2019 OSCAR-NOMINATED ANIMATED SHORTS

Once upon a time animated shorts were simple amusements.  No longer…at least not if this year’s Oscar-nominated animated shorts are any yardstick.

Here we have five brief films. A couple are charming. Cute, even.  You might get a chuckle or two.

But none of them are overtly comic, and in fact most deal with dead-serious issues. A common theme is familial relationships (parents and children, husbands and wives, siblings). Three of these movies have no dialogue at all; the remaining two are in foreign languages.  What this means is that viewers have to pay attention…no falling back on words to explain what’s going on.

But here’s the thing…on one level or another each of these nominees is an emotional workout.  You will cry.  I repeat: You WILL Cry.

You’ve been warned.

“HAIR LOVE” (USA, 7 minutes)  My rating: B+

Childlike yearning, parental concern and family crisis merge effortlessly in Matthew A. Cherry’s “Hair Love,” which finds a young African American girl coming to terms (well, sort of) with her unruly head of hair.

It starts out almost like a classic Disney cartoon with our little heroine interacting with her cat, a fussy creature who seems utterly disdainful of her mistress’ issues. But some sort of big day is approaching, and our girl is determined to look her best.  To that end she goes into the bathroom and —  armed with a sheet of photos of current Afro-centric hair styles, scissors, combs, brushes and unguents — attempts to do her ‘do.

It’s a disaster. When her father discovers what’s going on he intervenes. But let’s face it…dads are rarely great at their little girls’ hair, and this dad is combatting an unruly Afro that seems to engulf him in an explosion of ever-expanding follicle. After some comic confrontations, though, the father-and- daughter team get the job done, just in time for an emotional reunion.

“DCERA  (DAUGHTER)”   (Czech Republic, 15 minutes) My rating: B

“Daughter” opens with the beeping of a medical monitor; we find ourselves in a bedroom where a man lies dying. His adult daughter stands at the foot of his bed.

 Daria Kashcheeva’s film is rendered with what appears to be classic stop-action animation. The man and his daughter have been very roughly rendered — it’s almost as if their heads were carved from blocks of wood — and they move through a detailed environment.

When a bird flies through the bedroom window the woman is transported back to her childhood as the only daughter of a single man. In a few deft scenes Kashcheeva wordlessly explores her relationship with her father, who loves his daughter but sometimes has a hard time showing it. The little girl thinks of herself as a baby bird fallen from its nest; she even fashions a crude bird mask to wear as a way of buffering herself from a harsh world.

It soon becomes apparent that the bird is a metaphor for the human soul, and Daddy’s is about to take off.

“Daughter” is a technical triumph.  The movements of the characters and the camera (complete with hypnotically changing focal lengths) perfectly mimic a “live” film. But what really matters here is the rising ache of love and loss.

“MEMORABLE”   (France, 12 minutes) My rating: A

Anyone who’s ever had to deal with dementia in a loved one will recognize the events of Bruno Collet’s “Memorable.”

Louis, a painter, is clearly slipping away, much to the dismay of his wife Michelle.  At times Louis seems lucid; then he sits down to breakfast and tries to eat a banana without peeling it.

Michelle must be his guard and baby sitter, and it’s wearing her down. Part of the problem is that Louis is so damn good at covering for his bizarre behavior.

In an interview with a therapist he announces that the year is 1965.  The therapist put a cell phone on the table; Louis doesn’t know what it is.   When he’s told that he has failed to recognize a common item like a cell phone, he shoots back: “That’s normal. It’s only 1965.”

But even dementia may have its upside; in his mind Louis’ many paintings come to life, swirling around him in a snowstorm of Van Gogh-ish images. And he’s allowed the small grace of reliving his courtship of Michelle.

“Memorable” appears to have been animated via stop-motion…although it’s probably been done with a computer program imitating stop-motion. Nevertheless, these roughly-rendered characters become all too real before the film ends.

“KITBULL” (USA, 9 minutes) My rating: A-

A scrawny alley cat and a hulking pit bull form a great team in Pixar’s “Kitbull,” which employs computers to create what looks like old-fashioned cel animation.

The feline heroine of Rosana Sullivan’s short is none too thrilled when her territory is invaded by a dog chained near the pile of rubbish where she lives.  The big pooch wants to be friends; the hissing kitty is having none of it.  But after the canine returns, bloodied and lame, from a dogfight arena, the two animals bond.

“Kitbull” is cute, yeah, but it’s got lots of serious stuff swirling around, especially the theme of animal solidarity in the face of human cruelty. Talk about a huge “Awwwwweee” factor.

“SISTER” (China/USA, 8 minutes) My rating: B+

A young Chinese boy’s relationship with his sibling” is examined in the quietly heartbreaking “Sister.”

In voiceover narration the boy (now a man) recalls how he initially resented the presence of this interloper, whose childlike tantrums and demands are so vivid in his memory that he sees her as a gigantic baby who nearly fills the room.

As the years pass their relationship features the usual sibling rivalries…there’s a huge brawl over who gets to man the TV remote control. And a few  years later the brother and sister bury one of his extracted baby teeth in a flower pot, sharing the fantasy that someday they will grow a tree with dentures as fruit.

All this is rendered in genuine (not computer) stop motion.

But we suspect something’s not quite right when we see a family portrait…and the little sister isn’t there. Turns out that “Sister” is a beautiful lament for the souls never born thanks to China’s one-child policy meant to keep the population under control.

One cannot imagine that the Chinese government is thrilled with the film. The rest of us will be.

IN ADDITION TO THESE OSCAR-NOMINATED SHORTS, the program  features three additional films. In the impeccably stop-motion effort “Henrietta Bukowski” (USA, 16 minutes) a young woman overcomes physical infirmities to restore an airplane and fly away from her troubles. Featuring the voices of Christina Hendrickson Chris Cooper and Anne Dowd. “The Bird and the Whale” (Ireland, 6 minutes) features a friendship between a baby whale and a caged canary, the only survivor of a shipwreck. “Hors Piste” (France, 5 minutes) is a slapstick adventure about two bumbling mountain rescue workers who seem always to make their job more complicated.

| Robert W. Butler