Hollyshorts 2026 Round 1: Mel Brooks, AI Slop, and An Upside-Down World

Hollyshorts is in full swing here in Hollywood, and I'm making my way through the huge lineup. I'll be doing multiple posts with my thoughts on some of the animated shorts in attendance. Here, I've written about five of the shorts playing in the Kids & Family Animation program.

Let's start off with CrashCat, about a cat on a distant planet who is undergoing the Alpha Corps Military Exam, a three-round test that puts the cat's piloting ability, combat prowess, and IQ to the test. Once inside the testing facility, things don't go exactly as planned. The cat isn't a total disaster, but maybe isn't far-off. Frustrated, she ends up going rogue, which more or less puts her into an expert mode test as the facility's robotic security system kicks in.

CrashCat

From the moment the short shows a shot of outer space and then splats the word "SPACE" in all-caps over it, I knew I was in good comedic hands. There are a lot of fun little details. Like I love how the cat's ears stick out through two holes in her helmet, or when she tries to eat a cookie, forgetting she has a helmet on. The cat is a little weird-looking -- she's cute, but I feel like could've been a little cuter? Maybe that's problematic since she's just a hard-working wannabe-warrior, but it's my truth.

CrashCat is nimble, exciting, and has some fun surprises. And the voice acting is done by a real cat (named Wolfie), so it definitely gets points there.

Renée Zellweger makes her directorial debut with the charmingly animated They, which feels like it was beamed in from another era. The animation harkens back to UPA style, or maybe something like Mr. Magoo. The characters are figurative but only so much -- there's a simplicity to their design, where they're almost more shape-shaped than human-shaped in some cases, simply colored, not too busy. The animation is the main draw for me here, as it is so wonderful to look at, expressive and cute and nostalgic.

I admire the aim of the short, which is to unite people across different beliefs, political backgrounds, etc. They is about a man and his dog who see the toxicity of the world, symbolized by clouds of red smoke that ooze our of screens and also out of the mouths of people as they argue on the streets. Our heroic duo decide to do something about it, building a device to suck up and weaponize the smoke, in the hopes of eliminating the spiky rhetoric and clashing opinions, and helping people to realize their commonality. We're all human after all, right?

They

It's quaint, optimistic, and methinks a bit outdated. Sure, it's nice to imagine a world where people can reach out to people with different beliefs, opinions, backgrounds, etc., and in the real world, I think that happens more than you would think if you spend a lot of time online. But this short seems specifically interested in commenting on that heightened, extreme rhetoric that overflows from social media. In those cases, I think it's a bit naïve to wish for common ground, harmony, blah blah blah. When there are politicians trying to legislate entire populations of people out of existence, there's no world in which those politicians and I will be able to "put our differences in opinion" aside to sing "Kumbaya" together. 

Maybe it's because this is written and directed by an Oscar-winning celebrity who lives in a bubble of rarified air, but They feels a little out of touch, unable to actual meet the moment it's engaging with. But, it would be nice if everyone was just chill and kind to each other, for sure. So this isn't a miss, per se. It's a beautiful and clumsy mixed bag.

Another short in the lineup with star power is Flower of the Dawn, which counts Jane Lynch and Mel Brooks amongst its voice cast. Clocking in at just under 40 minutes, this is a really long short. I'll say that it thankfully doesn't feel that long, despite being quite bad. So it at least has that going for it.

As soon as I started this one, I had a feeling I was in for a painful watch. The animation is really rough. A lot of the background textures are flat and muddy, while the character models are shiny and plastic. They kind of look like action figures, which in some cases I didn't mind, but in other cases, really were not fun to look at. The female lead looks like they fed Anna from Frozen through an AI filter for design inspiration. There's just...a lot to digest visually, most of it unpleasant.

Flower of the Dawn

The film is based on a Brothers Grimm story called "Jorinde and Joringel," which I cannot claim to be familiar with. But at least here, the story is about a witch who lives in the woods, where she lures beautiful young women (and sometimes even girls) to her lair. She steals their beauty, transforming them into birds. Meanwhile, she gets to be, as she says herself, "hot." Yeah, this is one of those fairy tale twists that adds a lot of modern lingo and references, which is usually embarrassing. Here, it definitely is. The witch talks about how her magical scheme is cheaper than Botox. What??

The story has no meat to it. It's just a matter of one of the birds escaping so they can get the male love interest to go grab a magical flower that can battle the witch's magic. They shoehorn in a whole "true beauty is about what's inside" message, all while criticizing how disgustingly ugly the witch is when returned to her true form. Maybe they meant her insides are ugly? (Nah, we know they're talking about that messed-up grill). This short is a massive miss on just about every front. But at least Mel Brooks gives a fun performance!

I won't waste too many words on ChikaBOOM!!, a short about a girl from a family of magicians who's trying to tap into her power through access to magical objects rather than through practice. It's actually a perfect story for a movie from Asteria Film Co., the AI-assisted animation studio that's behind this short. You know, the one Natasha Lyonne is involved with (she's a voice in this short, too). Just as Chika, the young heroine of this short, wants to do magic without putting in the work, so this company wants to use shortcuts via AI rather than just having humans do the actual work. The result is ugly, soulless garbage. I would love for Hollyshorts to not platform AI trash in the future.

ChikaBOOM!!

My favorite of this first batch of shorts is the imaginative and emotional Saba, which takes place in an upside-down world. We meet an old man and his young grandson who live on a floating (in mid-air) houseboat. Gravity is reversed, with all of their possessions tethered to the boat by ropes. Then they can tug and pull what they need to to bring them down to the surface. It seems like the humans live in normal gravity -- no sign of weighted shoes or anything like that -- but everything around them is afloat. Above the boat is a sea, from which the family can catch fish -- again, in a topsy-turvy manner.

This leads to some truly imaginative visuals, like a plethora of umbrellas popping out of the boat's underside to protect it from the upward-falling rain. Or frying a fish over a fire by holding the pan upside-down. It's a dreamy and strange world, rendered in gorgeous 2-D animation where you can sometimes see the line work showing through the characters, the kind of handcrafted detail I love.

Saba

The film reveals itself to be a contemplation on loss, and the way we have to rebuild our world following the passing of a loved one. It's so easy to become lost, adrift, listless when we lose someone who's so key to holding our world together. Once they're gone, things can easily fall into disarray, but the hope of maybe seeing them again someday, and the memories of the precious time spent together, can help us to take the first steps toward living again, and maybe even in ways that rhyme with the before times.