#dcera

Dcera / Daughter by Daria KASHCHEEVA

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Best Animated Short Film Nominees for the 92nd Academy Awards (2020, listed in order of appearance in the shorts package)

Since 2013 on this blog, I have been reviewing the Oscar-nominated short films for the respective Academy Awards ceremony. This is one of my favorite traditions for the “31 Days of Oscar” marathon I hold yearly, and I recommend to all my North American followers to seek these shorts out (see this) – they have just released to theaters as of this review’s publication and the reach of each package’s distribution increases every year. As a one-off for the 92nd Academy Awards, the Oscars are being held on their earliest weekend ever, giving everyone less time to see the nominated shorts.

Without further ado, here are the Academy Award nominees for Best Animated Short Film. Three of the five are stop-motion animation. It’s a solid bunch and – despite the fact I have seen better nominee slates – all fully deserving of their nominations (it is rare I feel that way) in a tightly contested year. They are all, in some ways, featuring characters and showing how they connect to others.

Hair Love (2019)

Co-directed by Matthew A. Cherry (former executive at Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions); Everett Downing Jr. (a journeyman storyboard artist who has worked with Blue Sky, DreamWorks, Netflix, and Pixar); and Bruce W. Smith (creator of The Proud Family and former supervising animator with Walt Disney Animation Studios), Hair Love becomes what is most likely the second film in the history of the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film to have significant involvement from a former professional athlete (Cherry; the first is probably 2017′s Dear Basketball). Distributed by Sony Pictures Animation following a Kickstarter campaign, Hair Love played in front of 2019′s The Angry Birds Movie 2 – talk about a disparity in quality. The film follows a young girl as she refers to a YouTube channel (this film showcases modern technology but does not, like many other animated films, date itself in its technological depictions) to style, if not tame, her hair. Her father – who appears to have little experience with cutting or styling hair – is hesitant to help his daughter, but they struggle and learn together. The final moments of Hair Love reveal that their time learning from these online tutorials extends beyond their bonds as father and daughter.

Hair Love, riding on Hollywood goodwill from figures rarely associated with animation, has been lauded for its depiction of black fatherhood. In American popular culture, black fathers in black-centric narratives have often been portrayed as abusive or absent. So to see the opposite in hand-drawn animation is a welcome sight. The daughter’s hair almost has a life of its own and is normalized (black hairstyles have long been otherized in the West); an abstract sequence where the father is doing combat with the out-of-control hair represents the awkwardness of this scenario – with zero dialogue – perfectly. For an animation studio ridiculed for releases like The Emoji Movie (2017), Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and Hair Love serve as partial correctives. 

My rating: 8.5/10

NOTE: Hair Love can be seen on YouTube as of this review’s publication.

Dcera (Daughter) (2019, Czech Republic)

The Czech Republic can lay claim to being the home of the late Jiří Trnka, arguably one of the greatest, most innovative stop-motion animators of all time. Carrying that legacy forward is Daria Kashcheeva, a graduate of the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU). Her graduation film, Dcera (“Daughter” in English), won a Student Academy Award and was deemed the best graduation film at the famed Annecy International Animated Film Festival (the most important all-animation film festival in the world). In Dcera, we find a young woman at the side of her father’s hospital bed, reminiscing about their relationship. Wordless and shot largely with a shaky camera and in close-up, we see several images from the woman’s childhood – how her father, barely scraping by with household duties, had little time to express his love to her. Dcera often breaks into literal flights of fancy and the daughter’s surrealistic imagination. And yet even when retreating into a world crafted so that she can escape, there is a longing to bring her father in.

Kashcheeva’s notes about Dcera elicit that she wished to accomplish an, “authentic immediacy and a para-documentary nature” to her film via the film’s constant close-up shots and low depth of field. She mostly succeeds; although the shaky camera is distracting and prevents the audience from forming an emotional connection with the characters onscreen. The stop-motion puppets appear to be made of papier-mâché and are intentionally rough –reflecting how difficult their lives have been and the innumerable imperfections of their personhood. The production design – when we are allowed to see it (the lack of production quality is not any fault of the film’s, considering that it is a graduation work) – resemble something from a lucid nightmare. Dcera is an outstanding feat of stop-motion stylization. In its final minutes, it seeks to understand and to forgive that which was never realized. Its emotional impact is imperfect, but its intentions nevertheless pack a wallop.

My rating: 7.5/10

Sister (2018)*

When the Chinese Communist Party brought an end to its one-child policy in 2015, it concluded a decades-long experiment that has left China in a demographic bind. Stemming from a decision made in 1979, the policy’s consequences include a skewed age disparity and sex ratio at birth that will affect the nation for more several decades. Siqi Song’s graduation film from CalArts, Sister, has the one-child policy in mind. The film, narrated by Bingyang Liu (no previous film credits) is a reflection by a man thinking about his life with his little sister. More than midway through Sister, the audience learns that the film is nothing more than speculation. In China even now, the one-child policy – since replaced by a two-child policy – has left its mark on numerous generations be they children, parents, grandparents. The film’s unique character design is wool-based, with its monochrome pallet recalling an older family photo album.

According to Song, the film’s story, “didn’t change from the very beginning. [She] always knew the film would be about a man imagining how his life might have been like had he had a little sister.” What did change while Song – a “little sister survivor” whose family made a tremendous effort to keep her a part of their family – made Sister were the stories of a brother and sister as the two grow up. The never-to-be siblings have their conflicts, as well as their moments of familial love. Not all of the ways this is depicted work, most notably the scene where the sister grows beyond her crib to become a giant looming over her brother (the metaphor here is too heavy-handed). Our narrator ponders whether he might have been a different person if his mother – pregnant with his younger sister, wanting very much to bear her – never had the policy-forced abortion. Given the trauma it inflicted on his mother, the narrator – even from an early age – will be left pondering this well into his adulthood. Is there regret in his narration? Guilt? I don’t have any answers, but I will leave it to those of Chinese descent to discern theirs.

My rating: 8/10

*Sister is entirely in Mandarin. For non-English language films, I usually list the film along with its country/countries of origin unless it was primarily an American production. Despite Sister being listed as an American/Chinese co-production by Song, I see no evidence of a Chinese studio backing the film. For record-keeping purposes, Sister will be deemed an American film.

Mémorable (2019, France)

Last year, Ireland’s famous Cartoon Saloon garnered acclaim for Louise Bagnall’s Late Afternoon. Late Afternoon, an expressionistic study in an elderly woman’s dementia, is a distant cousin to Bruno Collet’s Mémorable. Here, an artist named Louis (André Wilms) shifts between periods of remembrance and forgetfulness. His wife, Michelle (Dominique Reymond), tends to his needs and to his increasing disconnection to the things and people around him. If Louis has one fixture in his life, it is his painting – with brushes or, close to the end, with his fingers. Collet, noting the increase of short films – animated or otherwise – about dementia in recent years, indeed questioned the wisdom of yet another film about someone suffering from it. He then encountered the works of artist  William Utermohlen. Utermohlen, like Louis, continued painting even as his dementia impaired his understanding of his surroundings, let alone his work. Collet, now convinced of the validity of his plans by learning of Utermohlen’s life, set straight to work on Mémorable.

Mémorable evolves as the film progresses. What seems like a straight stop-motion animated short film transforms itself as Louis’ dementia worsens. By the film’s end, Louis’ figure begins to melt into something like oil paints, making him a living Impressionist painting while others around become surreal on the terms of a Picasso or Dali. With Mémorable containing plenty of dialogue, none of this ever detracts from this short’s abstractions The film’s final moments – an uplifting dance scene between Louis and Michelle – is an extraordinary marriage of stop-motion animation and computerized animation. By then, Collet has depicted the progression of Louis’ dementia in as cinematic a way as possible using an array of styles that could not have been predicted within a twelve-minute animated short film. The technical daring of Mémorable and the strength of its artistic conceit is breathtaking to behold.

My rating: 9/10

Kitbull (2019)

If any animation studio has a history with animal, it is Disney. Released as one of Pixar’s “SparkShorts” – a program created in 2019 to foster the talents of Pixar’s younger animators to force them to make short films with limited resources – Rosana Sullivan’s Kitbull joins that esteemed company. Sullivan, a storyboard artist who worked on the likes of Monsters University (2013) and Incredibles 2 (2018), was previously training to be a veterinarian and had helped many pit bulls in clinics and shelters. She, “saw how sweet and gentle they could be, despite [her] initial fears.” Her work with unadopted black cats formed the other half of what would become Kitbull. In San Francisco’s Mission District, a scrawny kitten and a pit bull who is forced into dogfights (even the implication of dogfighting would render Kitbull ineligible for wide theatrical release by Disney executives, knowing their insistence on a sanitized brand) strike up a friendship.

The design of the kitten is not realistic, but it would not be believable if Kitbull was filmed as a stop-motion or CGI-animated film. The kitten’s unrealistic body proportions make it more appealing and the minimalism of the pit bull’s design (there is a minimum amount of lines used to trace its facial shape) is effective artistic economy. The pit bull is a type of dog in need of an image rehabilitation. Perceived the be among the most violent of dogs, pit bulls are anything but naturally violent and Kitbull plays into this misconception. Sullivan’s experience as a former veterinarian student are fused with themes of loneliness and trust-building. Cut down from an 18-minute-long storyboard to its nine-minute runtime, Kitbull is an efficiently told animated short film evoking the pathos of animal-centric Walt Disney Animation Studios’ feature- and short-length films of the 1930s and ‘40s.‡

My rating: 8/10

‡ Which, for younger readers that have not seen Disney films from those decades, should be taken as a high compliment.

NOTE: Kitbull can be seen on YouTube as of this review’s publication.

^ Based on my personal imdb ratings. Half-points are always rounded down.