Hi.
So, I actually found an upload of the last of this year's Oscar-nominated shorts, An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It. It's on Vimeo, but I'm not sure if the account is official or not. I don't want to review films on unofficial channels. So, sorry.
As compensation, though, I also found a few of the animated shorts that were also for Oscar's consideration on official channels. You'll also get a short I found while perusing the Annie Award nominations. That short wasn't considered at all this year, but maybe next year (that's what happened with one of this batch). These shorts are all on The New Yorker's YouTube Channel unless noted. Here they are.
Save Ralph - This short on the Humane Society's YouTube channel is a mockumentary about a test rabbit named Ralph (Taika Waititi). His cheery attitude about his "job" brutally contrasts with the side-effects. It's not pretty.
Ralph and his fellow test subjects are appealing stop-motion bunnies, but his physical condition isn't. He's already blind in one eye and deaf in one ear. Let's say it gets worse. I'm grateful that this wasn't any longer than four minutes. Any longer than that would have been a trek into despair.
The Black Slide - This slightly more upbeat Israeli short follows a day in the waterpark with Eviah (Ivri Shai) and Tsuf (Rom Shemesh). They sneak off to ride the park's most imposing attraction - the titular Black Slide. But Eviah has second thoughts. Meanwhile, we see him at home as he becomes aware of a looming family tragedy.
Its visual aesthetics are quite appealing. The water park's exaggerated production design is personified by the Black Slide itself, which is a mess of tubes. It gets pretty surreal inside when Eviah takes that plunge. The film's CGI stop-motion style is an appealing one. Tsuf is likable enough, but Eviah is wholly sympathetic. We feel for him when he accidentally scrapes himself on the slide's chain-link fence and when he listens to a certain phone call near the end.
The Garbage Man - This Portuguese short has the most interesting story to tell. In it, director Lisa Goncalves chronicles her uncle, Manuel Botao, through a family dinner. He's long gone, but his family is here to tell how he fled the Portuguese civil war and became a Parisian garbage man. One man's junk was his treasure, and he had a lot of it thanks to his job. He had a good life with what he had.
The sketched-out aesthetics were actually animated with the TV Paint program. This simple style is made stellar by its cinematography, which has some impressive one-takes (including one through the family dinner). Characters frequently step in and out of portraits, including Botao's monkey, the most striking character here. Botao's story is compelling and from what we hear of him, he sounds like he was a cool guy. The pineapple story is a highlight. Now from one dinner to another ...
Steakhouse - Short of the Week, an online film festival, hosts this Slovenian short on their YouTube channel. In it, Liza (Marusa Mejer) and her husband, Franc (Marko Mandic), have a contentious dinner. He let the steak burn as he waited for her to come home from her birthday party. Things soon take a turn for the gruesome.
You can tell during the dinner scene there's no love between Franc and Liza, especially when he "thanks her" for cooking the steak. It's a rough scene to watch with his exaggerated chewing and them eating amidst their dinner's smoke. You'll be puzzled when something happens to Franc. The actual truth will hit your stomach. Overall, the smokey watercolor aesthetics are fine and the story telling is efficient. But beware your appetite.
Love, Dad - This is the short that made it onto this year's Annie Awards list, but not this year's Oscar list. This Czech short follows the correspondence between a Vietnamese immigrant and his daughter, the director Diana Cam Van Nguyen. He spent a year in prison, where he wrote some letters, then left the family when he couldn't get a son. Nguyen found those letters years later. She narrates a letter she wrote back, where she hopes to reconnect with him.
The animation style resembles a collage of paper cutouts in motion. It gets its point across in a few scenes where young Diana interacts with a blank cutout of her dad. We can tell how much of a void he left in her life. There are a few impressive one-takes here, particularly one which travels through a swimming pool to focus on Diana's unhappy mother. It then transitions to a still frame of an argument back home. We also get a facsimile of a happier relationship between her and her dad ... with a catch. We see her frustrations in paper form play out over 12 minutes. It's a compelling story of a lost relationship that hopes to be found.
What's more with the shorts? The nominated short film packages are playing now in theaters. I'm going to catch the live-action package next week and review it then. Look forward to it.
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