Hollyshorts 2026 Round 2: Featuring Spike Lee, Jane Goodall, and Philip K. Dick

For this second round of Hollyshorts coverage, I'm taking a look at the shorts playing in the Animation I block. So if you've bought access to the online library, you can follow along there.

I've covered two of the shorts in this section previously, so click accordingly if you want to read my thoughts on Oscar-winner The Girl Who Cried Pearls or the wildly creative/cool Acid City. 

I'll start this round of with Apart, which has garnered a Best Animation nomination at the festival, to my consternation. It's a movie that carries itself as being very capital-I Important, and it certainly has its heart in the right place. But it is so heavy-handed, embarrassingly so, and feels like an after-school special that is desperate to get its point across. It is literally impossible to watch it without getting the point, so at least it succeeds on that front.

Written by Spike Lee alongside a slew of other writers, Apart takes place in South African during Arpartheid. It follows two families, whose ten-year-old boys are best friends. Joel is white, the son of a policeman who is (obviously) racist. Themba is Black, and is very worried about his best friend. Joel is sick, in desperate need of a new kidney, and only has days to live, per his doctors' best estimate. The hospital is, like most places, segregated, so when Joel is there, Themba has to communicate with him via walkie-talkie.

Apart

Themba's parents work for Joel's, doing cooking, landscaping, that kind of thing. The moms are good friends, often talking about life's ups and downs over a cup of coffee. The boys are, as mentioned, besties. The families have been connected for ten years. And yet Joel's dad still constantly harasses them, tells Joel to stay away from Themba, calls Themba's dad an idiot. Like, sure, this could be a dynamic, but it feels so weird, like you can feel the filmmakers pulling the strings to make things as dramatic as possible. "These families get along so well except for the racist policeman." (To be clear, ACAB all day every day. That's not the issue. It just feels clunky.)

Things reach a full boil when Themba offers to donate a kidney to Joel, and Joel's dad refuses because he doesn't want a Black kidney in his son's body. Yes, that's where this goes.

I'm all for movies tackling issues of race and racism, and showing how hatred of all sorts are taught, and need to be shed. But this short does not have the goods. There is no nuance, no artfulness, just full-force didacticism. That the short is bookended by actual interview footage feels like a slap in the face, as if it's trying to raise its message to the same level of import/impact as actual, first-hand  historical accounts. Yet another misstep in a film almost fully composed of them.

I'm not sure if the protagonist of Cracked is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, or one who's very much in the midst of one. It's a nervy film, all rough edges (cracks, if you will). Jagged lines, flickering lights, poking at the viewer's psyche. It almost makes you wonder if what you're watching is the actual finished product, or if there's something wrong with the file. Is it supposed to skip and jump like that? Was that blip of white on purpose? It's an unnerving watch, pretty effective at what it's going for.

Cracked

The film follows a women, fully nude, who is preparing her breakfast: two sunny-side up eggs and a cup of coffee. It's clearly a part of her normal routine -- her garbage can is full of eggshells -- but today, it seems like it might just send her right over the edge. She's twitchy, unsettled. There are cockroaches on the walls and floor. The eggs look so much like her breasts -- what if she pokes at the wrong thing with her fork? And that damn overhead light just won't fucking stop flickering!

The art style works. Very rough, messy, feels like an apt reflection of the woman's mental state. I wish the animation were a bit more fluid, as the movements are pretty clunky, but again, because of the subject matter, it all feels of a piece. I can't quite say I liked watching Cracked, but I think it achieves what it's going for, so kudos to first-time filmmaker Jessica Rizk for landing her vision.

anyone lived in a pretty how town is based on a poem by e.e. cummings (the poem is sometimes referred to as "29," as that was its placement in his collection titled 50 Poems). Here, the late Jane Goodall reads the poem over a beautiful animated rendition of it. The art style was inspired by cummings' own oil and watercolor paintings, and the result is lovely, evoking the same feeling as movies like Loving Vincent and The Peasants, where it feels like you're watching paintings coming to life.

As is often the case with cummings, the poem is a bit of a puzzle, with lots of strange wordplay and as many not-rhymes as rhymes. Pairing it with the animation makes it a little easier to immediately parse, though there's still plenty to chew on and ponder after the fact. The film introduces us to Anyone, a man who seems to live on a different wavelength than the other people in his town. He lives a freer, more joyful existence, taking in the beauty around him, dancing, jolly. No one else really seems to notice or care about him at all, until a woman named No One does. She cuts through the uncaring silence of the world and reached out to Anyone, and they find love in a world that could use more of it.

anyone lived in a pretty how town

The film/poem focuses on how special it is to find a meaningful connection, in this case love, in a world that is increasingly isolating and isolated. We spend so much time alone, even when we're surrounded by other people. We occupy our own worlds, are glued to our phones, rarely taking the time to connect. Even when something manages to connect us (say, a spectacular show of shooting stars overhead), it passes in an instant and then we're back in our own bubbles, our own heads. How strange that we're all human, but that we so often choose not to connect to each other. We're all passengers on this same strange ship.

My main gripe with the film is that the sound edit is a bit off. The film features gorgeous music which was conducted by director Daniel Kreizberg's late father, renowned maestro Yakov Kreizberg. The music is a bit overpowering, sometimes making Goodall's gentle intonation a bit hard to hear. But it's small issue, and one that doesn't particularly impact the power of the piece.

My favorite of this batch is The Gun, which is based on a short story by Philip K. Dick. We watch a spaceship get shot out the sky as it approaches the surface of a desolate planet. The film is monochrome, shade of gray and black and white, and dialogue-free. In space, no one can hear you scream. But you can hear the zap of lasers flying through the air, the explosions of those lasers making contact with various matter, so on and so forth.

A few of the crew from the ship set off the find the cannon (er, the gun) that shot them out of the sky, in the hopes they can disable it and thus leave the planet safely. The cannon is massive, sitting atop a base that seems to be the only remaining structure on the planet, the only suggestion that there was ever intelligent life there. Inside, they find artifacts of the before time: posters, statues, photos. The environment story-telling is strong, razor-sharp, showing how propaganda and jingoism are a slippery slope to giving up rights, violence, and fascism. (I really hate that this short feels so timely, and likely always will.) A very cool bit of sci-fi, this.