Pixar is riding a losing streak, Canada has two films in the running, and the contenders include everything from a bloodthirsty, chicken-chasing zombie to a kindly Humpty Dumpty.
That’s the landscape in the Oscar Best Animated Short Film category, one of the three shorts categories that TheWrap will survey this week.
The categories may still be the tie-breakers in everybody's Oscar pool, but they're easier to call than they used to be, when "look for the one about the Holocaust" was about as far as shorts-category conventional wisdom extended.
Now, for the seventh year in a row, the nominated shorts will be available on a series of three theatrical programs – one for the animated shorts, one for live-action shorts and one for documentary shorts.
The animated and live-action programs open on Friday in various cities, including Los Angeles and New York, and expand to more than 200 theaters across North America. The doc shorts will follow a week later in most cities, but will also open on Friday in New York.
ShortsHD and Magnolia Pictures will also make the shorts available on iTunes and on Movies On Demand.
TheWrap will spotlight all three of the shorts categories this week, running down the contenders and offering thoughts as to what way the voters might go. (I usually go two-for-three in predicting these categories, but rarely get them all right.)
We'll start with the animated shorts, where it's the National Film Board of Canada vs. Pixar, and where hand-drawn 2D sketches compete with 3D CG animation.
The nominees:
"Sunday/Dimanche" (photo above)
Patrick Doyon
One of two films produced by the National Film Board of Canada, the 10-minute, hand-drawn "Sunday" is a stylish and slightly surreal look at Sunday rituals in a small town bisected by train tracks and regularly subjected to the intrusions of a roaring, house-rattling locomotive.
The main character is a young boy, and the short follows him throughout the day, which includes a trip to church, dinner at grandma's house …
The look is distinctive in what is by far the lowest-tech of the entries, a factor that can work in a short's favor in this category. But "Sunday" is also a bit hard to latch onto emotionally; the film is slight and weird, and memorable more for its trio of cawing birds than for any of its human characters or action.
"The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore"
William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg
The celebrated children's book author William Joyce has produced and written animated shorts and features in the past, but this short is his first as a director. With major nods to "The Wizard of Oz," along with tips of the hat to Chaplin and Keaton, it plays with film references, but is mostly a lovely and evocative testament to the power of books to inform and sustain a life.
