Animated Short Films
The animated shorts list included a couple I didn’t particularly care for, which oftentimes means I’m probably way off on this category this year the same as I was last year when Mr Hublot won, a film I didn’t really enjoy.
Though, I guess I have a hard time saying I didn’t really dislike The Dam Keeper as much as I sort of shrugged my shoulders and said, “Meh,” to its children’s book nature. The story here is of a young pig in charge of a hillside dam that ensures a black cloud of pollution doesn’t ungulf the town below. One day a new “kid” comes to school and befriends the pig, changing his life forever.
Me and My Moulton moved me about as much as The Dam Keeper, though it does offer up a few little chuckles of enjoyment. No two households are the same and you can’t judge a book by its cover is probably how I would best describe this one as it tells of three sisters and their wish for their parents to buy them a bike. Eventually they learn to embrace their family’s differences from everyone else. Decent, not mind-blowing.
The Bigger Picture, which began its life on Kickstarter, is certainly the most “adult” of the features and most experimental when it comes to the animation. This is a life-size, stop motion animated feature in which 2D characters interact with the real world. Yeah, pretty cool, and I think the videos below will do a better job of explaining than I can.
[vimeo id=”85923309″ width=”640″]
A Single Life is easily my favorite of the bunch in terms of the amount of joy it gave me watching it. Now, it’s not as ambitious as The Bigger Picture, but I was impressed by its witty simplicity as a woman receives a record one afternoon and as it begins to play the record skips causing a dramatic change in her life. If I was to award the Oscar for the most ambitious and creative animated short it would go to The Bigger Picture, but for the one that gave me the most enjoyment it would be A Single Life, and yet…
I think it’s a foregone conclusion it will be Disney’s Feast, which premiered in front of Big Hero 6 and, I guess, I really don’t have too much of a problem with that. The animation is inventive and the story is very enjoyable, far more enjoyable than the movie that proceeded it.
So that does it. I’ll have official predictions for the short categories with my final predictions later this week.
