It's been over a week since we saw this year's program. Overall, it wasn't as good as last year but not a waste of time. The first short, Madagascar, a Journey Diary (Madagascar, carnet de voyage - 11 min.) by Bastien Dubois (from France), didn't move me, despite its dancing and singing. Perhaps my annoyance at missing the beginning (different problem, but still the second year in a row in the same complex) transferred over to my opinion of the short, which didn't have a story, just people moving around. I did like the animation but the whole piece left me cold. Next was Let's Pollute (6 min.) by Geefwee Boedoe, a satire in the style of a 1950's educational film strip that I enjoyed but Jack said was heavy handed. Again, no plot, but a bunch of people make every effort to consume consume consume, turning the oceans brown and causing the fish to die (their eyes went from o to x), all to jaunty advertising jingle-type music. Despite the exotic name of the director, this is an American production. Third, The Gruffalo (from United Kingdom and Germany - 27 min.) by Jakob Schuh and Max Lang, had a plot and a great cast--Helena Bonham Carter, Tom Wilkinson, John Hurt, Robbie Coltrane, and more. In Sendak-like animation, it begins with a mother squirrel telling her children a bedtime story about a cocky little mouse who makes his way through a dangerous forest. It's pretty cute. The fourth short, The Lost Thing (U.K. and Australia - 15 min.), which won the Oscar last night for Shaun Tan and Andrew Ruhemann is probably my favorite, too. The animation was reminiscent of both Sergeant Pepper and Monty Python. The so-called lost thing is a multi-tentacled creature encased in a metallic shell, and it's found by a guy about one-third its size. Next was Day & Night (6 min.) by Teddy Newton, which we had already seen because, a Pixar production, it preceded Toy Story 3. Kind of saccharine, it had a pair of ghosts through whom we can see day or night. They eventually end up dancing together. These were the five nominated shorts. The program was fleshed out with two more. Urs (10 min.), by Moritz Mayerhofer from Germany is bleak and depressing and we were really glad when it was over. Wordless, it's about a big, muscular guy who straps his aged mother into a chair on his back and climbs over a mountain. Hated it. The last one, The Cow Who Wanted to Be a Hamburger (6 min.) by Bill Plympton, is very cute, also wordless, featuring a calf who is attracted to ads for Happy Burger and tries to get join them. The animation reminded me of Peter Max. Some interesting trivia: Plympton, who at age 64 has 54 directing credits, most of which are short films, turned down a 7-figure offer from Disney to animate Aladdin, because anything he produced while under contract to them would become their intellectual property. Though not nominated this year, his work was in 1988 and 2005. You can watch the beginning here.
I had every intention of staying for the live action shorts but ran out of steam that day.
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