Oscars 2024: Who Should Win the Best Animated Short Academy Award

It's that time of the year! As the Academy Awards loom on the horizon, a roadshow presentation of the nominees in the Short Films categories conquests valuable screen time in Art House and commercial theaters alike. It's a fantastic chance to complete your 2023 watchlist and identify up-and-coming talent. Well, that and getting re-acquainted with some veterans doing stellar work in the format. We like to think these categories are primarily the starting point of developing talent, but this year, some real pros are stealing the young's thunder. My favorite is Jared and Jerussa Hess' "Ninety-Five Senses," but don't let the "Napoleon Dynamite" creators pop open the champagne just yet. My record predicting the winners is bad if we go by my 2022 choices.

Some of the shorts are available in streaming services, but I vouch for the experience of watching them on the big screen and with the prime sound system of theaters. It's in every movie buff's best interest to contribute to a healthy box office for this unrepresented format in commercial circuits. We need more shorts in theaters. Distributors and exhibitors will follow where the money goes. But this is not just an easy public service you can do. The quality of the animation and the imagination on display is amazing, even when the narrative elements might falter. Check them out!

...And The Nominees Are:

Our Uniform

Iranian director Yegane Moghaddam offers a lived-in, unique perspective on growing up as a young girl in a theocracy where men dictate the parameters of femininity. The narrator of her lovely short film reminisces about her upbringing and the deep connection between clothes and identity as she awaits an international airport for a connecting flight. The first thing that calls your attention is the way she combines classic 2-D animation with cloth, garments, and the tools of the seamstress' trade: A school bus rides over an ornate ribbon, and people grow out of denim. The second thing is how it sheds light on the awakening Iranian girls experience when they travel outside their country and enjoy, for a brief moment, the liberty of dressing as they like to. It's compelling stuff, beautifully realized.

Still, the movie leaves you wanting for something more personal. The key to its shortcoming is in the title. Moghaddam cuts her wings by aiming to portray a communal, plural experience. What's missing is a more personal point of view. It's barely there when she speaks of her experience contemplating the diversity of people in the airport's lounge. As it is, "Our Uniform" is like a smart anthropology student's beautifully animated term paper.

Letter to a Pig

A Holocaust survivor gives his testimony to a class of young children. Most are, at best, disinterested. At worst, they make fun of a particular development in his story: he found shelter from his nazi pursuers in a pigsty and bonded with a pig to whom he writes a letter. As he reads a letter he wrote to his animal savior, a girl's imagination gets triggered by his assertion that she and her peers are "his revenge." She visualizes this idea in somewhat literal terms.

Tal Kantor's short becomes deeply controversial by tragic, sheer chance. The movie premiered back in April 2022 at the San Francisco International Film Festival, long before the October 2023 terrorist attack performed by Hamas on Israel and the subsequent retaliation that unleashed an outright war on Gaza. As news of thousands of casualties hit the news, its contemplation of the idea of revenge becomes increasingly provocative. We don't know where Kantor stands in the current controversy around the scope of Israel's military operation, but the movie ends up being a Rorschach test from which you can distill opposing views. In the man's story, the pig is an ally. In the girl's reverie, it symbolizes an enemy to be punished and, unexpectedly, forgiven.

How this idea flies nowadays is a puzzle. We can agree on how expressive "Letter to a Pig" looks, combining sketch lines with photo-realistic details that ground the whole thing in a concrete word.

Pachyderm

Stéphanie Clément's harrowing story of abuse may take you off guard. The cute design and animation seem perfect for the setting and the time: a little girl is delivered by her parents for a brief summer vacation at her grandparent's house in the country. So far, so French. Darkness creeps in slowly. The only adult we actually see is the grandfather, his face obscured or off-frame. An elephant's tusk, mounted as a hall ornament, speaks of a penchant for violence. When the true nature of his interest - and the narrative - becomes evident, the girl fades into the ornate wallpaper. The feeling of leaving your body as trauma is inflicted upon it is eloquently conveyed.

"Pachyderm" crystalizes the tension between the narrow conception of animation as a medium for children and its viability to deal with heady, adult themes. Like "Letter to a Pig," it takes on a narrative convention of kiddie fare and twists it to darker territory. We never see a living elephant here, just a dead remain, hinting at the evilm men are capable of doing.  

Ninety-Five Senses

The husband-and-wife creative team formed by husband and wife Jared and Jerussa Hess are celebrating the XX anniversary of their indie breakthrough "Napoleon Dynamite." No one expected them to mark the milestone with an Oscar, but here we are. I'm skittish about favoring established filmmakers over newcomers in categories like this, but "Fifty-Five Senses" offers the richest, most well-rounded experience out of the five nominees.

Things begin sweet, with an elderly man talking in a folksy way about how the senses make life worth living: sight, smell, taste, you get the drill. It's cute, in an inspirational quote kind of way. Each segment is animated in a different style, keeping things interesting for those of us immune to the charms of twee. And then, a very dark turn opens up the movie and pushes it to a higher level. I will not spoil it for you. It's not good because of the whiplash effect of going from sweet to sour, charming to dark. That would be a shortcut to seriousness. I love how the script by Chris Bowman and Hubble Palmer shoo-in the full arc of a life in 13 minutes, playing in the field of American Gothic narrative. This is a full movie between the parameters of a short. The Hesses do their part by making the contrasting animation style work in harmony. Their appreciation for graphic talent is visible in how the artists are highlighted in the movie's credits.  

War is Over! Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko

If Pixar ever did a war drama, it would look like this movie. Soldiers on opposing sides of the battlefield pass the time playing chess, sharing their movements by sending paper notes through a carrier pigeon. There are no apparent signs of their political affiliation and timelessness in the warfare - the trenches reminded me of "Paths of Glory" (Stanley Kubrick, 1957), so I'm going with WWI. If anything, the character design and the use of chess point towards "Geri's Game" (Jan Pinkava, 1997), Pixar's Best Animated Short Film Oscar winner.

The movie is well done and affecting, but the connection with John Lennon and Yoko Ono feels gratuitous. It's a marketing gimmick. Sure, their son, Sean Lennon, co-wrote the script with director Dave Mullins. There is something opportunistic in sticking their names in the title and their Vietnam War-era peace pop hymn in the final scene. The movie would work just as well without it, but the famous names should drive more interest to the movie. Nothing further from Lennon and Ono's prickly artistry than the somewhat maudlin emotion on display.

Straight from the Shortlist

The five nominated shorts together run a bit over one hour. To give theatergoers their money's worth, distributor ShortsTV padded the show with two extra entries from the Academy shortlist. We are unsure if these two are literal runner-ups in 6th and 7th place or if they made the cut for other considerations. Still, they are well worth your time.

I'm Hip

A blast from the past for fans of mid-XX Century pop culture, Disney's "The Aristocats" (1970) and Hanna-Barbera's "Top Cat" (1961). Using a song by the late David Frishberg, director Ron Musker crafts a swinging satire about those who think they are, well, hip. If Musker'sname rings a bell, it's because he is a Disney veteran. He has been knocking around the legendary studio since working on the script of the film audit "The Black Cauldron" (1985). He directed "The Little Mermaid" (1989), the first salvo in their second Golden Age, and scored Oscar nominations for "The Princess and the Frog" (2009) and "Moana" (2016).

Wild Summon

The British production is like a slightly less in-your-face PETA public service announcement. Copping the style of nature TV docs, it tracks the life cycle of the salmon. The movie begins as a near-death female lays eggs in a riverbed and follows the little ones' epic trip to the sea and back again. On the way, they must evade natural predators and, of course, the biggest predator of them all: man. By the time an encounter with a fishing ship comes around, you have identified enough with the little critters to be horrified at how their heads are unceremoniously cut as they are taken from the nets.

The catch - ahem - is that directors Karni Ariel and Saul Freed make the salmon anthropomorphic. That is, they look like small human beings clad in colorful scuba gear. Since coming out of the egg, they have rubber fins on their feet and an underwater mask over their eyes. The equipment grows with their bodies as they reach maturity. The horrifying martyrdom will surely convert some viewers to veganism, especially because the first-rate animation combines photo-realistic, scenic natural backgrounds. You might even expect to hear Sir Richard Attenborough narrating the whole deal, but the honor falls to rock legend Marianne Faithful.