For the first time since 2002 there isn?t a single Disney or Pixar film in the running for the Academy Award category Best Short Film (Animated). For that matter, there isn?t a single American film in contention in either short film category this year, continuing the slant to international animation that began last year when Torill Kove?s ?The Danish Poet? beat out Pixar favorite ?Lifted.? This year, there are shorts from Canada (?I Met the Walrus? and ?Madame Tutli-Putli?), France (?Even Pigeons Go to Heaven?), Russia (?My Love?) and Britain (?Peter & The Wolf?).
In lieu of an authentic Pixar short, ?Even Pigeons Go To Heaven,? directed by Samuel Tourneux, is a worthy substitute. As the only nominated short made with 3-D computer animation, the influence of that famous Silicon Valley studio pervades throughout, with the ?pigeon? of the title ? a stingy and squat Provencal man ? bearing more than a passing resemblance to Skinner from last year?s ?Ratatouille.? The color palette is a bit more muted and mature, however, with lavish attention paid to the texture of everyday furniture and fabrics such as wool and corduroy. It also features a keener, more biting wit than American audiences are used to, with a slimy salesman peddling a machine he claims will transport the curmudgeonly man to heaven despite his long list of moral failings. The fates have others intention, however, and our anti-hero winds up with egg ? or something much grimmer ? all over his face.
?I Met The Walrus,? directed by Josh Raskin and produced by Jerry Levitan, has a clever, YouTube-esque charm that recalls 2000?s ?my spoon is too big!? nominee ?Rejected.? The short?s premise involves a surreptitious recording made by Levitan as an unusually eloquent 14-year-old as he interviewed John Lennon in his hotel room. As Lennon lectures that ?nonviolence and humor? are the best ways to rebel against the corrupt sociopolitical system we live in, a combination of pen and computer illustration animates Lennon?s words in absurdist, literal depictions, with each image seamlessly swirling into the next. For example, when Lennon talks about the ?square children? who will put down your aspirations, a series of stocky, cubic children instantly pop up. When Lennon points out, however, that they?re just living ?under the wings? of their parents, feathers sprout from their shoulders and a Wings album materializes in their hands.
Viewed purely in terms of visual excellence, Russia?s ?My Love? (Moya Lyubov) easily surpasses all other nominees. The film is animated with Aleksandr Petrov?s breathtaking technique of manipulating pastel oils on sheets of glass (winning him a 1999 Academy Award in this category for ?The Old Man and The Sea?), blurring the line between the traditional designations of ?high art? oil paintings and ?low art? time-based media. Almost every frame in the short exists as a considerable artistic achievement in its own right, from impressionistic studies of a shoe or hand to lush rococo landscapes to even nightmarish imagery worthy of Goya. The actual story, however, is a bit underwhelming and involves a young boy growing up in an aristocratic household in Turgenev?s turn-of-the-century Russia as a love triangle unfolds between him, his young maid and a rich, married woman next door. The plot comes across as simple and overly sentimental, without providing enough time for the audience to become familiar with the characters before following them through a twisting series of plot turns, deaths and renunciations. Even at a comparatively epic 26 minutes, the audience feels rushed and vaguely dissatisfied.
If ?My Love? doesn?t win this Oscar merely on the strength of its animation, the award will likely go to ?Peter & The Wolf.? This short is an idiosyncratic telling of the children?s story that combines Sergei Prokofiev?s classic musical composition with traditional stop-motion animation and a modern, ethically ambiguous viewpoint. Set in a modern, paradoxical Russia that has never existed, Peter is a brooding loner with piercing blue eyes who is prone to getting bullied by two gun-toting bad guys and thrown into the Dumpster. His friends include a somewhat dimwitted goose that Peter clings to like a blanket and a crow with a broken wing that manages to fly by a chance entanglement with a helium balloon. When Peter breaks open the back gate of his house, leading to the woods, his familiar leitmotif begins to ring in. Told without dialogue, the story is both familiar and magnificently new, with various changes to the original storyline ? not the least of which being an empathy Peter shares with the wolf as another commiserate outcast. Although there is nothing special to the animation, the visuals don?t needlessly call attention to themselves, letting the story carry the full weight. Of all the shorts, ?Peter & The Wolf? is the only one that feels less a snapshot than a complete story, self-contained in its own fantastic universe.
It seems likely, then, that this year the Academy will opt to reward a solid story over artistic merit alone.
Madame Tutli-Putli: 2 stars out of 5
I Met the Walrus: 4 stars out of 5
Even Pigeons Go To Heaven: 3 1/2 stars out of 5
My Love: 3 1/2 stars of 5
Peter & The Wolf: 4 1/2 stars out of 5
