Eat My Shorts

This year Comcast On Demand is making available the programs of Oscar-nominated short subjects in the animated and live action categories. Nine of the ten nominees are part of the programs, and I happily viewed them over the past two days.

In the animated category, all the nominees are there except for Pixar's La Luna. Perhaps this is because it will be shown before Brave this summer, and they didn't want to let the cat out of the bag until then.

The other four nominees are accounted for. Two are from the National Film Board of Canada. Dimanche/Sunday is a charming but slight tale about a boy's typical Sunday. He hangs out by the railroad track near his house, putting coins on the track. He goes to church, and visits his grandparents, and has what may be a hallucination about a bear trophy on his grandfather's wall. Wild Life is about a proper Englishman who goes to western Canada to be a rancher, but finds himself overwhelmed by the harshness of the land. The film attempts to be more intellectually rigorous by comparing his life to that of a comet's.

Many of these films are hand drawn, which is refreshing in this age of CGI. The Morning Stroll is mostly made of line drawings, and is a three-act story about a person walking along the street and seeing a chicken waddle by. By the third act, it is a post-apocalyptic future and the chicken is chased by a mutant, and then ends with a punchline. Cute.

But the best of the four in the program is the poetic The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. A Buster Keaton-like character and his house are picked up in a windstorm, and like Dorothy Gale of Kansas is deposited in a dream world, where books are sentient beings and can fly. They communicate by flipping their pages, registering emotion. The Keaton figure, Morris Lessmore, becomes guardian for a house full of books, even doctoring them when their pages fall out. The emotional connection between people and books, fast disappearing, registers wonderfully, and the animation is beautiful.

In the Live Action category, all five films are included. Two of them are very short comedies. Pentecost, from Ireland, is about an altar boy who lets his attention wander, constantly thinking about football. There is an amusing scene in which the priest gives a pep talk to the boys as if it were before a soccer match. Time Freak is a very cheaply-made gag about a scientist who has invented time travel, but spends over a year just trying to get his day perfect. It's like something you might see on Saturday Night Live, but not Oscar-winning material.

Also in a comic vein is Tuba Atlantic, a Norwegian film about an old coot who has been give six days to live. He wants to communicate with his brother, who he hasn't spoken to in thirty years, but the only way to do it is by blowing a tuba through a sound-enhancing contraption they invented. A teenage hospice worker helps him. The film is far too overloaded with whimsy, and I know seagulls are annoying, but there's a little too much giddiness in enjoying seeing them killed.

The best two films are the dramas. Raju is a German/Indian co-production about a pair of Germans who have adopted a four-year-old Indian boy. They are in Calcutta, and he becomes lost. While searching for him the parents learn something that tests their resolve.  It's a very well done morality play.

The win should go to Terry George's The Shore, set in Northern Island. It concerns the return of Ciaran Hinds, who emigrated to America and hasn't been back in 25 years. He brings with him his daughter (Kerry Condon), who finds out that he was previously engaged to a woman not her mother. Hinds tells her the full story of his best friend, his fiancee, and how they drifted apart. Condon insists he get in touch with them, and the reunion has both broad comedy and pathos. Though the film stops a bit dead while Hinds tells the story (certainly a longer, more funded film would have included a flashback) I enjoyed the richness of the tale.

George has been nominated twice for Oscars before, for writing In the Name of the Father and Hotel Rwanda. Here's hoping he wins this time.