I always look forward to the annual Academy Award-nominated short subjects, because succeeding in that form requires a special skill.
It’s the visual equivalent of literary talent. It’s easier to develop an engaging page-turner in the limitless expanse of a novel, but far more difficult to achieve the same dramatic or comedic punch in 14 short pages.
This year’s crop of live-action entries is quite strong, but the animated nominees are ... a mixed bag.
Starting with the former, director Adam J. Graves’ Anuja is the gripping saga of the 9-year-old title character (Sajda Pathan) and her older sister, Palak (Ananya Shanbhag). They live on the streets of Delhi, India, and eke out a hand-to-mouth existence by working in a sweatshop garment factory. The parentless girls’ “home” is an abandoned building, their food meager at best.
Palak knows that her younger sister is whip-smart, with a talent for math. Anuja is given an opportunity to attend school, but the placement exam involves a fee that girls never could raise. Worse yet, when the factory’s intimidating manager (Nagesh Bhonsle, in a hissably oily performance) learns of Anuja’s talent, he wants her to spend one day a week doing clerical work for him ... and warns that if she chooses school, Palak will lose her job.
Graves’ storytelling approach is unembroidered, which adds to the dramatic impact. He doesn’t preach, choosing instead to simply show every detail of the girls’ grinding, hard-scrabble existence.
The story’s conclusion is a nail-biter, but additional dramatic heft comes from the final text block: Graves’ film was made with the support of the Salaam Baalak Trust, a nonprofit that provides food, shelter and education to thousands of street and working children in New Delhi. Pathan — as impressively gifted young actress — is one of those children. Simply amazing.
Croatian director Nebojša Slijepčvić’s The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent is similarly harrowing. Goran Bogdan stars as Dragan, one of many passengers on a train traveling from points A to B. It makes an unscheduled stop; soldiers board and move slowly down each car, demanding papers and asking each passenger to identify the family’s patron saint. Those who cannot do either are removed from the train.
Dragan shares his compartment with several other passengers, including a frightened young man who watches the soldiers approach with dread, and quietly confesses that he has no papers. The soldiers get closer...
Although quite gripping, Slijepčvić’s film suffers from a lack of context. It’s based on an actual event: the Štrpci massacre that took place on February 27, 1993, when a Serbian White Eagles paramilitary group boarded a train traveling from Belgrade to Bar, and removed 18 Muslims and one Croat. One man challenged this action.
The incident illustrates the moral challenge facing those who witness unspeakable acts, most famously articulated by Pastor Martin Neimöller’s “First They Came”: Are we brave enough to stand up to violence, even if we aren’t its immediate target?
Croatians no doubt will immediately recognize the 1993 atrocity from this film’s setting, but an initial text screen would have been handy for American viewers.
On a much lighter note, Dutch director Victoria Warmerdam’s I’m Not a Robot is a quietly subversive slice of whimsy that’ll resonate with everybody whose laptop routine has been interrupted by a demand to solve a CAPTCHA test. (I hate the damn things, because it often isn’t clear which square images fit the desired command.
(I also never knew that CAPTCHA was an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart; I thought it was a made-up word.)
Lara (Ellen Parren), a successful music producer, is quietly working when a CAPTCHA screen abruptly pops up. She solves it; another appears. Then another. Then another. And another.
The CAPTCHAs finally cease, and are replaced by a message that reads “Unfortunately, you did not prove you are human,” followed by a brief online test that concludes, “There’s an 87 percent chance you’re a robot.”
At which point, poor Lara falls into the Twilight Zone.
Warmerdam builds this scenario to an abrupt — and unsettling — conclusion.
A Lien, the category’s “message entry” — which, given our current political climate, could push it to victory — comes from co-directors David and Sam Cutler-Kreutz. Sophia (Victoria Ratermanis) and Oscar (William Martinez) and their young daughter arrive at a big-city immigration facility, all necessary forms in hand, for his scheduled Green Card interview.
Unfortunately, the building also contains individuals present for an entirely different reason. A final text crawl reveals that the arrest of undocumented immigrants, at their required Green Card interview, is actively practiced by ICE.
The directors emphasize Sophia and Oscar’s confusion and mounting terror, along with the building’s crowded, Kafkaesque cacophony, via blurry cinematography, cockeyed camera angles and smash edits. Alas, they overplay that hand; the result is distracting, and undercuts the story being told.
The setting is South African’s Amakhala Game Reserve, and the story is based on actual events that occurred in 2012. Liyabona Mroqoza stars as Litha, a young Xhosa girl who has grown up admiring elephants and rhinos, thanks to the small carvings made by her father. They live near the reserve, which is patrolled by a single ranger — Khuselwa (Avumile Qongqo) — assisted by Robert (David S. Lee), who handles fence repairs and other maintenance duties.
And protection.
Khuselwa also carries a gun, because armed poachers constantly try to hack off rhino horns, in order to sell them to wealthy Chinese and Vietnamese buyers; they grind the horns into powder and consume it, believing this will cure cancer, hangovers and other maladies. (Utterly deplorable.)
Litha chances upon Khuselwa on this particular day; the ranger takes the eager girl into the reserve, to see all manner of animals, and mostly particularly her adored rhinos.
Then poachers strike.
What follows is an emotional gut-punch on many levels: definitely not for the faint of heart, and absolutely not for young children. That said, Lee’s film is an awesome achievement, laden with depth and dramatic heft; it feels more like a full-length movie, than a 28-minute short.
Like, wow.
Turning to the animated entries, I first must note that — once again — this Academy branch’s members obviously smoke too much wacky tobaccy. They keep populating this category with entries that are aggressively weird, at the expense of plot, characterization and basic watchability.
But let’s begin with the good stuff.
Iranian co-directors Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani’s minimalist In the Shadow of the Cypress tells its story without dialogue. The setting is a lone beachside home occupied by an aging sea captain and his adult daughter. The man, once in some unspecified military conflict, suffers from PTSD; his frequent rages have become too much for the young woman, who prepares to leave him.
Her departure is sidelined when, to her horror, a whale beaches itself in front of their house. Roused by her frantic effort to help this magnificent creature, her father joins the struggle ... but can they succeed?
The story builds to a genuinely poignant conclusion, and the hand-drawn animation style is oddly flat. The woman and her father are thin, tall stick-figures; the result is unusual, but not unpleasant.
The poetic title refers to the Persian culture’s belief that a cypress tree symbolizes resistance, purity and innocence.
French animator Loïc Espuche’s Yuck! is a delightful charmer set in a summer camp laden with dozens of families. Léo is one of five children gleefully disgusted every time they see adults kissing each other on the mouth: totally gross! They can see this act from afar, because when people are about to kiss, their lips become pink and shiny.
Ah, but Léo hides an embarrassed secret: His lips are starting to glow pink, every time he glances at Lucie, the lone girl in their little group.
The story gets much of its humor from the voice acting, done entirely by actual children. The eventual outcome is precious, but the film isn’t well-served by Espuche’s primitive, old-school, hand-drawn animation.
Dong-Dong is a lonely little boy, raised solely by his rather strict father, who plays marbles by himself, while forlornly watching other children play together in the park. His sole companion is an aging black-and-white dog, which lies faithfully by his side.
One day, while seeking new marbles in a shop, he instead buys a bag of marble-shaped candies. He pops one in his mouth after returning home, and is astonished to find that the living room couch starts talking to him. The boy briefly spits out the candy, noting that its yellow/orange color scheme matches that of the couch. Boy and couch converse until the candy melts away ... and then it’s just a couch again.
So ... what do the other candies match, in terms of color?
Answering that question sends Dong-Dong on a revealing and instructive personal journey that explores perspectives, and teaches the boy to better understand the world around him ... and the individuals close to him.
Totally beguiling, from start to finish.
As for the remaining two entries ... it’s flat-out bizarre that both feature explicit male nudity, for absolutely no reason. Do the Academy branch members have some weird fixation? Sadly, this unwarranted display of genitalia makes the entire quintet unfit for children, which robs them of the ability to see the others.
But that’s far from the only problem. Dutch animator Nina Gantz’s stop-motion Wander to Wonder is a peculiar piece set in the world of a 1980s children’s TV show of the same title. At its prime, revealed via old video clips that occasionally interrupt the current events, a kindly host dubbed Uncle Gilly (Neil Salvage) oversees the antics of three furry little creatures dubbed Fumbleton, Mary and Billybud.
But they’re actually tiny human beings (!) in costumes, and — in the present day — the actor playing Uncle Billy is dead, his body slowly decomposing in a moldering studio laden with flies. With nobody to guide them, and food becoming scarce, the trio presses on, creating increasingly deranged episodes to entertain their audience.
But do they even have an audience? And where did these little people come from? And is their slide into dementia supposed to be somehow entertaining?
Gantz explains, in the series press notes, that her film is a study in how people cope very differently with grief. That’s a stretch, and I highly doubt that point will be recognized by folks who wander unawares into this 13-minute exercise in relentlessly distasteful vulgarity.
Gantz’s film has serious competition from Belgian director Nicolas Keppens’ stop-motion Beautiful Men, quite possibly the most insufferably pointless animated short I’ve ever seen. The flimsy excuse for story finds three brothers traveling to Turkey, in order to get hair transplants, and how they get on each other’s nerves along the way.
“Boring” isn’t a sufficient descriptor; neither is “baffling.” This 18-minute exercise in meaningless behavior isn’t merely a waste of time; it’s proof that this Academy branch desperately needs new members who will reward quality.
Beautiful Men supposedly is one of last year’s five best animated shorts? Seriously? Better than — right off the top — Pixar’s exquisitely produced Self, which actually is about something?
Nonsense.
And if Magic Candies doesn’t win on March 2, they’re gonna hear from me...
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