Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts (2024) review
Out of this year’s three Oscar-Nominated Shorts categories – Documentary, Live-Action, and Animation – you’ll find that all five of the nominees for Animation are great! Is that unusual? Well, it’s surprising, considering that’s not always the case with any of these Shorts categories. Indeed, all of the Animated Shorts this year are great and they also show the artistic range that the medium can offer. Most of the stories told are quite personal and reflective and one is inspired by a Christmas song from a Beatle. Only two of this year’s nominees are from the USA, which is certainly a plus considering it is always fascinating to see what other countries are doing with animation.
Like every year, all five nominees can currently be found playing in select theaters thanks to ShortsTV. In Chicago, the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts can be seen at the historic Music Box Theatre, as well as Landmark Century Centre Cinema.
Below are my thoughts on all of this year’s Animated Shorts, from Great to the Best. Since I thought they were all great, I couldn’t possibly rank them from Worst to Best. They truly all have something significant and unique to offer.
WAR IS OVER! Inspired By the Music of John and Yoko
It says it in the title. This 10-minute 3D computer-animated short directed by Dave Mullins was inspired and features the song “Happy Xmas (War is Over)”. Mullins co-wrote the story, which is set in No Man’s Land during an alternate WWI, with Sean Ono Lennon. The story follows a carrier pigeon who delivers messages to each side of the battlefield, specifically for two soldiers who are playing chess together. The fighting on the battlefield continues as the chess game resumes, but the ending feels a bit heavy-handed and not quite aligned with the intent of the famous song by John Lennon and Yoki Ono. Considering that’s a peace anthem and here we are in 2024 and war is certainly not over, the short winds up being a pipe dream. Nevertheless, this is a wonderfully rendered short (animation and visual effects were created by Peter Jackson’s WETA Digital), with impressive cinematography and expressive characters.
RATING: ***
OUR UNIFORM
The first nominee I watched is actually the very first animated short to be nominated from Iran. Produced and directed by illustrator/animator Yegane Moghaddam, “Our Uniform”, sets out to allow viewers an understanding of what it is like to be a girl in Iran living with the religious expectations of hijab. In the 7-minute short, we hear the voice of an Iranian girl who recounts specific school-age memories of wearing a hijab. Moghaddam takes an inventive approach to the subject matter, by incorporating the various fabrics, threads, and cloths that make the school uniforms she has worn – all while interweaving different textures and buttons, with delightful cartoon characterizations of young girls. It may resonate more for Muslim women, but how it tells their story should be fascinating to anyone.
RATING: ***
A LETTER TO A PIG
The most captivating thing about this 16-minute Israeli-French short from visual artist/animator Tal Kantor is the visual aesthetic used. Much of the artwork on display consists of sketches and ink washes, but as the story unfolds, some rotoscope work can be found, providing a clearer focus to the moving outlines. The setting of the story is a high school classroom that is visited by a Jewish Holocaust survivor named Haim (Alexander Peleg), who as a boy managed to stay alive by hiding from Nazis in a pigsty. He shares how he feels that one particular pig saved his life and in a gesture of gratitude, wrote a letter to the pig. Understandably, not many of the teens are interested in his story, but one specific girl is affected and winds up pulled away into a dreamscape related to the trauma she’s heard from Haim. Kantor covers a lot in 17 minutes, like how Haim was raised to believe that pigs were unclean and deserving of slaughter, similar to how Nazis believed that Jews were lesser beings and needed to be eliminated. It’s not at all heavy-handed, but it is a unique story and fascinating how the pig winds up becoming the hero, victim, and metaphor while serving to tell the complexities of humanity.
RATING: ***1/2
NINETY-FIVE SENSES
Although this 14-minute short from Jared and Jerusa Hess (“Napolean Dynamite” and “Nacho Libre”) hails from the USA, there was an assortment of U.S. and Latin American animators involved, utilizing six different kind of animation styles. While the story is quite straightforward, how it is told makes all the difference here. The protagonist of the story is an old man (voiced impeccably by Tim Blake Nelson) on death row, reflecting on his past and how our senses sign off one after the other when we die. He recalls how certain senses conjure fond memories while others bring back trauma from his childhood. There are sections of Chris Bowman and Hubbel Palmer’s script that are given different animation styles that represent the past (2D) and the present (a variety of expressionistic layers), all through the lens of a man who has very little time. What’s most compelling is how the man appreciates and values the senses he mentions and how the passing of time puts life into perspective. He shares how he has seen and experienced more than others because he’s never owned a cellphone. He also shares how his hearing was damaged due to his father always playing music loudly – that hearing loss provides the short with a potent twist that I didn’t see coming. Ultimately, this is a man who has appreciated life regardless of its hard turns, someone who will miss being touched and has only had his wistful dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and regrets, with him in the same concrete walls and steel bars for years.
RATING: ***1/2
PACHYDERME
The animated short that transfixed me the most was “Pachyderme”, a lovely and unsettling 11-minute tale of a woman (narration by Christa Théret) reflecting on the summer she lived with her grandparents in their countryside home when she was a young girl. It sounds like a recollection of fond memories, but how the visit is described gradually reveals tp a darker time and inevitable trauma that gestated. The French short was directed by Stéphanie Clément and written by Marc Rius and has an immersive picture-book approach to it paired with a story that weaves subtle memory fragments into a troubling revelation. There’s a reason the young girl imagines the wooden knots in the ceiling are gazing eyes or that it’s possible that she can disappear into the flowers on the wallpaper. As an adult, she can now see that these were coping mechanisms. Are her memories the truth from her past or what she believes it to be? What we see could be dreams from her past melding together with reality. Regardless, I couldn’t help but continue to think about “Pachyderme” long after viewing it.
RATING: ****
