#forevergreen

For Christmas, I got you this link to this Disney-animator's short film, only available for the next few days to stream for free.

Just watched Forevergreen, a heartwarming animated short directed by Nathan Engelhardt and Jeremy Spears. Sharing it with you guys because I really enjoyed the giant/tiny interaction between the massive tree and the bear cub.

Best Animated Short Film Nominees for the 98th Academy Awards (2026, listed in order of appearance in the shorts package)

This blog, since 2013, has been the site of my write-ups on the Oscar-nominated short film packages – a personal tradition for myself and for this blog. This omnibus write-up is done in memory of two now-shuttered theaters that were very important to this tradition – the Nickelodeon Theatre of Santa Cruz, California (2012 and 2013) and the Regency South Coast Village in Santa Ana, California (2014-2020, 2022-2024).

Now, here are the nominees for the Best Animated Short Film at this year’s Oscars. In decades’ past, this was a category that was the province of Walt Disney Animation, Warner Bros., and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Familiar names such as Tom and Jerry, Mickey Mouse, and various Looney Tunes characters populated the nominations and wins. With the shuttering of MGM and Warner Bros.’ original animation studios and more recently the withdrawal of Disney and Pixar animated shorts from cinemas, this has become the most democratic of all Oscar categories. And certainly, the most stylistically diverse of the short film categories.

My write-ups for this year's Best Documentary Short and Live Action Short nominees are in those preceding links. Non-American films predominantly in a language other than English are listed with their nation(s) of origin.

The Three Sisters (2024, Russia)

Director Konstantin Bronzit is one of two previous nominees in this year’s category (2014’s We Can’t Live Without Cosmos). His latest film, The Three Sisters represents a curious trend in the animation film festival circuit: Russian directors labeling their films as Cypriot (Cyprus) movies and submitting to film festivals using pseudonyms. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, filmmakers like Bronzit – who, shortly after the invasion, signed an open letter to condemn his nation’s warmongering – have used fake names and the Cypriot label to bypass festival programmer biases. The Three Sisters’ nomination came to be with the Academy’s full knowledge of the film’s correct nation of origin and Bronzit’s directorship.

Like We Can’t Live Without Cosmos, The Three Sisters is foremost a film about loneliness. Set on an island barely qualifying as one – a very steep sand dune, with no foliage – three sisters live their lives, periodically receiving company from a passing merchant ship. When one of the merchant ship’s visits goes wrong, the sisters decide to rent out one of their homes. A gruff, tattooed, grunting sailor takes them up on the offer – and all three sisters are smitten.

At fifteen minutes, The Three Sisters’ mildly funny take on social isolation never develops beyond sibling squabbling and the sailor’s obvious disregard for the women who clearly enjoy his presence. The film’s visual language is aggressively horizontal – except for the opening minute. Thus, we always see the island from the same angle (from a distance, with the doors of the houses facing the viewer). Perhaps Bronzit is trying to make the viewers feel the constraints of the sisters’ island lives, but it comes off here as too similar to cheap Flash animation.

My rating: 6/10

Forevergreen (2025)

Qualifying for this year’s Academy Awards by winning the Grand Jury Prize for Animated Short Film at the American Film Institute’s AFI Fest 2025 in Los Angeles, Forevergreen feels like a film, at least in its first half, channeling the spirit of Walt Disney Animation’s Silly Symphony series (1929-1939). A presumably orphaned bear cub – hungry, cold – encounters an anthropomorphic tree that provides shelter, feeds, and raises the cub. As the years pass, Forevergreen unfolds as a moralistic fable, without dialogue, and contains temptation-driven character development playing out way too quickly. That is textbook Silly Symphony material (1933’s The Three Little Pigs and its sequels, 1936’s The Country Cousin) and one’s ability to forgive such rapid changes in character motivations will depend on the viewer.

The co-directors are longtime Disney Animation veterans Nathan Engelhardt (originally a Blue Sky animator, he served as animation supervisor on both Zootopia movies and 2014’s Big Hero 6) and Jeremy Spears (storyboard artists on 2011’s Winnie the Pooh and 2021’s Encanto). Both wanted to attempt an animation project outside of their day jobs, and found more than two hundred volunteers to assist them on all aspects of production. The polished CGI masquerading as stop-motion animation is always charming. And there are some moments here of incredible visual inspiration – a wooden waterfall, a film-ending timelapse, the fire effects.

Forevergreen’s resolution might feel unsatisfying to viewers because a character who does not necessarily “deserve” absolution nevertheless receives it. According to Engelhardt and Spears, devoted Christians, that was exactly their intention. A Bible verse (John 15:13) just before the end credits was more off-putting than conclusive to me, but it spells out – perhaps too explicitly – the film’s message. This would not be the first time a Disney or Disney-adjacent project directly invoked the Bible (Bagheera directly quotes John 15:13 to eulogize a supposedly dead Baloo in 1967’s The Jungle Book). To each their own regarding the film’s Biblical invocations.

My rating: 6.5/10

The Girl Who Cried Pearls (2025)

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB), a public producer/distributor funded by the Canadian government, is now a multi-decade powerhouse of animated short films. Their 39 nominations are second only to Disney Animation (51, sans Pixar). The latest NFB nominee is Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski’s gothic fable The Girl Who Cried Pearls (La jeune fille qui pleurait des perles). Lavis and Szczerbowski were previously nominated for Madame Tutli-Putli (2007).

In Paris, an older man (an excellent Colm Feore) recounts to his granddaughter (Gabrielle Dallaire) the story behind his most treasured possession: a pearl. The film is mostly told in flashback, as we transport back several decades to Montréal. Our narrator, then a homeless and starving young boy, encounters a girl of similar age. They never meet or speak to each other: he observes the girl and her family solely by peering through a wall from an abandoned next-door apartment. The girl suffers daily abuse from her stepmother, with her sickly father unable to stop this. At night, she cries herself to sleep, with her tears turning into pearls.

The stop-motion animation is outstanding: it makes full use of its actors’ fully expressive live-action reference footage to dictate its incredibly fluid movements and the gorgeous, ramshackle production design (the pawnbroker’s shop is the highlight). CGI animation was used only for the characters’ mouths – The Girl Who Cried Pearls has both an English- and French-language version, and having to film dialogue scenes twice would be prohibitively expensive. And the flashback’s unsettling character designs – unevenly colored green-and-red skin, painted eyes that never blink or move – seal the film’s gothic bona fides.

The Girl Who Cried Pearls feels like a half-forgotten story untold for most of a lifetime. In tone, it has much in common with the dark fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. In storytelling, this is a sharply-told parable. That includes its unsatisfyingly abrupt ending that nevertheless upholds the film's thesis (uttered by the grandfather near the end) – showing the uncomfortably close lines between love and greed.

My rating: 9/10

Butterfly (2024, France)

Also known by its French title, Papillon, Florence Miailhe’s film tells the story of Artem “Alfred” Nakache – an Algerian Olympic swimmer who represented France at the Berlin 1936 and London 1948 Summer Olympics. Nakache was an Algerian Jew*. Upon Nazi conquest of France, Vichy France (a collaborationist state to Nazi Germany) stripped Nakache of his French citizenship. The Nazis sent Nakache to Auschwitz and separated Nakache from his wife and daughter (he never saw them again). Nakache survived the Holocaust, and the only member of his family to do so. Butterfly unfolds mostly in flashback, as Nakache – now sixty-seven years old – takes one final swim in the harbor at Cerbère (he fell ill shortly after the swim and died after a brief illness on August 4, 1983). The film presents itself as Nakache’s stream of consciousness as he does what he loves to do the most.

In fifteen years of viewing the nominees in this category, I have never seen an all-painted animated short. The only points of comparison for Butterfly are two feature films: Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman’s Loving Vincent (2017; a Van Gogh biopic entirely in his style) and The Peasants (2023). But unlike the hundreds of artists that worked on those films, Florence Miailhe was one of only four artists – all women – who meticulously painted the several thousand paintings needed for Butterfly’s fifteen-minute runtime. If one of the artists made a “mistake” on one of the paintings, the film would adjust around it. Throughout, Miailhe and her artists depict water differently depending on the scene (darker colors and disturbed ripples for emotionally fraught moments; lighter colors and transparency for more peaceful passages). The attentive use of color – no matter what is happening on-screen – emotionally guides the viewer through Nakache’s triumphs and tragedies.

For those wondering about the inspiration for this film: Miailhe’s father got to know Nakache through his work with the French Resistance. Miailhe’s father deeply respected Nakache – who never publicly spoke of his most traumatic experiences. Here, she wanted to honor her father’s friend, a French swimming pioneer (who just so happened to train with the same swim team that schooled Léon Marchand decades later) lost in the nation’s memory.

My rating: 9/10

* In 1870, France issued the Crémieux Decree, which automatically granted Algerian Jews full French citizenship while Algerian Muslims remained second-class citizens in the French Empire.

Retirement Plan (2024)

Entering into Oscar consideration by winning the Grand Jury Award for Animated Shorts at SXSW 2025, John Kelly’s Retirement Plan is easily the funniest of this year’s nominees. That is largely due to Kelly and Tara Lawall’s screenplay – dry and droll, poetic and poignant. The origins of the film stem from Kelly (who works in the advertising industry, not cinema) having a panic attack at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, as he realized all the things he wanted to do but hadn’t.

Ray (Domhnall Gleeson) is approaching retirement, as he relates to the audience all of the things he wants to do when he retires. Through a montage of those things Ray fantasizes that he wishes to do when he reaches retirement, Retirement Plan succeeds mostly on Gleeson’s great delivery of his lines. Its appeal to all of us to live life as completely as possible – whether we are young, old, or somewhere in between – applies to us all, within the means we are lucky to have. How appropriate that this was the last film seen in the theatrically-released set for North American audiences.

Yet, as wonderful as Gleeson’s delivery is and as much as I enjoyed the humor of Retirement Plan, I have to judge this on the merits of being an animated short film. As a piece of animation, the simplistic illustrations do very little to evoke any emotion – that is almost entirely coming from Gleeson’s narration and the use of John Carroll Kirby’s piano piece “Walking Through a House Where a Family Has Lived” (not an original composition for this film, but very fitting nonetheless). Other than the gradual progression of Ray’s aging as the montage continues and Ray’s one unchanging salmon-colored polo, the visuals are not complementing the spoken material as well as it could.

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. Half-points are always rounded down.

From previous years:

85th Academy Awards (2013)

87th (2015)

88th (2016)

89th (2017)

90th (2018)

91st (2019)

92nd (2020)

93rd (2021)

94th (2022)

95th (2023)

96th (2024)

97th (2025)

One other film in this package played as an honorable mention. The film was Cartoon Saloon's Éiru (2025; dir. Giovanna Ferrari; 7/10).