#boxballet

Best Animated Short Film Nominees for the 94th Academy Awards (2022, listed in order of appearance in the shorts package)

NOTE: Because moviegoing carries risks at this time, please remember to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by your local, regional, and national health officials.

This blog, since 2013, has been the site of my write-ups to the Oscar-nominated short film packages – a personal tradition for myself and for this blog. This omnibus write-up goes with my thanks to the Regency South Coast Village in Santa Ana, California for providing all three Oscar-nominated short film packages. If you are in the United States and Canada, find which theaters are showing the Oscar-nominated short films here. Without further ado, here are the nominees for the Best Animated Short Film at this year’s Oscars. Films predominantly in a language other than English are listed with their nation(s) of origin.

As this is the tenth time I have seen the animated (and live-action) short film Oscar-nominated short film packages (since February 2012, missing 2014), I wanted to thank all those who have watched these films with me over the years – whether virtually, in-person, or in spirit. It has been my privilege to share these films with you.

Robin Robin (2021)

If the name Aardman Animations doesn’t ring a bell, perhaps their filmography does. The British stop-motion clay animation studio is responsible for the Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep films, in addition to standalone features such as Chicken Run (2000). Directed and co-written by Dan Ojari and Mikey Please (Sam Morrison is the third writer), Robin Robin is Aardman’s first foray into needlefelt stop-motion. Here, a family of mice adopts a baby robin (Bronte Carmichael), and they decide to raise her like a mouse (Adeel Akhtar voices Dad Mouse). Sometime later over Yuletide, the mice bring Robin along to their nighttime raid to help pilfer food from a “Who-Man” house. A mix-up brings Robin in the company of Magpie (Richard E. Grant), who has eyes set on a Christmas tree star to add to his collection, and a malicious cat (Gillian Anderson) looking for her next meal.

Robin Robin is a wholesome, if slight, delight for all of its brisk thirty-two minutes – deserving of becoming a family holiday tradition. As charming as the premise and execution are, the film contains some of the best animation in Aardman’s history. The animators sewed together at least five puppets of each major character, with a grand total of seventy-five puppets in use over eight months of filming. If, going into a first viewing of this film, one doubts that felt characters with googly eyes could be as expressive as any stop-motion character before them, be ready to have those expectations exceeded. So seamless are the characters’ movements that two people who I had the pleasure of seeing this with at first thought this film was computer-animated. The design and lighting of Robin Robin’s wintry wonderland – from the kitchens laden with food and the snowy exteriors – is immaculate, to the point where one almost forgets this is an animated short film. This is yet another stunning achievement from Aardman, befitting a studio that remains one of the standard-bearers for stop-motion animation.

My rating: 8.5/10

Boxballet (2021, Russia)

Kazakhstan-born director Anton Dyakov once taught children at an art school. During “free topic, free choice” time, he would notice that most of the boys would draw sportsmen (boxers, footballers) and the girls opted for dancers and ballerinas. As an inside joke to his friends, he would say that to make a film with a boxer and a ballerina would appeal to both. Many years later, those art school memories intertwine in the dialogue-free Boxballet, an allegorical film that waits until the last second to reveal its late Soviet-era underpinnings. It is 1991 in Soviet Russia. Evgeny is a boxer, bruised and bludgeoned over his many years in the ring. Olga is a ballerina who is facing pressure to return the invasive and unwanted affections of her ballet director so that she may play the title role in Adolphe Adam’s Giselle. Our two protagonists meet accidentally, and set off on an unlikely relationship from there.

The timing of Boxballet’s Oscar nomination during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is a curious coincidence. When one realizes the film allegorizes the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is all the more curiouser. Olga’s ballet director and his behavior is a stand-in for the old Soviet state – its corruption, its obsolescence, its paper-thin strength. Her eventual decisions in the film are reflective of what democratic-minded Russians could envision for themselves in the early years of the pre-Putin Russian Federation. Evgeny and Olga, mulling their future together, also make their choices in light of the unpredictable chaos the future will later reveal. Elsewhere, the extreme contrast in the character designs strengthen the comedic elements of the film – physical (see the differences in boxer and ballerina movement) and romantic. Dyakov, working alongside for the first time with Melnitsa Animation Studio animators (2015’s We Can’t Live Without Cosmos), endows Boxballet with an intimacy that feels unexpected, but fully earned.  

My rating: 7.5/10

Affairs of the Art (2021)

Most first-time viewers of Joanna Quinn’s Affairs of the Art might be surprised to learn that this is the latest film in a series. Quinn, best-known for creating the Charmin bears, has been telling the story of her anti-heroine, Beryl with Girls Night Out (1987), Body Beautiful (1990), Dreams & Desires: Family Ties (2006). In Affairs of the Art, we meet Beryl’s (Menna Trussler) family: husband Ifor, sister Beverly, and son Colin. Since viewers last met Beryl, she is now, “drinking through the cup of creativity” in using her body (and the reluctant Ifor) as an artistic subject. Her artistic instincts have consumed her – something that she compares to the obsessions of, through narrated flashbacks, Beverly (a taxidermist with a crush on Vladimir Lenin who yours truly believes is a psychopath) and Colin (anything of technical complexity). The disjointed structure and rambling narration are purposeful, as this latest nominee from the oft-nominated National Film Board of Canada (NFB) revels in its dark humor.

Is Affairs of the Art an unhinged ode to creating art or a spiel from a person who remains high-functioning despite a mental disorder? However one analyzes the film and whether or not you gel with its absurd and graphic comedy as written by Les Mills (Mills also wrote the previous Beryl-starring short films), Quinn’s movie is a stylistic wonder. Despite its rough pencil strokes to outline its characters and foregrounds, Quinn’s pencil animation keeps character animation unexpectedly fluid. The viewer can feel the weight of characters and intuit their gait in just a few seconds of screentime. For the first time in a short film starring Beryl, dialogue occurs on-screen. Quinn, who did not want to go through the trouble of syncing dialogue and animation, found that this process aided her film. The lip sync is an integral part of her characters’ acting. In conjunction with their designs, this provides Affairs of the Art a vitality that Quinn’s prior Beryl movies do not have.

My rating: 6.5/10

Bestia (2021, Chile)

Similar to the Academy Award-winning Bear Story six years ago, Bestia requires context for non-Chileans in order for them to fully appreciate the film. In 1973, a CIA-backed military coup d’état overthrew a democratically-elected socialist government. Its replacement was a junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet. With American assistance, Pinochet’s regime kidnapped, tortured, and executed political opponents through 1990 – several thousand desaparecidos (“disappeared”) remain unaccounted for. Hugo Covarrubias’ Bestia (“Beast”) follows a woman who resembles Íngrid Olderöck (“La mujer de los perros”), an infamous member of the Chilean secret police (DINA) who committed rapes and torture with a dog. The first half of Bestia follows our protagonist (“Íngrid”) as she goes about her silent, regimented morning routine with her canine companion. From the moment we meet Íngrid, the droning and unsettling score from Ángela Acuña immediately hints that what is about to occur will disturb the audience.

Bestia then spends the remainder of its time excavating the depths of Ingrid’s mentality – her casually violent thoughts and dreams, the callousness of her work, the mental detachment she adopts in order to be at terms with herself. If you have not seen this film and have read this far, you are probably imagining, accurately, the cinematic approach Bestia takes to show the calm in how Íngrid commits atrocities. As a stop-motion film, Bestia makes a key decision to represent its characters as porcelain dolls rather than clay or felt figures. Where most animated shorts wish to exaggerate character emotions and movements, Bestia distinguishes itself – and strengthens this personal portrait – by adopting the antithesis. As an inexpressive porcelain doll, Íngrid embodies the gruesome banality of her existence, never allowing the audience any tonal reprieve even in the closing seconds of the film.

Other writers, upon learning that Olderöck survived a 1981 assassination attempt, have bemoaned the she never received any punishment for her crimes in life. A little more than a week after viewing Bestia, I would not be so sure.

My rating: 8/10

The Windshield Wiper (2021)

The Windshield Wiper is a Spanish-American co-production directed by Alberto Mielgo. Mielgo has an eclectic visual résumé befitting the fascinating look of his newest film, including art direction on the television series Tron: Uprising, visual consultant on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), and as director on an episode of Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots. As visually stunning as The Windshield Wiper is, its shapelessness is a detriment. The film begins with a lonely, cigarette-puffing man asking, “what is love?” For the remaining fifteen minutes of The Windshield Wiper, Mielgo presents various scenes of love – a couple lounging on a beach, two people at a grocery store oblivious to each other while swiping away on a Tinder-like app, a homeless man exclaiming how much he misses someone. These fragments, connected by the slenderest of threads, have little to offer about or on the opening question.

Appearing like an incompletely-rendered Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Windshield Wiper’s stripped-down CGI animation is interesting to behold. At a time when CGI has unfortunately become the overwhelming default in American mainstream animation, The Windshield Wiper’s aesthetic serves as counterbalance. Mielgo appears that is he attempting a discourse on how modernity has filtered out genuine love, but the loosely-edited vignettes prevent much of the intended pathos. The film’s title, according to Mielgo, derives from the action of raindrops being cleared by a windshield wiper while driving. A pattern of rain appears differently each time, as does love. His film is approaching the avant garde, which – as Mielgo notes himself – will easily divide audiences in how they perceive his dense filmmaking.

My rating: 7/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

From previous years: 85th Academy Awards (2013), 87th (2015), 88th (2016), 89th (2017), 90th (2018), 91st (2019), 92nd (2020), and 93rd (2021).

Boxballet