And swimming in a pool at Auschwitz, where the soldiers forced him to fetch objects from the pool's bottom over and over again. How complicated his relationship to water and swimming must have been by the end of his life, something he was so good at, that brought him so much joy and success, but also punctuated some of his most painful memories.

With that, I've now covered all of this year's Oscar-shortlisted animated shorts. On Thursday, we'll find out which five make the cut. This year's batch is really strong overall, which makes an already unpredictable category even harder to get a handle on. But here's my personal ranking, along with links to where you can read my thoughts on the eleven shorts not covered in this post:

1. Retirement Plan
2. Playing God
3. Hurikán
4. Cardboard
5. Butterfly
6. The Night Boots
7. Autokar
8. Snow Bear
9. Forevergreen
10. The Quinta's Ghost
11. The Three Sisters
12. The Shyness of Trees
13. I Died in Irpin
14. Éiru
15. The Girl Who Cried Pearls