Tag: Oscar Nominated Shorts

REVIEW: Oscar nominated shorts – Live Action

Joann Leave a comment

I admire short films because their shortness does not represent the depth of the message they carry but only shows the limitation to the time they are allowed to trap the audience’s attention. Due to these resources, they have to be clever in picking what to show and tell. This will mean that the audience will be on a quick, dramatic ride. The five films, although very different in the subject of the emotion they are telling, shared the common theme of pain and fear. It could be pain from a man having to ‘turn off’ his wife after her brain death(On my mind), fear of being imprisoned by machines that run the jurisdiction system without the flexibility to correct a mistake(Please hold), the pain of not having ‘a normal’ body and being laughed at(The dress), racism and violence conducted under it that comes without warning(The Long Goodbye), or the pain of a girl who dreamt of continuing her studies in the city where she was kidnapped to a rural village to do an unwanted marriage under the village and family’s approval(Ala Kachuu). They are communicated concisely and strongly, resembling a roller coaster with five peaks.

On My Mind – Great connection between scenes to make a complete story. The interesting buildup keeps the audience curious and engage during the first half.

Please Hold – The exemplary model of criticism toward the status quo. Intelligently designed reference to current digital society’s dehumanization of operations (we all have the experience of being frustrated by the neverending loop of ARS that does not have the option I want) and digital advertisements that nag you to spend money on options, and the necessity to have money even to fix something that went wrong. A thriller that has amazing communication: it was really easy to connect to the horrors and frustrations of the protagonist. However, I think the real horror was not the mechanic voices. The ones who saw this will remember the scene where the human attorney exclaimed ‘not again!’ before ending the $1000 call in a few seconds-will this mean that the protagonist was not the first wrongly accused? Why was the system not discarded after the continued horror of sentencing 40+ years to innocent men?

The Dress – A deep sorrow told of an unfamiliar world.

The Long Goodbye – The bewildering transition from a peaceful family home to a scene of murder and violence told the emotion of horror very well, but the part that was very unique to this movie came at the very end by a monologue from one of the characters. The rage, sorrow, and desperation break through the fourth wall with the character speaking directly at the audience. The poetic, POWERFUL monologue; it can also be found on the main actor, Riz Ahmed’s youtube channel.

Ala Kachuu – I wondered why the protagonist did not throw a fight against her kidnappers after she was forced into marriage, and then I fully realized the horror of the situation. The dread of being someplace where she knows not where, where everyone is acting kindly but on the watch for her escape, being abandoned by her family, and having no one to trust is just horrible. To seat in a theater may make the rebellion look easier, but in her situation, she did not know whether the people will attack her depending on how she reacted. The message at the very end saying that this kind of kidnap is being continued in the world was dreadful. This movie did a great job of emotionally converting the dreadfulness of such situations.

PREVIEW: Oscar nominated Shorts – Live Action

Joann Leave a comment

Shorts TV annually released oscar nominated short films. This year’s nominations are:

On My Mind (Martin Strange-Hansen and Kim Magnusson / Denmark)

Please Hold ( K.D. Dávila and Levin Menekse / USA)

The Dress (Tadeusz Łysiak and Maciej Ślesicki / Poland)

The Long Goodbye (Aneil Karia and Riz Ahmed / UK/Netherlands)

Ala Kachuu – Take and Run (Maria Brendle and Nadine Lüchinger/ Kyrgyzstan/Switzerland)

Ranging from 12-38 minutes, they all seem to tell strong stories within a short time span. Click here for trailers.

Among the movies, the synopsis of ‘Please Hold’ was especially interesting. It’s based in the future in a mysterious jail controlled by the ‘computed bureaucracy of the privatized American justice system‘. The trailer of ‘The Long Goodbye’ also intrigued my interest as well – the irony between bright, cheerful rap music as the background and something serious and dangerous seems to be happening to the characters made me wonder what’s going on.

Again, U of M students can get a ticket to the Oscar-nominated shorts series free if they use the Passport to the Arts before March 22th. The movie is playing on the 19th and 22nd at the Michigan theater. Please refer to the webpage of Arts at Michigan for further information on where to find the ticket / how to use them.

PREVIEW: Oscar nominated shorts – Animation

Joann Leave a comment

2022 Oscar-nominated short films are playing at Michigan theater. It’s divided into three categories – live-action, Animation, or Documentary.

This year’s Animation nominations consists of five animations:

  1. Robin Robin (Dan Ojari and Mikey Please / UK) – A holiday movie featuring Robin
  2. Boxballet(Anton Dyakov / Russia) – a love story of a boxer and a ballerina, not just romantic
  3. Affairs of the Art (Joanna Quinn and Les Mills / UK/Canada) – This is about a factory worker who aspires to be an artist. It has unique drawing styles that has soft but vivid lines, like a pencil or conte
  4. Bestia (Hugo Covarrubias and Teo Diaz / Chile) – This will be a scary one, inspired by a violent secret police agent of Chile’s military dictator
  5. The Windshield Wiper (Alberto Mielgo and Ledo Sanchez / USA/Spain) – According to the director, the central question of this one is  “What is love?”

As can be guessed by the drawing style of each animation (please refer to the featured image if you want to check them out yourself), this combination seems to be different from the pleasant, heart-warming, and dreamy Disney fantasies. After all, this is an animated film rated R. Instead, they look a bit eerie and definitely unique; the LA Times described that they “plumb the heart – and the heart of darkness“.

Passport to the Arts offers free student entry until March 22. For more information, please visit the Arts at Michigan Website. (Passport to the Arts – Arts at Michigan (umich.edu))

REVIEW: Oscar Nominated Shorts: Documentary

Emma Pinchak Leave a comment

Not the most uplifting selection of shorts, but these five documentaries were certainly thoughtful and artistic.

They combined beauty with a quiet sadness in the background that came forward only in brief moments. We are offered such an intimate look into personal tragedies and journeys in

this group of films, and that doesn’t always feel completely right. In Life Overtakes Me especially, we observe several refugee children caught in the coma-like state of Resignation Syndrome; they are unaware at that moment of our watching them being taken care of like invalids. The cool, pretty sunlight comes through the window to highlight a delicate hand, the rising and falling of the chest filling with unconscious breath. Their parents are filmed almost as a performance of parenthood, having to ignore the cameras’s eye and the incredible pain of not knowing–their family’s refugee status, whether their child will regain consciousness, what would happen if they were deported. It feels like an intrusion, something I don’t deserve to see.

Walk Run Cha-Cha was the most light-hearted of the five, though it was also the only one that made me cry. Ageism, particularly with women, is strong in the film industry, so I was happy to see an older couple featured in a way that connected them to their bodies and to each other. Too often mature subjects are discounted in their sensuality and ability, instead cast aside as static figures who do not (implied: cannot)

offer anything but old-fashioned wisdom, always from a seated position. They have less 
agency than their younger counterparts, often in a position of needing someone to take care of them. In Hollywood’s eyes, life seems to end somewhere around 35, maybe 50 for men.This shows that as we age there is still plenty more room for learning, for joy, for romance.

St. Louis Superman was touching without letting the audience forget its reality of systematic, racially-charged violence. The incorporation of Franks’ young son King was simultaneously beautiful and heartbreaking (he learns so much so young: his father’s bravery, the effect that one’s drivenness can produce, the hypocrisy of institutions meant to protect, how deeply racism permeates those structures). His innocent eyes take in too much, and as we see him cling fiercely to his father, we’re forced to wonder whether his future will be painted more by cynicism or tenacity. 

 

In the Absence seemed the most abstract. We see almost no video of the passengers of the ferry, which makes sense as most of their phone recordings were destroyed as the ship sank. A large portion of the documentary featured the slowly tilting boat, a big beast of a structure, looking like a dying creature, maybe a whale. It brings to the mind a guilty kind of disgust; we’re meant to be second-hand mourners, but instead we see the government’s ineptitude and this huge, ugly thing taking its sweet time drowning hundreds trapped on board.

Finally is the documentary shorts winner: Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl). The movie was a well-thought-out mix of history, interview, and politics, while getting closer to the heart through a close connection to a group of talented, spunky young girls. In a land that does not allow for any of the activities depicted in the film, it would have been more accurate to incorporate a touch more seriousness here, rather than depicting Skateistan as a magical safe haven. The point was empowerment and fighting for human rights, but these things can so easily be rosily shown, without the terror and violence involved in their capture.

If you haven’t seen these shorts, I’d recommend taking a pal down to your local theater, as it’s still playing for a few more days most places. This website will find a location near you that is showing them.

REVIEW: 2020 Oscar Nominated Shorts – Animation.

niezi Leave a comment
List:
Hair Love – Matthew A. Cherry and Karen Rupert Toliver
Dcera (Daughter) – Daria Kashcheeva
Memorable – Bruno Collet and Jean-François Le Corre
Sister – Siqi Song
Kitbull – Rosana Sullivan and Kathryn Hendrickson

The Bird and the Whale (Highly Commended)
Henrietta Bulkowski (Highly Commended)
Hors Piste (Highly Commended)
Maestro (Highly Commended)

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Hair Love, Dcera, Memorable, Sister, and Kitbull are contenders for this year’s Oscar nominated shorts in animation, and The Bird and the Whale, Henrietta Bulkowski, Hors Piste, and Maestro are highly commended films also playing at Michigan Theater. Like every year, the style and media of the films differ tremendously, each with its own merits that make it an interesting watch.

The series opens up with Hair Love, a film that’s full of pastels and backgrounds that look like it’s been coloured in with pencil crayons. It’s heartwarming and sweet, and although it’s not as visually rich as some of the other shorts, the pacing in its storytelling is perfect. A father does his daughter’s hair for the first time with a little encouragement – an interaction that develops their relationship in the absence of her mother.

Although Hair Love was produced by entertainment giant Sony Pictures, it feels pretty organic. People need people, and the film does a good job capturing that spirit when the father and daughter bond and rely on each other when their family fabric is pulled and twisted by the lack of her mother’s presence.

Daughter (Dcera) has the momentum and framing of motion picture cinematography. The characters look imperfect, textured puppets with painterly faces, an expressiveness teased out with an unflinching gaze. The camerawork, jarring and claustrophobic, frames the tenuous relationship between father and daughter. Despite the closeness of the camera, there is an endless distance between the two, and the short film takes us to a quiet hospital room to reflect on the course of their relationship and the moments lost so long ago.

Daughter is beautiful and sad. The yearning for love and comfort is pinned delicately in scenes like butterfly taxidermy. There is no dialogue, but Daughter doesn’t need any to convey the emotions told through space and time, through elegantly laid out shots and a silence that stretches between father and daughter until a bird flies into the hospital window.

Memorable follows in the same vein using puppets full of post-impressionistic strokes. Louis, a painter, watches the world around him become strange, surreal, and unfamiliar. The film is imbued with the style of van Gogh in many scenes. It turns his perspective into works of art – a cellphone puddles into moving shades of gray, his family members’ faces become molded and abstract, and his wife becomes nothing more than a few brushes of paint. Life around him falls apart until he is left in an empty world with only himself in it.

The soundtrack is also stunning, just as vivid and as bright as the visuals. When the world around Louis disintegrates and the music fades, the sense of loss feels personal and profound. Memorable does a good job building up this moment. First, the details are lost, turning people and objects into broad strokes. Then the meaning is lost, the paint pooling and disappearing.

We see a different kind of loss in the short film Sister, an exploration of things that could’ve been. The film is very tactile; the textures used lends itself to the distinctiveness of the animation. In a scene, the brother pulls on his giant sister’s belly button, the cottony material used to make the puppets twisting like an umbilical cord out of her until he lets go and she deflates like a balloon. Everything looks very soft and sweet, finished with a muted colour palette of black and white and a faded red.

Despite its subject matter, Sister touches very lightly on the political aspect of China’s one child policy, alluding to it in post-film dedication. Instead, it focuses on the emotions of the narrator, the feeling of loss of not just a person, but an entire life missed because of it. Shots of mundane, every-day life are intertwined with surreal imagery to tell the story of Sister.

Kitbull is very cute, cushioning some of the gloomy undertones. It’s not as emotionally heavy-handed as a few of the other shorts nominated, but there’s a sweetness that prevails. The animation is descriptive; each expression and emotion is detailed through the movements of the stray kitten and the pitbull, even though their art is relatively simplistic. The two characters slowly grow closer together, helping each other get by in daily life, whether it’s from boredom or from hurt. It’s not ground-breaking or riveting, but Kitbull is still a solid film with a happy ending. It’s endearing and hopeful – a good note to end on.

Catch the Academy nods before February 9th.

REVIEW: 2019 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Animation

Angela Lin Leave a comment

The 2019 Oscar Nominated Shorts in the Animation category explore similar themes of family and time, evoking certain emotions over and over again.

Many of the shorts, including Bao and Weekends, were autobiographical. Bao, Disney Pixar’s short released with Incredibles 2 and applauded for its cultural representation, tells the story of a lonely Chinese mother and one of her dumplings when it comes to life as a little dumpling boy. This narrative with animations characteristic of Pixar plays with the idea of parental possessiveness and the need for familial love and attention, taking a harrowing turn at the end that leaves one to wonder the costs of overprotection. Also featuring an Asian-American family is One Small Step, the cleanly-drawn animation about big dreams and realistic achievements. Through the passage of time, Luna must grapple with her dreams of being an astronaut and the obstacles in her way, supported by her single father the entire time. The crisp 3D animation was certainly appealing, turning this “dream-chasing-believe-in-yourself” storyline into something fresh and emotional.

Another short that deals with family is Weekends, a hand-drawn melancholic tale of childhood after a recent divorce. The absence of dialogue brings all the focus onto the universal mood of this film, as a child bounces between homes and lives and relationships evolve as a result, offering a compelling story of a fractured family with purely the art of animation. Late Afternoon looks at the painful issue of memory loss, as Emily, an elderly woman, goes through old memories in order to make sense of the present. Through the use of color, Emily was able to weave through all the different memories, and the flow through time between the present, the subconscious, and the memories. The emotions associated with memory loss was heightened with the use of water throughout the film, washing over her as she searches for clarity.

The last nominee shown, Animal Behaviour, features anthropomorphized animals in a group therapy session. As the most comedic short in the featured films, it is filled with crude animal jokes based on their natural traits until an ape gets going and sets off the dog therapist. The lineup also included two additional selected shorts, Wishing Box and Tweet Tweet. Wishing Box introduced us to a greedy pirate and his hungry monkey companion who come across a box that will give you anything you wish for, while Tweet Tweet gives us the courage to balance on a tightrope as a girl befriends a sparrow who guides her throughout her life.

All the short films used a variety of animation styles, opening my eyes to how diverse animated films can be. From the scratchy and homey feel of the hand-animated Weekends to the colorful, flowy vibe of Late Afternoon to the crisp 2D-on-3D animation of One Small Step, the animation nominees were all both visually appealing and emotionally resonant.