It’s about that time again. The 97th Academy Awards are scheduled on March 2, which simply feels like not enough time to watch all the nominated films if you were to start now. However, if you are considering potential winners, you can probably now cross EMILIA PÉREZ off your list. Or even better, you will have enough time to get cracking on this year’s nominations for the short film categories, which include animated, live action, and documentary. Starting on Friday, 2/14, the Coolidge Corner Theatre will be playing the nominated short films in their designated categories (Animated and Live Action on 2/14 and Documentary on 2/21). Watching movies is fun, but betting on winners during awards season is another kind of manic pleasure that usually ends in disappointment. Know-it-alls who were wrong about Saldaña’s category campaign can re-experience the immersive experience of getting wrecked again. Let’s get on it and argue!
INTRODUCTION
Every year, I feel the urge to add another tally to the number of years that Disney has not been nominated in this category. Why? I think it’s a bit similar to the reason that I feel excited about the USWNT losing the World Cup in 2023 for the first time in years. It’s not that I feed off of another reason for misogyny on women’s sports, or that I think Domee Shi doesn’t deserve to win an Oscar and subsequent success afterwards. It just feels like the global playing field is leveling out. How cool is it that this is Iran’s second year getting nominations? Or that Magic Candies is the first Japanese-language animated nomination in over ten years in this category?
The talent and originality of international animation has always been there – and finally, we have probably the most enjoyable cohort of nominations since 2021, when I first started covering. Let’s take a look at this year’s nominations for Best Animated Short Films.
CONTENDERS
- BEAUTIFUL MEN (dir. Nicolas Keppens | Belgium/France/The Netherlands, 18 mins | trailer) – Three brothers from the Netherlands take a medical visit to Türkiye for hair transplants. Unfortunately, cosmetic procedures can’t fix what’s broken inside.
- IN THE SHADOW OF THE CYPRESS (dir. Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani | Iran, 20 mins | trailer) – The deteriorating relationship between a father and a daughter is glossing over the elephant in the room – rather, the beached whale in front of their home – confronting their painful family history.
- MAGIC CANDIES (dir. Daisuke Nishio | Japan, 21 mins | trailer) – Dong-Dong’s trepidation in talking to other peers is thwarted by his “magic candies,” which gives him the ability to listen to voices from inanimate objects. It hasn’t not been confirmed that they’re hallucinogens.
- WANDER TO WONDER (dir. Nina Gantz | The Netherlands, Belgium, France, the UK, 13 mins | trailer) – Three abandoned puppet characters from a popular TV show are trying to survive after their creator dies.
- YUCK! (dir. Loïc Espuche | France, 13 mins | trailer) – A group of kids run around saying “Yuck!” (or “Beurk!” in French) to people kissing, until one of them has caught the love bug.
THOUGHTS
One of the shortcomings of reviewing movies is that occasional jaded feeling that you’ve seen it all before. It’s nice to be surprised with something that feels new and exciting. It’s not that other years have been failures, but with this year, I honestly have good feelings about most of them, which is reminiscent of how I feel about 2021: fun, innovative, hilarious.
Beautiful Men brings to mind a past Sundance favorite, Kangmin Kim’s JEOM. I’d say that beauty expectations in men should be highlighted more, but it feels as though traveling to the Middle East for hair transplants has become quickly accepted over the past year with little discourse fanfare. Maybe it depends on who adheres to those standards; in Beautiful Men, the three featured brothers look like they are part of the middle-aged rowdy crowd that hangs out at TD Garden even if there aren’t any games scheduled that day. Each of them have their own personal shit to deal with, but as men generally are, they don’t directly address them. However, what’s more vulnerable than admitting that you want to fix your appearance about yourself? Step aside, Queer Eye; these men will get through their emotions one way or another.
Funnily enough, the full-frontal penis count this year is two (exactly one more than 2023, when My Year of Dicks was nominated). As Beautiful Men exposes, Wander to Wonder unearths. In the first fifteen seconds of watching this one, I actually had to stop to ask, “Fuck, is this found footage horror?” It’s not (at least, not in the Bible-written sense), but I couldn’t still discount how unnerving it felt to watch it. The beginning starts with an opening theme to an old TV show with the same name, featuring an elderly man as the host and three puppets (Mary, Billybud, and Fumbleton) as the jovial players to act out his teaching lessons. It’s then cut to the present, where the puppets find themselves in abysmal conditions following the host’s death, where food scraps now have to be rationed while the puppets attempt to create more episodes. Are these puppets okay? Absolutely not; something about the decadence of surviving-but-not in this film tastes like cannibalism and bloodletting in the air. But is it one of the most unique experiences to witness in this category for the past few years (including the short film about a Chilean torturer)? Absolutely.
But even the weirdest film still has its competitors grabbing for the ball. If Wander to Wonder is I Saw The TV Glow’s successor for awards season, then YUCK! is Inside Out 2 if it were a sleeper hit. Nothing against YUCK!; it is a traditional feel-good of growth and self-awareness with cute kid behavior to match. Unfortunately, it faces Magic Candies, which should be the frontrunner of this category. In Magic Candies, Dong-Dong consumes a bag of the eponymous snack and starts to hear voices, from the living room couch letting him know that his father is letting out farts to the family dog reminiscing about them growing up together. Like a lot of Japanese animations, the weirdness gets sentimental in a flash (Suzume, you will always be famous) and it sure got me in a chokehold when Dong-Dong consumes his last magic candy to hear the last voice.
However, if we’re talking technicality, current relevance, and emotional resonance, In The Shadow of the Cypress had the widest appeal for its direction, animation, and heart-feels. A father, whose PTSD has blindly ruined his relationship with his daughter, is stuck in between leaving his raw emotions be and preserving whatever is left of his family. The chance comes when his daughter finds a beached whale on the sands. Despite the father giving up in bringing the whale back to the ocean, the daughter expends her efforts in taking care of the whale, even when it starts to look impossible to save its life. The film is not shy with metaphors, and it’s also not shy to call it like it sees it. In a flashback, we see that the father, who was a boatman, watched his wife drown in the sea when they were attacked by a fighter jet dropping bombs. And honestly, if I close my eyes and only hear the screams of my daughter calling out to her drowning mother, the incoming paralysis feels like the only justifiable feeling. But it’s not just the storyline that makes it powerful. The animation recalls that negative space can be illustrated creatively, and that through the climax of chaos in different angles, hope can shine through, too.
PREDICTIONS
WHAT SHOULD WIN: In the Shadow of the Cypress or Wander to Wonder
WHAT WILL WIN: In the Shadow of the Cypress or Magic Candies
Now playing @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
Watch this space for Anna’s thoughts on the Live Action and Documentary categories!
