Your Guide to the Oscars-Shortlisted Animated Shorts

As we speak (well, as I type), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is smack dab in the middle of voting on what films will be nominated for their prestigious array of awards. It’s understandably an exciting time for some film fans: Will Greta Lee sneak into the Best Actress lineup for Past Lives? Will a fellow Greta (last name Gerwig) be nominated for Best Director again after becoming only the fifth woman to ever do so in 2017? (Since then, Chloé Zhao and Emerald Fennell have also joined her in that honor, making 7.) These decisions are being made right now, and it all comes to a head on January 23rd, when the nominations will be announced.

However, the category I want to explore is one that is too often overlooked, and is very much worth paying attention to. Frankly, not enough people know how much of an injustice it was for The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse to win over My Year of Dicks or Ice Merchants last year. The short film categories are among the ten categories that announce shortlists of 10–15 films prior to nominations, so let’s take a look at the 15 films that made this year’s shortlist for animated short, ranked in order of my own preference, for whatever that’s worth.

(Dis?)honorable Mention: I’m Hip

I’m Hip is a traditionally animated film directed by John Musker who, in collaboration with Ron Clements, directed a number of Disney Renaissance-era animated films, including Aladdin and The Little Mermaid. This is the only shortlisted film in this category that I have been unable to watch, as I don’t believe it’s ever been made publicly available. If that changes anytime soon, I will update.

14. Boom

Where to Watch: YouTube
Boom is a frankly uninspiring and unengaging short, with animation that fails to set itself apart, somewhat reminiscent of Ice Age both stylistically and narratively. There’s some attempt made at commentary and some attempt made at comedy, but ultimately this short has little to no substance.

13. Wild Summon

Where to Watch: Not Available
Wild Summon has an interesting concept, mimicking a documentary based around wild salmon (get it?) but replacing those salmon with humanoid creatures in an attempt to create empathy for the fish they represent. The film blends live action footage with animation. The former, shot in beautiful Iceland, is of course stunning. The latter, however, has that unappealing rubbery hyperrealism style that I have a hard time getting onboard with. More to the point, the short is long and not that interesting in practice. It’s a shame that most of the CGI shorts on the shortlist failed to be all that innovative in the medium, as I’d love to see some new spins on CGI in this category.

12. Once Upon a Studio

Where to Watch: YouTube or Disney+
This short is technically impressive, but even aesthetically it somehow fails to escape feeling like a commercial, especially considering it opens with live-action footage that looks downright cheap. It’s great to see new 2D animation from Disney that emulates various points in their history, but as much as I’m sure it was a labor of love for the animators involved I can’t help but wish they had spent that labor making a fully 2D animated short of any actual substance.

11. Humo (Smoke)

Where to Watch: Not Available
Although Humo centers around an inherently distressing topic and is able to find emotion there, I’m not sure that it feels the most personal. Its narrative lacks specificity, and it’s all soundtracked by a repetitive, ever-present score. I wish it felt like it had something novel to say. That said, what doesn’t lack specificity is the animation, which is incredibly creative and interesting, incorporating a mix of 3-dimensional stop motion and paper craft that looks like it was drawn on with pencils. At every corner there’s a compelling visual trick or spark of creativity, and it comes together well.

10. War is Over!

Where to Watch: Not Available
Subtitled Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko, this short aims to bring context back to the titular song, and thus tells a fictionalized war story about the moment soldiers receive word of the war’s end. Despite its sentimental, even idealistic overtones, there’s something genuinely haunting about the short, marrying a Pixar-esque visual style with an unexpected brutality. There’s an unnerving emptiness as it shows people being killed in those crucial moments between the war ending and the message reaching everyone. The plot beats are well-trodden (you could probably guess them all within the first minute), but whether the short’s complexity is earned or only exists because it parallels more complex works, I think there’s something to appreciate here.

9. Pete

Where to Watch: YouTube
Yet another short directed by Disney/Pixar alumni, Pete is a sweet story of gender identity, turbulence, and acceptance. The beats are all squeezed into a 7 minute package, which means it feels like a rather CliffNotes version of its story, but the film nevertheless feels personal and it’s hard to take fault in it. The CGI animation is very noticeably low budget (it looks something like Illumination’s style with a filter over it), but it gets some credit for going in a more unique stylistic direction than the other CGI shorts on this list.

8. Dog Apartment

Where to Watch: Not Available
Dog Apartment, which follows a man who lives in an apartment that is also a… dog, strikes a nice balance between having something to say but not feeling like it’s solely about one particular bold-texted issue (even though it clearly has commentary on being stuck in the rat race, so to speak). Through stop motion, it creates an interesting surreal world with a commendable level of attention to detail, which makes it easy to believe that there is somehow a logic to how everything fits together, that this is someone’s lived-in world. It’s all a rather mature piece of absurdism.

7. Our Uniform

Where to Watch: Not Available
This is the shortest of the 14 shorts I’ve seen (the one I haven’t is even shorter), but it also has possibly the most innovative animation style, using physical fabric as the canvas for painted animation. The story is a relatively simple slice-of-life exploration, aiming to tell about a life without anchoring itself to definitive commentary. In that sense, it’s very successful, and it’s as sweet as it is short.

6. Letter to a Pig

Where to Watch: YouTube
This is another short with rather unique animation, using rotoscope that is blended in with live-action elements: the girl’s eyes, an old man’s hand, a pig. Between rotoscoping and live-action, there’s a distinct sense of reality to the animation, which accentuates how tense and awkward the film’s opening scene feels as it depicts a Holocaust survivor struggling to connect with a classroom full of rowdy children who fail to understand the gravity of history. This scene then morphs into an intriguing dream sequence, which proves to be visually quite striking.

5. Ninety-Five Senses

Where to Watch: SmallScreenings.org
This understated (yet hard-hitting) story of mortality and regret is a series of vignettes tied together by an old man’s narration, each segment representing one of the five senses and wielding a distinct animation style, ranging from a warm, nostalgic, Disney-esque rendering of the man’s youth to the more abrasive, shuddering style of the present. The short is cleverly disarming, and manages to seem like genuine reminiscence rather than existing purely to set up its twist or deliver some quote unquote “profound” wisdom. It doesn’t seem like the film cares much about a specific message or wants to communicate some trite meaning of life, instead it comes off as a study of one person’s complex life and mind.

4. Pachyderme

Where to Watch: YouTube
The animation style here is unique enough that it’s hard to pin down exactly how it was achieved, but it appears to be a blend of handdrawn and CGI elements, paired with a stuttery framerate that mimics something like stop motion. The visual language on display here is tremendous, bathing everything in unease and making it all seem tinged with horror: the flowers in the wallpaper taking over Louise’s body, the hands pulling her through the lake, the reflection of her childhood self in the water, her grandfather’s gargantuan hands enveloping her arm. It’s all very effective, and makes an unfortunately common subject matter personal and specific. The narrator mentions it being too cold for the summer, and likewise the moments that should feel like warm nostalgia instead feel shadowed with tension.

3. 27

Where to Watch: Not Available
Perhaps of the same spiritual ilk of last year’s My Year of Dicks, this short eschews that film’s young teen coming-of-age dynamic for the aimlessness of one’s late 20s. There’s a power to it that I don’t think would be so obvious from its broad strokes alone: It’s a story of liminal adulthood and sexual frustrations, but it lands in a rather unexpected way, perhaps because the life being depicted feels so full, despite much of the runtime of the film being either fantasy or extended abstract montage. The interspersed realism manages to bring a potent dose of sensitivity and empathy that pulls it all together, and the details make the sparse setting and story ring true and lived-in.

2. Eeva

Where to Watch: YouTube
There’s something about Eeva that really worked for me, featuring a spiral of grief (guilt?) -driven self-destruction that feels something like the intersection of Bojack Horseman and the work of Charlie Kaufman, except more visually stylish and uniquely gothic. It wordlessly (except for one sentence tapped out in Morse) depicts a woman’s existence in a way that’s tinged with absurdism and speckled with dark humor but somehow has truth nestled within it. It’s a strange and affecting blend of surreal comedy and melancholy, and few of the shortlisted shorts feel so narratively, thematically, and stylistically cohesive.

1. A Kind of Testament

Where to Watch: Vimeo
Distinctly beguiling and skin-crawling in equal measures, A Kind of Testament nestles pulpy body horror within the true horrors of mundanity, which is matched by a seemingly mundane presentation: The film is presented as a faux documentary, or something even more casual, and its situation isn’t particularly outside the realm of believable possibility, following a woman who stumbles upon a series of animations online that were created from her own selfies and falls down a rabbit hole trying to understand why someone would create such a thing. Its story is one that feels rooted in internet existence — in the idea that we have unprecedented access to each other yet are no closer to true understanding — but the unknowability of others is an evergreen conundrum, as is the desire to project oneself and one’s own experiences onto a stranger. Most haunting is the idea that there can be no answers, and that it’s easier to accept and move on than to try to derive meaning from someone else’s idiosyncratic actions.