Presenting brief reviews of the five films nominated for this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, ranked from my favorite to least-favorite. It’s a solid slate of films this year – not up to the standard of the same category last year, which was one of the best overall collections of films this category has produced in the 21st Century – but, at a minimum, a good distance better than the Best Animated Feature category this year.
Robin Robin (Dan Ojari & Mikey Please, UK/USA)
Nakedly sentimental and manipulative, but the people doing the manipulating are terrific at it: we have here a 32 minute Christmas special by Aardman Animation, the infinitely beloved stop-motion studio responsible for Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, and some of the best-earned whimsy in modern animation. And in this case, they teamed up with an artist who gets me even more excited: co-director Mikey Please, whose 2011 thesis project The Eagleman Stag remains not just one my favorite pieces of animation this century, but one of my absolute favorite films of the century, full stop. It’s no shock that Robin Robin can’t match that level; it is, to begin with, serving a different audience, and it’s finding that audience through the dark lords at Netflix.
But just because the bare-bones description of what it is – a Netflix-produced Christmas special for children that was already lining up merchandising partnerships months before it was released – suggests a certain level of mercenary cynicism, that doesn’t mean that Please and co-director Dan Ojari (they also wrote the script alongside Sam Morrison) had to treat this like a tacky cash-grab. And, in fact, Robin Robin finds Aardman trying out a brand new aesthetic, pushing itself forward into new terrain like it hasn’t since, arguably, Flushed Away all the way back in 2006, when it first made its first project entirely on computers.
Robin Robin isn’t that big of a break: it’s still stop-motion animation. But instead of the plasticine modelling putty that Aardman has used up till now in creating its squishy figures, Ojari & Please and their team of animators have elected to go with felted puppets. This isn’t that radical; felt and other fabric materials have become something of a trendy way to go in stop motion in recent years. But I’m not sure that I’ve seen any other felt animation puppets used to to create the kind of highly expressive, squash-and-stretch style character animation we see here. These characters have big rubbery expressions that mush up all around their faces and into their bodies, combining the flexibility of old-fashioned cartooning with a cozy, handcrafted feeling of snuggly domesticity, and the marriage is at least slightly unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. Slightly.
It’s also a perfect vibe for the narrative, which is all about the titular Robin (Bronte Carmichael), raised from hatching by a family of mice, under the loving guidance of an apparently widowed father (Adeel Akhtar). The bulk of the story takes place on 24 December, when Robin is made miserably aware that despite her best efforts, she’s not a mouse, and doesn’t have the native facility with sneaking into human homes that mice do. So she needs to come up with another way to prove herself to the family, not really getting that for them, no proof is necessary. She’s one of them, and that’s that. Hence the coziness.
That’s only really active around the edges of the film, though; the middle is taken up with the comic misadventures of Robin and a neighborhood magpie (Richard E. Grant), as they try to steal a Christmas star off a tree, while avoiding a local cat (Gillian Anderson). The style and the story are all about warm Yuletide sentiment, but the film is all about Grant and Anderson giving a pair of outstanding, scene-stealing performances. It’s not a huge surprise to me that Grant should be a great voice actor, giving his character just the right pomposity to be a good comic foil, while lacing that with enthusiastic idiocy; Anderson is an outright revelation, transforming her voice into an insinuating alto rumble, warm and slinky with enough clear menace and hunger to make the character an unambiguous, terrifying threat.
It’s delightful, and it’s funny, and it’s genuinely impressive as a piece of craft; an across-the-board marvel, in short, and given the propensity of 30-minute long Oscar-nominated British animated shorts to crawl along like a dying snail, the fact that it’s so briskly watchable is a Christmas miracle, indeed.
Affairs of the Art (Joanna Quinn, UK/Canada)
It’s a good year for English short animation. I will admit right away that I’ve never seen anything by director Joanna Quinn, who has made three films before this starring Beryl (Menna Trussler), a middle-class eccentric who narrates the film to us as though we were dear, dear friends who made the terrible mistake of asking “what’s up?”, forgetting that this was an invitation to allow her to go on a nonstop 16-minute ramble through an erratic monologue about the various ways that she and other members of her family have been driven by this or that obsession. But if the other Beryl shorts – or Quinn’s non-Beryl work, including previous Oscar nominee Famous Fred, from 1996 – are anything like this, I have some marvelous treats in front of me.
The script, by Les Mills (who has collaborated on all of the Beryl shorts), finds us stumbling across Beryl as she’s plunging herself into a mission to become a painter, and it’s very, very hard to tell if this is a lifelong dream finally reaching fruition, or the latest in an endless chain of ideas that she commits to with great eagerness for a little while before moving on. The eagerness is the point, at any rate, and it’s with ingratiating, chummy incoherence that Beryl tells us the stories, in no particular order, of how she got into painting, her sister got into taxidermy, and her son got into, among other things, appreciating the precision of screw threads. The unifying themes is that these are all driving passions, verging on compulsions, for the individuals involved, and Beryl’s story ends up telling us much more about how a family of obsessives can create a breeding ground for more obsession, than about how an artist’s mind works. Somehow, this is all done without a trace of mockery, and indeed one gets the feeling that Quinn and Mills actively love their grotesque, eccentric weirdos, even when they’re up to the ugliest behaviors.
It’s a sprawling monologue, and it gets a sprawling style to go with. Quinn’s aesthetic feels a little bit like Bill Plympton by way of classic Disney: a lot of fluid movement and big facial expressions, drawn in the form of urgent, at times barely legible scribblings that feel like they’ve come from the deepest depths of an ugly bender. It’s a style that favors human grotesques, and Quinn is very happy to make her cast look like a collection of oddities, but the very same graceful fluidity of their movement adds some warmth that one would never, ever find in a Plympton film. Instead, it feels like the film is constantly racing to catch up with Beryl’s words and the raw ebullience of the people she discusses, the art vomiting itself on the screen with all the pencil lines of the drafting still visible beneath the body shapes, barely able to get there in time to fill out this world. Very much a “not for everyone” proposition, but I found it bracing and routinely hilarious, if only because it moves with such energy that it’s hard not to be swept up in the anarchic bliss.
Bestia (Hugo Covarrubias, Chile)
Context matters here: the film gives us some at the end and none at the beginning, and without that, I think this is still a brutal dive into a depraved psychology. But for the true weight of the film to land, I think it requires knowing at some point, in advance or not, that the main character in this wordless slice of life (and death) directly echoes Íngrid Olderöck, a Chilean-born descendant of escaped Nazis who, in the 1970s, became a particularly imaginative torturer for the Pinochet regime.
You are at this point probably imagining an experience extremely close to the one Bestia actually offers: in a generally distressing and weird collection of movies, this is far and away the bleakest, presenting a savage pantomime of banal daily life interspersed with brief flashes of the horrifying violence flickering inside Íngrid’s broken mind. Literally: the film opens by watching her on an airplane, steadily moving in towards the cracks stretching out from a little chipped-out hole in her skull (Íngrid is, in the film, played by a porcelain doll head atop a cloth body, animated through stop-motion). It’s a metaphor just as blunt as the film to follow, ushering us into a fractured brain for a 16-minute tour of the horrors to be found there.
It’s all very obvious, but to a certain degree, “it’s so obvious” is the film’s argument: it’s so obvious that a person doing what Íngrid Olderöck did, a person capable of doing what she did, is somehow outside the pale of humanity, so how is it possible that she was just perfectly fine all through her life? It’s part of the evergreen Chilean genre of “We have not come close to reckoning with the savage ugliness of the Pinochet years” films, focused and compacted by the productive limitations of the short film form. The film has one basic idea: present Íngrid’s daily life in a tonally flat series of moments, with the inexpressive porcelain doll and her cute felt dog being put through little dollhouse scenes; and then present her visions of slicing off the dog’s head, training it to rape prone humans, and other charming stuff like that with the same tonal flatness. It makes an experience that’s deliberately and necessarily harsh and unpleasant somehow that much harder, since the film isn’t giving us any kind of “out” with the extreme content; it’s an ugly and inhumane part of life, but it’s part of life all the same, and that is that.
Boxballet (Anton Dyakov, Russia)
Absolutely the most stylistically conservative film here: it’s pretty straightforward hand-designed 2D drawings animated with the help of computer software, so the extremely detailed human caricatures can be moved relatively fluidly without completely destroying the character models. The story is barely any more complicated: she’s a ballerina, he’s a boxer, will these two kids from opposite worlds end up together?
And yeah, it’s the thing that it is, but it’s a pretty good version of it. For one thing, the film manages to sell its toughest idea without any trouble: ballet and boxing are both just different ways of controlling your body in space, both require a great deal of coordination, both require you to sculpt your body into an extremely unlikely form. For another, those caricatured designs are fantastic. The ballerina is a collection of sinuous tubes, roughly the shape of a bean sprout; the boxer is made up of endless scalloped curves on curves, a pyramid of muscular blobs. The colors have a really lovely mottled texture that gives the whole thing a little bit of colored pencil texturing.
And it helps that the story, however light and clichéd, is presented with such pleasant commitment. The wordless storytelling is carried off smoothly, hanks in no small part to those wonderfully evocative, warm character designs; they’re such emotionally immediate figures, whose emotions are carried out through their body shapes as much as their faces and actions, that the story itself attainst he same kind of emotional immediacy. It’s almost like a little fable, really, taking full advantage of the inherent surrealism of drawn humans that move to create a state of pure emotionalism.
And then it all goes weird right at the end: literally in the last ten seconds, it throws out a brief flourish of historical (live-action) stock footage that’s basically a twist ending. And that twist basically says “surprise! This has all along been an allegory for Russians rebuilding their lives in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union!” Which, sure, I guess there’s nothing wrong with allegory, but it came as a real shock, and not a terribly happy one.
The Windshield Wiper (Alberto Mielgo, USA/Spain)
The one misstep of the bunch. It springs from the question “what is love?”, asked of a thoughtfully philosophical-looking man tearing his way through a pack of cigarettes, sitting at a table in a diner, and it ends with him providing a pretty terrific, if overly cunning, one-sentence answer right at the end. In between are almost 15 minutes of… love stuff. It’s all presented as a series of disheveled fragments, covering a wide range of experiences: lovers sitting stiffly in detached silence on a beach, people more interested in treating dating apps as a game than as a way of making human contact, enjoying peaceful silences and trying to escape them like a prison.
It’s pretty damn formless, obviously on purpose, and the style that Alberto Mielgo and the animators of Leo Sanchez Studio have concocted to frame all of the disconnected fragments of different lives serves to make them feel even more broken-apart and deatched. The film is 3-D CGI – the only one of the nominees to use that ubiquitous style, in fact – and it is very crude, basic CGI, though I think it would clearly be incorrect to suggest that this is because it’s cheap, or underfunded, or such things. This is closer to aesthetic primitivism, and there’s certainly a sense in which it’s interesting that CGI has been around long enough that it can have a “primitive” form. It’s transformed the simple textures and shapes of the models into something looks like three-dimensional graphic art, with floating lines creating volume separate from the volume of the models themselves.
Given my ongoing complaint that CGI always does the same boring things, I should be more sympathetic to this than I am; it’s certainly unusual, grabbing the medium and forcing it to do something new. But it’s also extraordinarily ugly, and it adds a level of slick, toxic shine to a film that already takes a pretty cynical and mean view of how humans inhabit the world and forge (or fail to) relationships with each other. The whole thing, narratively and visually, is just laborius, is the thing, and more than slightly pretentious, and while I appreciate that it’s boldly going into uncharted territory, all it’s found there is swampland.