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| Best Animated Short nominee The Dam Keeper was directed by Robert Kondo and Daisuke Tsutsumi. |
Each day as we make
our way to the Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 22, Last Cinema Standing will take
an in-depth look at each of the categories, sorting out the highs, the lows,
and everything in between. Check back right here for analysis, predictions, and
gripes as we inch toward the Dolby Theater and that world-famous red carpet.
Best Animated Short
The nominees are:
The Bigger Picture
The Dam Keeper
Feast
Me and My Moulton
A Single Life
Among the cooler, little-discussed trends in the last decade
or so has been the resurgence of the animated short to accompany feature films.
Major studios such as Dreamworks and Disney-Pixar have used their celebrated
animated films to release equally impressive shorts, while the rise of digital
animation has allowed smaller production houses to jump in the game with their
own shorts.
John Lasseter, who oversees all of Pixar’s productions won
his first Academy Award for Tin Toy,
an animated short that was loosely adapted and expanded into Toy Story, which you may recognize as
the film that launched the Pixar empire. Walt Disney, who won 22 Oscars, won 12
for Animated Short, including seven consecutive awards from 1934 to 1940.
Walt Disney Studios is in the mix once again this year, as
it is almost every year, but a big studio is no guarantee of an Oscar anymore with
talent from around the globe producing stunning work in a wide variety of
animation styles. The nominees this year come from the U.S., the U.K., Norway,
and the Netherlands. They range from just two minutes long to 18, but they all
have something vital to say about the world we live in and how our interactions
with people can have long-lasting effects.
The Dam Keeper (directed by Robert Kondo and Daisuke Tsutsumi) –
I am not certain how anyone could see this film and not name it the best
animated short of the year. With no qualifier, this is one of my favorite films
of 2014. In just 18 minutes, The Dam
Keeper manages to tackle tough subjects such as loneliness, isolation,
bullying, the environment, and forgiveness while still telling a touching story
about friendship and featuring the most beautiful animation of this group.
In a world populated by anthropomorphic animals, a small pig
operates a giant windmill that keeps a poisonous cloud of pollution from
overrunning his village. Every morning, he wakes up and gets the windmill
spinning to protect the town, then he heads to school, where he is physically
and emotionally bullied by his classmates for not being as attractive or smart
or popular as they. Despite the abuse from his peers and the indifference of
his teachers and other adults, the pig performs his duties to preserve the
lives of an ungrateful populace.
It is heady stuff for a cartoon, but it shows just how
powerful these shorts can be, stoking feelings of rage, despair, and pain, all
for the plight of this little human-like pig. Anyone who has ever been bullied
like this knows what it is to feel like nothing you can do will ever make it
stop, like the pain will never go away. It is a sad truth that many children
live with every day, but most suffer in silence because they are convinced they
deserve this, so they walk around invisible to everyone until they truly are
gone. The Dam Keeper understands
this, and that alone is worth celebrating.
Feast (directed by Patrick Osborne) – As the Walt Disney
Studios entry this year, Feast was
released to theaters to play before Animated Feature nominee Big Hero 6. It tells the story of one
man’s life as seen through the eyes of his faithful, hungry dog. The animation
is gorgeous, as one would expect from a Disney production, and the story is
straightforward and touching.
Rescued from an alley by the man who becomes his owner, the
dog sees the world through the lens of the table scraps and canned food he
receives. As the man’s life changes, so does the dog’s food, for better and for
worse. What is remarkable about this film is how effortlessly Osborne, working
from a story by Nicole Mitchell and Raymond Persi, is able to tell a deeply
affecting tale about depression in the background of one adorable dog’s
never-ending feast.
A Single Life (directed by Marieke Blaauw, Joris Oprins, and Job Roggeveen)
– A brilliant little story that goes by in a flash, I only wish it were longer,
but its brevity is the point. A woman receives a mysterious vinyl record. When she
plays it, she finds that if she speeds up the record, she can fast forward
through her life. If she plays it backward, she goes back in time.
It does not have the fanciest animation of the bunch, but it
is clever, entertaining, and surprisingly poignant. In just two minutes of run
time, Blaauw, Oprins, and Roggeveen lay out the case for stopping to appreciate
the music rather than trying to skip ahead to the good parts because no matter
how long it plays, the record will come to an end.
The Bigger Picture (directed by Daisy Jacobs) – Two bickering
adult brothers argue over who will care for their dying mother. Though it is
clear they were never close, the longer their mother clings to life, the wider
the gap between the brothers grows. It is an honest, low-key examination of how
strained family relationships can be altered by the death of a loved one, and
its story will be familiar to anyone who has experienced a similar situation.
The immediately striking animation is among the most unique
and innovative I have seen in recent years, as Jacobs uses six-foot-tall
painted characters in life-size sets to tell her story. By filming on live
sets, Jacobs imparts a tactile feel to the film that makes the world seem lived
in and imperfect, while at the same time giving depth to the frame that is
lacking in most non-computer-generated animation. The style is at first
startling in its oddness, but ultimately, it is key to creating the reality of
the story.
Me and My Moulton (directed by Torill Kove) – Me and My Moulton is about a girl who
comes from “the weird family.” You know the one. They don’t dress like everyone
else, eat like everyone else, or live like everyone else. For all intents and
purposes, they are regular folks. They just seem odd to the outside world, and
when you are a child coming of age, there is nothing worse than seeming odd to
the outside world. They live above a “normal” family, and all day, the girl
wishes her family were more like the downstairs neighbors.
The animation will remind some of children’s cartoons such
as those you might find on PBS, and the story of learning to love who you are
and where you come from certainly takes its cues from that style of cartoon as
well. Kove is the only director in this group who is a previous nominee. She
has three nominations in total, and she won this award for her 2006 animated
short The Danish Poet, which employed
a similar hand-drawn style. The Academy clearly likes her work, but Me and My Moulton is probably at the
back of the line this year.
The final analysis
If anything other than The
Dam Keeper or Feast wins this
award, it will go down as one of the most shocking upsets of the night. The Dam Keeper is the most deserving on
both a story and an animation level. Despite wins for big studios in the past,
the Academy is rarely swayed by the big names behind a production in this
category, usually awarding the best work – a novel concept, I know – but Feast would not be an unworthy winner.
The Bigger Picture
won the British Academy of Film and Television award for short animation, but
like Boogaloo and Graham in the live action short category, it did not compete there against any of the other
Academy Award nominees. The innovation of The
Bigger Picture may be enough to sway voters, and the film certainly has an
emotional core, but this one probably comes down to the two American films in
the lineup, The Dam Keeper and Feast.
Will win: The Dam
Keeper
Should win: The
Dam Keeper
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