I always look forward to the live action and animated Academy Award nominees; it’s fun to wonder if we’ll see the first efforts of the next Spielberg, Kurosawa or Scorsese, or the next Miyazaki or Lasseter.
Most of this year’s live action nominees show plenty of promise.
The animated nominees are, um, more challenging. And be advised: Two of them absolutely are not for children.
Lysiak’s story is a bittersweet “first sexual encounter” saga, but Julia isn’t a fresh-faced youth; she’s an embittered, sexually frustrated, middle-aged woman who has spent her entire life deflecting rude comments about her diminutive stature as a “little person.” The pain is palpable in Dzieduszycka’s expression and posture, as she angrily chain-smokes and feeds endless coins into slot machines.
Then she chances to meet Bogdan (Szymon Piotr Warszawski), a trucker who smiles and treats Julia with respect; the flicker of hope that illuminates Dzieduszycka’s eyes is heartbreaking. Lysiak doesn’t pull back from subsequent details; the difficulty she has buying a suitable “date dress,” for example, is particularly touching.
Sezim nonetheless runs away to Beshkek, moves in with her friend Aksana (Madina Talipbekova), and gets a job in a bakery while awaiting the results of a university entrance exam. One day, totally without warning, she’s kidnapped by three young men; they drive her to an even more remote Kyrgyz village, where she’s forced to marry one of them (Nurbek Esengazy Uulu, as Dayrbek).
The village women, themselves former victims of “bride-kidnapping” — which apparently is endemic in Kyrgyzstan — offer no sympathy.
Turdumamatova’s performance is shattering; Sezim’s despair and desperation are palpable. Brendle’s plot beats are unrelenting; we Western viewers can’t help being shocked by her helplessness, and the callous “traditions” that tolerate such treatment of young women.
Danish filmmaker Martin Strange-Hansen’s On My Mind is slight, but quite sweet. Henrik (Rasmus Hammerich) wanders into a bar at closing time; owner Preben (Ole Boisen), running receipts, wants him to leave. Bartender Louise (Camilla Bendix), sensing pain in this customer, is more accommodating.
Henrik spots the bar’s karaoke machine, and asks to sing a song; this further fuels Preben’s impatience. The question, of course, is why the agitated Henrik so desperately wishes to sing this particular song; the touching answer comes via the persuasive work by all three actors.
British director Aneil Karia’s The Long Goodbye, co-written with star Riz Ahmed — and designed to accompany his recent rap album of the same title — is a violently angry indictment of institutionalized racism. Alas, Karia and Ahmed drastically overplay their hand, and the resulting 12-minute film is likely to alienate viewers inclined to be sympathetic to the message.
The setting is a dystopian near-future (although that isn’t made clear), when roving gangs of thugs (police?) routinely raid the homes of “foreigners” — despite their British roots — and execute them in the street. The film’s deplorable first half is merely a set-up for Ahmed’s subsequent lengthy, vitriolic rap, the core message of which is “We’re citizens just like you are.”
But the set-up doesn’t work. Given the premise, Ahmed’s character’s family is oddly clueless, like lambs waiting to be slaughtered; the result is more a rap video than anything approaching a coherent narrative.
Mateo (Erick Lopez), heading to work one day, is apprehended and arrested by a police drone that subsequently takes him to a booking station, and then to a prison cell: a wholly automated process lacking human involvement. But Mateo hasn’t done anything, and he has no means of contacting anybody to prove this.
Dávila and co-writer Omer Levin Menekse are relentless with this mistaken-identity trauma: bits that are simultaneously hilarious (we laugh nervously) and terrifying. The overseeing Correcticorp AI (“Reforming one life at a time!”) botches Mateo’s guaranteed phone call; the price of his meals, as days and weeks pass, are charged against his depleted savings; the only way he can earn funds is pennies-by-the-hour crocheting for Handmade … which is, of course, a subsidiary of Correcticorp.
Lopez’s emotional disintegration — confusion to disbelief, to anger and frustration, to barely controlled patience, to dismay and finally weary resignation — is totally persuasive.
Moving on, English animator Joanna Quinn’s Affairs of the Art is the newest chapter in the wacky life of Beryl, the working-class eccentric previously seen in three earlier shorts: Girls Night Out (1987), Body Beautiful (1990) and Dreams & Desires: Family Ties (2006).
Quinn’s loose, painterly, hand-drawn style is strongly reminiscent of American animator/cartoonist Bill Plympton; both create aggressively misshapen burlesques whose behavior borders on distasteful, even repugnant. Although Beryl’s determination to become an artist is this new short’s core plot, numerous detours explore the lunatic quirks of her husband (Ifor), their son (Colin) and her sister (Beverly), along with their repulsively peculiar childhoods.
I guess it’s all supposed to be funny, but my reaction can be summed up with one of Beryl’s own rhetorical questions: “Why am I wasting my time on this s---?”
But if Affairs of the Art is merely distasteful, Chilean director Hugo Covarrubias’ Bestia is downright disgusting. The main character is inspired by Íngrid Olderöck, a ruthless DINA agent with the Chilean military dictatorship ruled by Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to ’90. Her stop-motion counterpart here is based on a porcelain doll, as a means of conveying this woman’s coldness.
That said, this 16-minute nightmare is best described as the revolting thoughts, desires and actions of a woman sliding into insanity; two brief sequences are beyond repugnant.
Academy voters felt this was worth sharing with the world? Seriously?
Spanish director Alberto Mielgo’s often abstract The Windshield Wiper isn’t unpleasant, but viewers may find it similarly impenetrable. The episodic narrative begins with a philosopher chain-smoking in a café, who poses a question: “What is love?” Rather than attempting an actual answer, subsequent vignettes mostly convey the difficulty of love in our modern world.
Mielgo’s style is all over the map: hand-drawn, CGI, painted backdrops, graphic novel-style cityscapes, surreal countrysides and even photo-natural figures that appear to be rotoscoped.
A late-night homeless man mistakes a store window mannequin for a former lover; a couple sitting wordlessly on a beach appears to be in the throes of a break-up; a young man bearing flowers is ignored when (one assumes) he buzzes for entry into his lover’s apartment; and (this one’s an ironic hoot) two people standing next to each other in a market are too focused on scrolling through a dating app to notice that they’re perfect for each other.
Mielgo made this film while he worked as a production designer on 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. (His explanation of this short’s unusual title is too lengthy to include here, on top of which … I ain’t buyin’ it.)
Dyakov’s animation style whimsically exaggerates their dissimilar physicality; Olya’s limbs are matchstick thin, while Evgeny is a hulking, oversized bruiser. The story’s resolution is delightful (and a breath of fresh air, after the previous trio).
Robin, Robin, finally, is a captivating, Christmas-themed treasure from Aardman Animations, the British folks best known for Wallace & Gromit. The story concerns a small bird raised by a benevolent family of mice, when her unhatched egg falls out of the nest. Alas, Robin proves to be “a very poor mouse” when it comes to sneaking into “Who-man” homes to forage for food.
At 32 minutes, this almost feels like a feature film; Robin’s droll adventures include encounters with a curmudgeonly magpie (voiced by Richard E. Grant) and a malevolent cat (Gillian Anderson). Unlike the plasticene well-roundedness of Wallace & Gromit, the stop-motion characters here are all feathers and fur: utterly charming.
It defies comprehension that something this sweet and gentle would be selected by the same folks who picked Affairs of the Art and Bestia. Robin, Robin is like a single rose sprouting from a pile of cow dung; it’s not merely beautiful in its own right, but its very presence is miraculous.
And, given this anomaly, I’m sure Robin, Robin hasn’t a chance of winning. More’s the pity.
Participating movie theaters and show times for this package, presented by ShortsTV, can be found at https://tickets.oscar-shorts.com
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