Normally the Oscar-nominated live action shorts are the bleakest films of the bunch, but this year’s crop of Oscar-nominated animated shorts assume a darker shade. Fans of fluffy cute animals won’t find them here. However, these films are further proof that animation offers far more than child’s play. While the five Oscar-nominated animated shorts don’t have content for parents wondering about bringing young viewers, they do deal with heavy material, important subjects, and traumatic pasts. They’re thoughtfully mature and artfully invigorating works.
Our Uniform
Take, for example, the brisk Our Uniform, directed by Yegane Moghaddam. A young Iranian girl discusses the politics of clothing and gender as pieces of her school uniform provide the canvas for the film. She reflects upon what it means to wear a hijab and be a girl in public spaces. Her stories evoke the mental toll and the threats of violence entailed within a patriarchal society. On the scraps of her uniform, thin sketches create a child’s memories of constantly self-policing her appearance.
Told in a quick five minutes, Our Uniform makes a concise and compelling story. However, the overall canvas for the film is relatively blank. The scraps of clothes cover limited sections of the frame, which creates swathes of negative space that let the contrasts of which the girl speaks resonate. They do, however, leave something to be desired aesthetically in such a prominent showcase for animation. It’s an odd case where the animation is the least impressive aspect of a nominee in this category.
Pachyderme
Style is storytelling, however, in fellow nominee Pachyderme. This French short from director Stéphanie Clément offers a visually striking illustration of repressed traumas coming to surface. The film follows another young girl, Louise, who confronts a monster at her grandparents’ summer home. This classically composed fable evokes vivid emotions with its impressionistic design. Clément’s approach speaks to the elusive nature of trauma. It smartly conveys the challenge of articulating such pain directly. Give it time to wash over and envelope you.
Letter to a Pig
Meanwhile, haunting sensations of past pain fuel the Israeli-French co-pro Letter to a Pig. The film directed by Tal Kantor wins the title for the most daring and challenging nominee of the bunch. Put another way, it’s the best.
The film comes to the Oscars after winning the Grand Prize at the Ottawa International Animation Festival along with a slew of other awards. It conjures a truly provocative, unsettling work. Letter to a Pig incorporates splashes of live action—a hand, an eye—as a Holocaust survivor recounts his story to a class of students. A young girl listens intently as the man tells how he survived by living with pigs. His lecture addresses his porcine cohabitant, but also the figurative “pigs” from whom he hid.
This story evokes a maelstrom of violence in the girl’s classmates. Dark thoughts plague her mind. She imagines a pig and her peers, who miss the point of the story and become incensed to act drastically, brutalize the innocent animal. She heeds the message of peace, however, and strays from the pack. The animation is sparse and striking with the negative space, contrasting sharply with the aesthetic of Our Uniform, accentuating the violence that punctures the frame. It’s a chilling feat of abstraction.
The film poetically conveys the dangers of polarisation and how quickly, how disastrously people act when they fail to listen. Letter to a Pig looks to the past to speak to the present. It could save our collective bacon.
Ninety-Five Senses
If the masterful abstraction of Letter to a Pig invites active sense-making, so too does the playfully sensorial Ninety-Five Senses. Tim Blake Nelson narrates this lark from the Napoleon Dynamite duo of Jerusha Hess and Jared Hess. His character, Coy, speaks from death row as he awaits his last meal. He imagines the flavours that will be the last to touch his taste buds and the aromas that could be the last to fill his nose. (Unless, of course, he gets the electric chair.) But the impending food and doom inspires him to revisits all the sights his enjoyed, all the thrills that have touched his body, and all the cacophonous noises that have been the soundtrack to his life.
Employing six teams of animators—one for the master story and one for each of the five senses—The Ninety-Five Senses evokes all the wonders of the world. It’s the most olfactory and flavourful film in ages, but also a humorous, poignant, and bittersweet ode to all the sights, sounds, scents, and flavours that give us all the feels.
WAR IS OVER!
Also sure to inspire lots of emotion is WAR IS OVER! Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko. Director Dave Mullins shares writing duties with John and Yoko’s son, Sean Lennon, for this wistful reminder of the power of song. WAR IS OVER! hails from Weta FX, the studio behind the visual effects for blockbusters like The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which means that it’s inevitably a visual wonder. The film transports audiences to the battlefields of World War I as a pigeon ferries chess moves between players of warring factions. The soldiers manoeuvre their pawns and rooks while the soldiers scurry in the trenches.
The film omits dialogue and instead lets the evocative score by Thomas Newman (how is he still without an Oscar?) and the animation do the talking. Particularly effective is the lifelike bird. The pigeon carries a striking symbol of innocence as it flies high above battle. It observes the brutality of war, but also the humanity that endures as it flies above no man’s land with skill.
One can easily predict where this film inspired by the music of Lennon and Ono is going, but no matter how obviously one sees the musical cue coming, the needle drop proves effectively cathartic.
The Oscar-nominated Animated Shorts open in theatres beginning Feb. 16, including TIFF Lightbox.
