Here we go again with this year’s quickly assembled collection of Oscar-nominated short films, all slapped together in a 10-title touring package released just before the big night itself.
This is a shrewd idea. In the past, these films were almost entirely unseen by the public at large (and for that matter, by critics). Short movies, with the occasional exception of a Pixar or Disney cartoon, have no natural place to exist these days, except perhaps online.
So here are the five nominees for animated short film, and the five nominees for live-action short film. I probably won’t shock you if I suggest that the cartoons are a livelier, more clever bunch.
They are also shorter. This is not a minor issue.
The giddy star of the animated shorts is “Logorama,” a crazy 16-minute film in which corporate logos and mascots have taken over the entire landscape. Two cops, played by Michelin men, chase a miscreant (a profanity-spewing, Uzi-toting Ronald McDonald) through a Los Angeles covered in advertising images.
I don’t know much about filmmakers Francois Alaux, Herve de Crecy and Ludovic Houplain, except that they are deviously inventive and clever. And the final irony is that their logo-smothered world doesn’t look all that different from the one we already live in.
The shorter cartoons each play out one note. “French Roast” is a nicely rendered tale of a crisis in a cafe, where a fussy diner must contend with a homeless man and a nun with a secret. “Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty” doesn’t offer enough variation on its idea: Granny tells a scary story to her terrified grandchild.
“The Lady and the Reaper,” produced by Antonio Banderas, follows a little old lady as she gets tugged toward the “white light” by Mr. Death, as a hospital’s staff keeps shocking her back to life.
Better developed is “A Matter of Loaf and Death,” a half-hour piece from Nick Park’s Aardman Studios. It stars Wallace and Gromit, the dim-witted human and quick-thinking dog who have become beloved in a series of Aardman films. This one’s a typically well-rendered comedy in which Wallace falls for a possible murderess.
The live-action shorts all looked to me like audition pieces for feature films. Three of them are on heavy subjects, so one of these three is the probable winner: “Kavi” looks at child slavery in Asia, “Miracle Fish” is about violence in schools and “The Door” is a stark, nicely controlled story about the effects of Chernobyl on one family.
The lighter pieces are “Instead of Abracadabra,” a Swedish comedy about a Napoleon Dynamite-like magician, and “The New Tenants,” a Tarantino-flavored tale about something left behind in an apartment.
Maybe it’s just my congenital inability to warm up to live-action short films (a prejudice to which I plead guilty), but to my eye these offerings all carry the limitation of the form: a certain obviousness, a single limited idea and everything tied up in a small, overly neat package.
There’s some talent here, but I just didn’t care much about the results. One of them will get an Oscar out of it, so more power to ’em.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
