Animated shorts up for Oscars tackle life and all its follies
“Ice Merchants,” one of the five “Oscar-Nominated Shorts: Animated” explores the charm and danger of isolation. Rendered in conventionally-drawn tricolor, the Cannes award-winning film features a wooden house tethered by ropes none-too-securely to the rocky side of a very tall mountain, just beneath its summit. A father and son live there, making ice that they break up and deliver to a village at the foot of the mountain by parachute. The boy has a swing from which he see-saws over the yawning gulf. I found the red-white-and-blue only (with some orange) color scheme monotonous and not very appealing. Written and directed by Portuguese filmmaker
Joao Gonzalez, who also composed the score and plays on the soundtrack, the film captures the absurdity and recklessness of manual labor. But it also revels in risk-taking and high-flying.
The second film, which begins with strains from “Carmen,” “An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It,” is a stop-motion effort from Australia. In it, a worker named Neil (writer-director Lachlan Pendragon) sits in an office sits before a computer trying to sell a toaster over the phone to somebody who already owns one. His boss (Michael Richard) stops by to point out that Neil has one day to sell something before getting terminated. It’s clearly a hellish existence. Neil stops by to speak to a coworker named Gaven (Jamie Trotter) and notices that Gaven does not have a chair beneath him, but appears to be sitting.
Neil also notices that the light frequently switches to a single green color. “Have you noticed the weather?” he asks Gaven. The characters are puppet-like with movable pieces on their faces. An ostrich appears to Neil and tells him he is “living in a lie, a sham.” In the storehouse, Gaven finds different pieces of his face and encounters a human arm and hand. With apologies to “The Matrix” and “The Office,” “An Ostrich Told Me the World Was Fake and I Think I Believe Him” is what happens when a stop-motion character and the film he’s in fall to pieces.
Mixing stop-motion, crude conventional animation and a snippet of live-action, Sundance award-winner “The Flying Sailor” is another wordless effort. The film is based on the true story of a Halifax sailor who was caught in the 1917 harbor explosion, flew 2
km. “and lived to tell the tale.” Directed by Palme d’Or winners and filmmaking partners Amanda Forbis and Wendy Trilby, “The Flying Sailor” packs a whole life into 8 minutes of very inventive visuals. It is a wondrous celebration of life’s fragility and resilience.
”My Year of (slang for male genitalia)” which is definitely not for the kiddies, tells the story in five chapters of an adolescent
woman’s attempt to lose her virginity. Directed by Icelandic filmmaker Sara Gunnarsdottir (“The Diary of a Teenage Girl”), the film is based on screenwriter Pamela Ribon’s 2017 comic memoir “Notes to Boys and Other Things I Shouldn’t Share in Public.” The action is set in Houston in 1991 and begins with the chapter “The Vampire,” which is about Pam’s relationship with a skater
named David (Sterling Temple Howard). “My Year” mixes plain 2D images depicting “real-life” with baroque, horrorfilm and Japanese anime fantasy imagery and features a skinhead suitor and a borderline inappropriate sex “talk” between Pam (Brie Tilton) and her father. It’s a rollicking, minimalist, miniature “Moll Flanders” with Pam failing comically to achieve her goal.
“The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse,” the fourth film in this category, was not submitted for review.
(“Oscar-Nominated Shorts: Animated” run the gamut from PG to Rrated content)