Oscar Shorts 2006
I had the rare opportunity to see screener videos for the animated and live action shorts that were nominated for Academy Awards this year. Most people, myself included, generally only get access to the Pixar or Warner Brothers’ animated short that comes before their animated feature of the year, making your office Oscar pool a crap shoot. (Or: “Oh, it’s about starving gay Jewish children in Rwanda? That one will win.”) I can’t predict who might win, but I can tell you about them anyway.
Live Action:
The first one we watched was West Bank Story, from the U.S., an amusing re-imagining of West Side Story, but with the star crossed lovers from competing fast food joints in the West Bank, one Hummus Hut, run by Palestinians, and one Kosher Kastle, run by Israelis. The whole thing feels like a silly in-joke or perhaps a particularly inspired sketch comedy sketch on the surface, but they really dug in their heels and tried to make a good, timely parody with good production values and weird but kicky little songs. Despite its professionalism, it doesn’t have that Oscar feel, despite its deadly serious setting.
The Saviour, from Australia, features a doughy, sweet Mormon fellow (Malcolm Thomas Campbell) who is in love with a married woman on his ministry route. He gets in trouble with church leaders and conflicts with his partner, and the whole film seems like it is not going anywhere until suddenly its title makes perfect sense at the very end. Kudos to the filmmakers for hiring a differently-abled actor to use in a manner that makes you not notice or care that he is such. It’s a little over long, but Campbell makes it worth it. Not so much what you might think of as an “Oscar Short” but hopefully will get some play on Sundance.
Binta Y La Gran Idea (Spain) is my pick for the win. Set in French-speaking Senegal, a group of progressive Africans are trying to promote education in their town, especially for the girls. Binta is our narrator, a small girl whose sister is one of the ones in most need of education. Binta’s big idea you’ll just have to find out for yourself, but she tells the tale of this village conflict with the ingenuousness of a small child’s perspective. It’s colorful and dramatic and winds a story within a story to a nice payoff at the end.
Eramos Pocos (One Too Many) is also from Spain. A woman leaves her selfish, lazy husband and son, so they go to the nursing home to fetch her mother so she can take care of them. The whole movie is also kind of silly and a little vague at the end – the ending could mean one of two things, and while ambiguous endings are nice in a drama, for a comedy to have the right punch, you must not waffle. I’ll go ahead and spoil this one: either the woman they fetch is a complete stranger, which means she was so lonely she was willing to be their housekeeper without letting on that she was the wrong person, or she is the husband’s mother (instead of mother-in-law), which shows how little he appreciates the women in his world (and the lady was so lonely she still didn’t mind). Both work, but I couldn’t tell which it should be. It was unsatisfying as a plot arc – something that could have been told as a 5 line bar joke doesn’t always expand well into a 16 minute short.
Helmer & Son from Denmark also was a 13 minute version of a very short punchline. It has a little more overt drama (father-son emotional moment #28) than Eramos Pocos, but it still relies heavily on a silly situation to get us there. I found it the most scattershot of the nominees but I did enjoy basking in the Danish language.
Animated:
From Norway, The Danish Poet presented a sweet little fable of love and fate and the winding path of choices and fates. It felt like a fairy tale you have already read but forgotten, which matched its simple but emotive drawings as something familiar even if you have never seen it before. The plot zigs and zags like a mountain trail, but has a satisfying ending. It’s a strong contender but it does demand your full attention for its full 14 minutes (it feels like more because of how much content is in there).
Roy Disney had a hand in Russia’s offering The Little Match Girl, and it shows (that is a compliment). The animation style looks like latter-day hand-drawn Dreamworks, but the feel of it is the very very old school of Disney’s fairy tale classics like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty (and especially Bambi). There is no dialogue, just the beautiful String Quartet #2 in D by Alexander Borodin, which lends the piece its old-fashioned and classic air. (See also the excellent fantasia Allegro Non Troppo from Italy, if you can find it.) By not flinching at the story’s end and by presenting the simple fable so artfully, I think this one is the lead contender, though the Danish Poet has that new fresh classic feel.
Finally, from Hungary, there is Maestro, the only computer-generated entry. My companion shrewdly described it as feeling like a thought experiment more than a story. We have a penguin-looking bird preparing for a big show at his dressing table, while the camera tocks around the scene, from different angles on each sweep but jerking every 1/60 of a minute or so to the next angle. It’s kind of an off-putting kooky mechanical ballet. It’s evident that the Academy doesn’t care about animation by their choices lately (the animated feature nominees are 2/3 horrifying) so this weird, jarring experience will probably win over the storytelling craft of the other two. The final payoff explains a lot about the style of the piece we have just watched, but it doesn’t justify how not fun it is to watch.
