2020 Oscar-Nominated Animated Short Films

This year, I am reviewing all 15 films nominated across Oscar's three short subject categories. Versions of these blurbs have also been published at Cine-File.

OSCAR-NOMINATED ANIMATED SHORT FILMS

Cute anthropomorphic animals, eccentric Scandinavians, heavy social messages, and arresting stylistic invention; Oscar’s wide-ranging taste in animation is well represented by this year’s nominees, which comprise both pet favorites and more esoteric marvels. Of the former category, it wouldn’t be the Academy Awards if Disney didn’t occupy its obligatory spot. Thankfully, Madeline Sharafian’s Burrow (6 min) is a delight, a warmly 2D-animated piece about a shy bunny trying to create her dream home. Reluctant to ask for help from the underground critters who keep digging through her walls, the bunny burrows deeper into the ground until she realizes she won’t be able to solve her problems alone. There are more complex thematic potentials in here than Sharafian (and probably Disney) are willing to explore - urban development, housing inequality - but as a charming ode to community, the short is plenty satisfying. 

For those seeking ambitious, loaded concepts, Erick Oh’s mind-boggling Opera (8 min) should do the trick. The antithesis of Disney, the short consists of one slow vertical pan down and then back up a giant pyramid structure, whose teeming contents reveal a vast, self-perpetuating ecosystem of exploitation and oppression. Despite the hierarchies of power he graphically delineates, Oh never guides your attention; rather, your eye is forced to wander endlessly across this perverse ant-farm fiefdom and the plethora of cryptic dramas contained within. 

A more emotional approach to grim subject matter is found in Will McCormack and Michael Govier’s If Anything Happens I Love You (12 min). Told in an elegant graphite-and-ink wash style, it depicts the paralyzing grief of two parents whose daughter is killed in a school shooting. In a film that goes the sentimental route, sometimes to a fault, its most potent gesture is simply a lingering shot of a large, vibrant American flag hanging in the school hallway; those stars and stripes should elicit only deep shame in anyone watching. 

From sobering reality to aesthetic phantasmagoria, Adrien Mérigeau’s Genius Loci (16 min) charts the nocturnal odyssey of a young black woman through a mystical, shapeshifting urban landscape. The look of it is breathtaking, whether it’s bringing to life the work of Belgian illustrator Brecht Evens, slipping into geometric abstraction reminiscent of Kandinsky and Klee, or even, at one point, detouring into a woodcut-esque montage.

Rounding things out is Gísli Darri Halldórsson and Arnar Gunnarsson’s droll Yes-People (8 min), which chronicles a day in the lives of a handful of monosyllabic denizens of an apartment complex. Punctuated by coffee slurps, accumulating snow, and disruptively loud sex, it's a deadpan Nordic symphony of minor annoyances, staged in little vignettes that suggest a more lighthearted Roy Andersson.