Chances are, you landed on this review because you’re trying to game your Oscar pool, looking for a clue as to what will win the always-underseen shorts categories — in a year when they were unceremoniously booted from the telecast, no less. Well, if it’s predictions you’re looking for, there’s little contest among this year’s cartoon contenders: Academy favorite Aardman Animations has delivered a delightful frontrunner in “Robin Robin.” But don’t stop reading there! In an unusually adult-leaning year, the traditionally kid-friendly category is well worth watching in its entirety, whether in theaters or on demand, thanks to stalwart distributor ShortsTV.
The program opens with “Robin Robin,” which seems poised to earn Aardman its fifth Oscar (the other four were all won by Nick Park, creator of the Wallace and Gromit characters). This half-hour Christmas musical was hatched by Dan Ojari and Mikey Please, who joined the Bristol-based studio for the express purpose of co-directing this Netflix holiday special, about a clumsy baby bird (Bronte Carmichael) raised by a family of far-more-agile mice who’s determined to prove that she can sneak as well as the rest of them. Along the way, she teams up with Magpie (Richard E. Grant, terrific) and does her best to evade a menacing Cat (Gillian Anderson, still sounding like Margaret Thatcher), which is all quite adorable, whether your six or 60. The rhyming script and character designs recall “The Gruffalo” as much as anything Aardman has created, and the material itself — needle-felting, rather than sculpted plasticine figures — gives everything a wonderful tactile quality.
The next four shorts aren’t really for kids at all, which marks a welcome change for the category. Russian animator Anton Dyakov’s hand-drawn “Boxballet” brings together two opposites — battered prizefighter Evgeny and dainty dancer Olya — in a rather cynical romance, one in which the pair must endure all manner of moral compromise in order to be together, just as the Soviet Union is collapsing around them. In the studio, she’s harassed by a pot-bellied Svengali; in the ring, he’s beaten to a bloody pulp after refusing to cheat. (“Dumbass!” his trainer huffs in the film’s only intelligible line of dialogue.) It’s an ugly story, both visually and in such details, though it’s not without humor or a certain sweetness in the rugged characters’ moments of wordless connection. Then as now, Russia runs on corruption, and this highly stylized short stares that reality head-on, while showing optimism for a future (now past) this odd couple will face together.
It’s easier to love Britain-based veteran Joanna Quinn’s “Affairs of the Art,” another hand-drawn entry whose pleasures derive from its loose style (Quinn lets her sketch work show in the finished film), expressive characters and irreverent sense of humor. The project picks up where things left off with Beryl, the lively working-class woman she introduced 35 years ago in “Girls Night Out.” Here, Beryl’s determined to be an artist, enlisting her husband for an amateur version of Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” while gossiping about her various good-for-nothing relatives. The result has personality to burn, embracing violence, sexuality and an all-around kind of insouciance that rivals fellow doodler Bill Plympton. There’s a Disney cuteness to her aesthetic, though Quinn’s independent as they come.
By far the most disturbing of the bunch — but only because twisted Taiwanese horror short “The Night Bus” (Joe Hsieh’s Sundance-winning entry) wasn’t nominated — Chilean director Hugo Covarrubias’ “Bestia” takes some time to unpack. It also benefits from a second viewing, for those who can stomach it. This chilling portrait of evil clearly relates to the country’s still unresolved political history under Pinochet, though hardly anyone knows the woman who inspired it, Ingrid Olderöck, going in. She was the tool of a corrupt regime — depicted here as a blank-faced porcelain figure in a disconcerting stop-motion world — though Covarrubias is slow to reveal her role (as a torturer of female prisoners), and even then, he leaves much of it to our imaginations (Ingrid’s dog Volodia was trained to sexually assault these captives in the basement of a nondescript house known as “La Venda Sexy”). The film takes us inside Ingrid’s head, literally, where fantasies and fears leave lasting impressions on us as well.
While it seems unlikely to win, the best of the lot — the nominee most likely to change the medium itself — hails from Alberto Mielgo, the visionary artist behind “The Witness” entry of Netflix’s “Love Death + Robots” anthology series, whose early, way-outside-the-box design work on “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” set the revolutionary look of that film. His short, “The Windshield Wiper,” centers around a universal-enough question, “What is love?” and splinters out in a dozen different directions. Drawn from a mix of personal experience and imagination, the 14-minute everything-everywhere-all-at-once assembly — a raw medley of heartbreak and yearning — operates according to the visual vocabulary of movie trailers and TV commercials, efficiently paring larger stories down to key moments: a couple sits on the beach, sharing a cigarette; a tattooed man and Goth woman are so busy swiping through a dating app that they fail to notice one another at the grocery store; an elderly couple share a quiet moment before her death.
Ever since “Up,” animators have been trying to capture the emotional power of that film’s relationship-spanning montage. Most simply try to imitate what Pixar did there, but Mielgo makes it his own, mining his relationship history for answers to the larger human condition. It’s impossibly ambitious — the reason Charlie Kaufman got into animation in the first place, because it can access this potential — tackling everything from tentative, vulnerable early text message conversations to the pain of outliving one’s soulmate.
Nota bene: Only one animated short impressed me more last year, French director Bastien Dubois’s shortlisted “Souvenir Souvenir” (not included, since ShortsTV skipped the “Highly Commended” bonus offerings this time around). Like triple-nominated feature “Flee,” Dubois’ self-reflexive project expands the potential of the animated and nonfiction formats alike, focusing on his grandfather’s service in the Algerian War, while addressing universal issues of PTSD, guilt and how subsequent generations process the sins of their elders.
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