Oscar Nominated Animated Short Films 2019

To shake things up a bit I watched all the Oscar nominated short animated films from 2020. You can find most of them online or rent them/buy them on iTunes or Amazon.

DAUGHTER (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)(Dceraj)

Written and Directed by Daria Kashcheeva

Nominated for best animated short at the Oscar back in February 2020, this poignant and beautifully realised Czech film uses a sort of stop motion technique using puppets made in what looks like paper mache. It is filmed as a real film would be, with big close ups of faces, shallow depth of field, handheld camerawork and so on. Not a single line of dialogue is spoken as a woman sits by her father’s deathbed waiting for the final moment… and as she does remembers…Poetic, minimal and profound.

SISTER (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

Director: Siqi Song

“Today I want to tell you about sister” starts this short animated film, this one too nominated for an Oscar in 2020.Coming from China, I should have expected the twist, which suddenly lifts the film and gives it a whole new meaning. Dedicated to ”the siblings we never had” between 1985 and 2015, this is a strange, gentle (like the way the characters are portrait here, like cotton stuffed dolls) and haunting film about siblings (or lack of), is probably a quiet political form or protest, but also a cry for lost generations… for what lives could have been… if…

MEMORABLE (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

Director: Bruno Collet

Another short animated nominated at the Oscar 2020, this French little gem depicts a couple of old people. The husband, probably with dementia, lives a strange reality as he forgot most about his life and how to live in it and yet he still has remnants of his old self, his humour, his love for paintings and his love for his wife. Romantic, touching, poignant.

HAIR LOVE (⭐️⭐️⭐️)

Directed by: Matthew A. Cherry, Everett Downing Jr., Bruce W. Smith

A dad literally wrestling with his daughter’s hair… she’s seen a video online about how to take care of her hair and she asks her dad for help. What a seemly trivial little story about finding the right hairstyle hides a poignant twist. Slightly manipulative, and a bit cheap (both in its intent and in the execution), this would have been fine if I hadn’t seen the others first. It is probably the second least interesting of the lot and yet, because it’s American and it’s distributed by Sony, eventually it was the one that won the Oscar.

KITBULL (⭐️⭐️)

Director: Rosana Sullivan

I don’t think I got this one… or at least I got it, but I did it think it was worth a nomination. An unlikely friendship between a dog and a kitten, which could only be made in animation, because as we know cats are selfish and would never help a dog escape his abusive owner. Very unmemorable and not even that interesting from the technical point of view.