The 2026 Oscar Shorts: Good things in small packages

The Oscar Shorts (2026) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Unrated, akin to a PG-13 for occasional dramatic intensity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.22.26

This year’s batch of Academy Award-nominated animation and live-action shorts is much more entertaining than those from the past several years.

The animated entries aren’t visually weird or off-putting, and the live-action entries aren’t unrelentingly depressing. The overall “mood mix” is varied, with a pleasant balance of serious, gently moral and laugh-out-loud amusing.

 

That said, one live-action entry is quite bizarre ... and we’ll get to that.

 

Starting with animation, I’ve always been impressed by filmmakers who tell their stories without dialogue, making them immediately approachable to viewers throughout the world. Two of this year’s entries take that approach.

 

U.S. writer/directors Nathan Engelhardt and Jeremy Spears deliver a fascinating blend of carved wood elements and CGI in Forevergreen, a charming little tale about an orphaned bear cub “adopted” by a fatherly tree. Their bond is strong until the bear reaches young adulthood, at which point it’s tempted by the allure of easy human food: something the wise, long-lived tree knows could be dangerous.

 

This film’s overall look is enchanting. Engelhardt and Spears wanted their bear to be “tree-like,” to strengthen the viewer’s impression of their rapport; the gentle CGI elements definitely deliver that emotional note.

 

This 13-minute film’s conclusion is a heart-tugger, so be prepared.

 

Russian director Konstantin Bronzit’s The Three Sisters employs classic, hand-drawn 2D animation, in an exaggerated style that enhances his story’s broadly comic elements. (No, this has nothing to do with Chekhov.) Three devout sisters live a quiet life on a barren, isolated island that pokes out of the ocean like the upper half of a beach ball.

 

Supplies are delivered periodically by boat; the women pay with coins from a carefully guarded purse, which — horrors! — one day falls into the sea. Now forced to earn money by renting out one of their homes, the dynamic shifts abruptly when the new lodger turns out to be a grizzled fellow as coarse as they are delicate.

 

Except they don’t stay that way, once they vie for his attention...

 

This core story is hilarious enough on its own, but Bronzit adds plenty of droll sight gags that are even funnier, thanks to his animation style.

 

H Is for Happiness: D Is for delightful

H Is for Happiness (2019) • View trailer

Four stars. Not rated, and suitable for all ages

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.23.20

We all need some measure of control in our lives. Without it, that way madness lies.

 

Poor Candice Phee (Daisy Axon) has almost none. Her mother, Claire (Emma Booth), has retreated into chronic depression since the crib death of Candice’s baby sister. Her father, Jim (Richard Roxburgh), can do nothing about this; he’s also angrily estranged from his incredibly wealthy brother — known by Candice as “Rich Uncle Brian” (Joel Jackson) — believing he got screwed during a collaborative business venture.

 

Candice (Daisy Axon) enthusiastically helps new best friend Douglas (Wesley Patten)
search for the perfect tree, in which to test his dimension-hopping theories ... which
involve jumping from a high branch. (The horse just, well, appears at unexpected
moments.)

Candice and her parents eat their meals separately. Mother rarely leaves her bedroom; Father rarely stops working in his downstairs office, cut off from the world by headphones.

 

As a result, despite being not quite 13, Candice has learned to fend for herself. She’s a bright, inquisitive and — as far as her classmates are concerned — insufferably cheerful adolescent, always first to raise her hand when teacher Miss Bamford (Miriam Margolyes) poses a question.

 

Noting the rows of carefully sorted gel pens forever arranged on Candice’s desk — among her other affectations — “mean girl” Jen (Alessandra Tognini) waspishly refers to her as “Essen,” short for “SN,” as in “special needs.” Indeed, it’s easy to assume that Candice is a spectrum child, or even autistic.

 

But no: The carefully arranged gel pens, her devotion to vocabulary — she reads the dictionary — are simply her means of maintaining somesemblance of order in her life.

 

Director John Sheedy’s H Is for Happiness — available via Amazon Prime and other streaming services — is scripted by Lisa Hoppe, and adapted from Barry Jonsberg’s award-winning 2013 young adult novel, My Life As an Alphabet (a far superior title, by the way). It’s a poignant, carefully nuanced and at times droll slice of Australian whimsy. 

 

Although the emotional content is deeply felt and persuasively depicted — laughter and heartbreak existing side-by-side — Sheedy’s stylized approach owes more than a little to eclectic directors such as Wes Anderson, Baz Luhrmann and Bill Forsythe.

 

Particularly the latter: Like Forsythe, Sheedy’s tableaus frequently include random individuals doing interesting — or unusual — things in the background, or at the fringes of a random shot. Cinematographer Bonnie Elliott’s efforts are deliberately stylized, her depiction of this colorful coastal town of Albany somewhat heightened, in the manner of 2001’s Amelie.

 

A touch of magic realism also infiltrates this narrative, whether in the antics — and wisdom — of the cross-dressing costume shop proprietor (George Shevtsov); or Miss Bamford’s distractingly active lazy right eye; or in the mysterious miniature white horse that inhabits the nearby woods.

 

The woods themselves have plenty of personality; Elliott often aims her camera directly overhead, into the thick top-growth, as the trees mumble, grumble and groan in the breeze. It’s hard not to think of the Ents, in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

 

Early Man: Aardman lite

Early Man (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang

According to the whimsical minds behind Early Man, soccer’s origins go way back.

No matter how much trouble Dug gets into, he can depend on his best friend — his
pet prehistoric pig, Hognob — to save the day.

British director Nick Park and his Aardman production team, best known for claymation superstars Wallace and Gromit, go prehistoric with their newest project: a gentle comedy set at the dawn of time, when cave folk tremble from exploding volcanoes, woolly mammoths and Jurassic-size ... ducks.

The droll production is a smooth blend of Park’s traditional puppet animation and scale-enhancing computer effects. All the characters can be recognized as Wallace’s great-great-great-many-more-greats ancestors: most particularly buck-toothed Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne), the most curious and idealistic member of a small Stone Age tribe led by genial Chief Bobnar (Timothy Spall).

They’re a motley bunch of meek eccentrics unwilling to hunt any game larger than rabbits, despite Dug’s insistence that tackling a mammoth might keep food on the table a bit longer.

It’s important to note, just in passing, that no rabbits are killed or otherwise injured during the course of this story ... although Mother Nature isn’t nearly as kind to Dug’s even more prehistoric ancestors, during a prologue that reveals How Soccer Came To Be.

This is merely the first of many fanciful touches emanating from Park and co-scripters Mark Burton, James Higginson and John O’Farrell. The humor is typically British: dry and mildly snarky, often relying on anachronistic touches. As an example, when confronted with a plate of sliced bread, one fellow enthuses that “That’s the greatest thing since...” and doesn’t really know how to finish the sentence.

At times, one senses the spirits of Monty Python hovering overhead.