When the Academy releases its Oscar nominations each year, aside from top awards as Best Picture and Best Director, they also have the dreaded Best Short categories. Since these aren’t that widely seen by the public, there are two options for making an educated guess.
You can either pick a winner at random, or preferably, seek out the shorts yourself. One way to do so is to watch the theatrical compilations of the Oscar Nominated Short Films. I watched the compilation of the Animated shorts, and these nominees are quite worth it.
The one that stuck out for me was Let’s Pollute, a six-minute faux educational video about how our economic ways mess up the eco-system. It’s quite an interesting piece due to its style and satirical humor, which borders a bit on meanness.
Day and Night, which many viewers will have seen already with Toy Story 3, also stood out because of its 3-D scenery within its 2-D characters. Madagascar, a Journey Diary, an animated travelogue of the African island, is sure to get some attention due to its shifting styles. An Australian effort, The Lost Thing, and The Gruffalo, a British short with an all-star cast, are the welcome two that round out this category.
In the end, though, my favorite short was one of the two extras that were on the nominations shortlist, but didn’t make it. It was The Cow who wanted to be a Hamburger, a toon about just that. It’s quite a humorous, good-spirited short, whose message I’ll sadly probably ignore afterward.
But ironically, by the time of this writing, the theatrical compilations’ll have come and gone in theaters. Still, find the individual shorts if you can, and you won’t be disappointed.
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