Countdown to the Oscars: Best Animated Short

We’re counting down the days until the Academy Awards! We’ll be here, breaking down each of the 23 categories, talking a bit of history, and trying to figure out who is going to win all those gold statues. So check back throughout the next three weeks for Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars.

Best Animated Short

The nominees are:

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse

The Flying Sailor

Ice Merchants

My Year of Dicks

An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It

I have seen every nominee for Animated Short in seven of the past eight years. I only missed 2018 because I was in the process of moving from New York to Los Angeles at the time of the awards, though I did see that year’s eventual winner, Bao, when it played in theaters before The Incredibles 2. Anyway, the point of this is to say that this may be the finest lineup top to bottom that I have seen.

There have been better individual shorts over the years – Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow from 2015 is a full-stop masterpiece that comes to mind – but there is often a clunker or two in the group, as well. Not so this year, as every film contains within it something to recommend, from bravura animation to enduring messages about hope and the power of togetherness.

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse – Produced for AppleTV by the likes of JJ Abrams and Woody Harrelson, among others, Charlie Mackesy’s and Matthew Freud’s sweet little film is an adaptation of a bestselling novel with a deceptively simple premise: A boy, lost in the woods, searches for a family. In the process, he meets a Mole (Tom Hollander), a Fox (Idris Elba), and a Horse (Gabriel Byrne), who teach him various lessons about love and forgiveness and finding family where you least expect it.

The hand-drawn animation is truly stunning. In particular, I found myself riveted by the sleek lines on the fox and the effortlessness of his motions. Mackesy’s original novel is a brisk 128 pages, but toward the end of the adaptation, the script starts to feel overstuffed with truisms and homespun affirmations. It all starts to feel a little repetitive, but the film’s heart is in the right place, and it is a big heart indeed.

My Year of Dicks – Frank, funny, and fabulously animated, Sara Gunnarsdóttir’s adaptation of Pamela Ribon’s comic memoir is a gem of a short film and should be seen by adolescents and teens far and wide. The film packs more truth about growing up and dealing with sex into its 24 minutes than any number of TV shows dedicated to the subject ever touch on in their entire runs.

There is humor and humiliation in equal measure as 15-year-old Pam attempts to lose her virginity and chooses wrong guy after wrong guy. The animation matches the emotion on screen beat for beat, flowing freely among a number of stylistic influences. The film has earned numerous accolades from festivals around the country and represents the exact kind of bold, beautifully executed shorts this category is meant to honor.

An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It – A fascinating bit of meta commentary on the form of short animation itself, writer-director Lachlan Pendragon’s stop-motion film is insightful, inventive, and flat-out hilarious. It follows an office worker named Neil whose coworkers start disappearing around him. He notices some of his office mates who remain don’t have legs – because if Neil weren’t standing there, they wouldn’t be in the shot. Eventually, he meets the ostrich of the title, and all hell breaks loose.

When Neil breaks into the “real world,” or that of the filmmakers making the very short in which he is starring, it is one of the most ingenious plot developments I have seen in recent years. The whole thing has the energy and wit of Charlie Kaufman’s brilliant Anomalisa but condensed into an 11-minute package. The conclusion is less satisfying than one might have hoped, but the journey there is so stupendous it hardly matters.

Ice Merchants – The first Portuguese animated film to win an award at the Cannes Film Festival, João Gonzalez’s Ice Merchants is a beautiful fable about familial love and environmental stewardship. A father and his young son live on the side of a cliff, where they make ice to sell to the village below. Though obviously dangerous work, they have a routine that makes it feel safe and natural, and most importantly, they have each other. We learn the man’s wife and boy’s mother has died at some point recently and was once an integral part of this ritual.

One day, they awake and there is no ice in their cooler. It is too warm. The cliff above begins to give way as the rest of the ice melts, and the father and son are left stranded beneath an impending avalanche. It is impossible not to see the parallels to the ways real families’ livelihoods are dependent on the natural world and how precariously perched we all are on the brink of ecological disaster. The whole thing concludes on a perfect emotional beat, leaving the audience world weary but hopeful for the future.

The Flying Sailor – Wendy Tilby’s and Amanda Forbis’ The Flying Sailor tells the incredible true story of a sailor who was caught up in the Halifax Explosion of 1917 and thrown through the air nearly 2 kilometers but miraculously survived. In the film, his life flashes before his eyes – and ours – as he soars across the sky, naked as the day he was born. Built on its gorgeous animation, the film is a profound meditation on the fragility and brevity of life.

Tilby and Forbis are the only previous nominees in the category this year. They were previously nominated together in 1999 for their short When the Day Breaks and in 2011 for Wild Life. Tilby also received a solo nomination in 1991 for her film Strings.

The final analysis

For as much time I have spent talking up the quality of all of these films, the victory usually comes down to which movie voters are most aware of, and that usually comes down to which one has the big stars and the big money behind it. This year, that means The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse, which has the support of Apple, the big-name producer in Abrams, and the star-studded voice cast. If voters are feeling a little experimental and looking to go outside the box, the likely beneficiary is My Year of Dicks, with a story that is universally relatable and a title that certainly stands out on a ballot.

Will win: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse

Should win: Ice Merchants

Next time: Live Action Short