Dories, Dumplings, Dinos, Delta-Vs, and Dunes

December 18, 2018 11:27 PM

The list of nominees for best animated short film is out and some of them are online!
For your consideration, five of the ten nominees: Age of Sail • Bao • Lost & Found • One Small Step • Pépé Le Morse
Trailers and clips for the others: Animal Behaviour • Bilby • Bird Karma • Late Afternoon • Weekends
posted by Going To Maine (25 comments total)

oh wow. Bao does an incredible amount of nuances things in a very short runtime.
posted by Faintdreams at 2:45 AM on December 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

To be clear, this is the shortlist, not the list of nominees.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 2:48 AM on December 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

I saw Lost & Found yesterday and it broke me! Wonderful film.

I also saw Bao at the cinema prior to Incredibles 2 and the gasp from the audience at a given point was worth the price of admission.
posted by Stark at 3:27 AM on December 19, 2018 [5 favorites]

Bao by a mile, I don't even need to see the others but I will so I don't keep on beng ignorant and besides what if I miss out in something as good as Bao?
posted by entropone at 4:15 AM on December 19, 2018

Just watched ‘One Small Step’. I haven’t seen Bao, but you folks who have already decided on it should check it out, too. Worth watching.

Edit: turns out I have seen Bao. Good, too.
posted by grimjeer at 4:27 AM on December 19, 2018

Age of Sail, because it is honest
posted by thegirlwiththehat at 4:45 AM on December 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

I liked Bao, another great video from Pixar, but Age of Sail is a wonderful video short story.
posted by Agave at 5:04 AM on December 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

Bao is brilliant, and beautiful and deserves all the accolades heaped upon it.
But it seems kind of unfair for projects with 5 people to be lumped against 60 Pixarians

That said, One Small Step might've made me laugh and cry a bit more than Bao. I blame that on being a space loving kid at heart, and never having a Chinese mother.
posted by DigDoug at 5:05 AM on December 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

I feel like all of them except Age of Sail are little more than weaponised death and/or regret, and I'm pretty tired of having my chain yanked the same way all the time. So, yes, hat tip for the short story with well developed characters who act accordingly in realistic situations and have things go very wrong, and yet it ends okay for believable reasons.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:41 AM on December 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

Of the full ones available, I think Pepe le Morse was the one that took full advantage of the weird that's available to short-form animation--not just in terms of visuals (plenty of that in some of the others), but also in the fact that shorts can leave some weird threads hanging without necessarily needing to explain them.

I liked One Small Step a lot, but felt a bit manipulated by it. Actually, felt about the same with Age of Sail.
posted by pykrete jungle at 6:34 AM on December 19, 2018

Also interesting that three of the ten here seem to be telling Asian-(North) American stories.
posted by pykrete jungle at 6:39 AM on December 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

To be clear, this is the shortlist, not the list of nominees

This is true! This is the short list. The nominees are hidden within it.
posted by Going To Maine at 7:47 AM on December 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

I loved Bao (like, a lot, and I usually don't find Pixar shorts to be that interesting). But the animation categories for the Academy Awards are a total shitshow because Academy members don't even see the majority of nominees. You can read this article on Cartoon Brew about this problem (it's old now but I don't believe anything has been done to ameliorate the issue). There are a lot of worthy films that get passed over to give yet another award to the big American studios.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 7:57 AM on December 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

I think this is well true, in the same way that all of the Oscars are different degrees of political and motivated by interest. But I like the shorts because they usually give you an excuse to go to a theater and see a bunch of small things that are all different. (Live action, too.)

(Also it justifies my disdain for the pick of the inane Kobe movie from last year that won the shorts.)

Anyhoo, Cartoon Brew has an article up about how the shortlist snubbed the best work and has
compiled a list of trailers and online versions of all the eligible films.

The three that the first article specifically notes as being unfairly snubbed are :

• Bloiestraat 11
• La Chute
• Solar Walk

posted by Going To Maine at 8:59 AM on December 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

I saw Incredibles 2 twice in theaters and both times Bao broke me.

Lost & Found just now almost made me tear up but I think it's short length saved me.
posted by numaner at 10:19 AM on December 19, 2018

I can't find the complete videos for the ones that are just trailers, including two of the snubbed films, but I tried to watch Solar Walk and... I don't think I get it? It feels like some kind of avant garde film that is "trippy" for trippy's sake. I couldn't really detect a coherent story and I gave up halfway through, and that was already at 10 minutes.
posted by numaner at 10:46 AM on December 19, 2018

I was hoping Jeron Braxton's 'Glucose' would get shortlisted, but I knew it was a long shot.
posted by sleeping bear at 10:57 AM on December 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

That cut in "One Small Step" was the closest I've come to Kubrick in a long while.
posted by flamewise at 12:22 PM on December 19, 2018

Age of Sail gains a lot from the old sailor being voiced by Ian McShane.

Lost & Found - "You will believe a knitted dino can fly."

One Small Step also has weaponized death and regret, yes, but in ways that touch me very specifically.

More broadly, I'm always a bit surprised by the criticism of "manipulation," since that's what all stories, fiction or non-fiction, regardless of medium, do. Manipulated you in ways you didn't like, fair enough.
posted by aurelian at 2:07 PM on December 19, 2018

Bao makes me hungry for dumplings. Is that just me?
posted by adept256 at 2:33 PM on December 19, 2018

i really enjoyed bao, but my god did lost & found make me actually cry.

i love/hate you for posting this. thanks???
posted by the thought-fox at 4:22 PM on December 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

Seriously. When did short animation become exclusively about making people cry?
posted by es_de_bah at 5:28 PM on December 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

Manipulated you in ways you didn't like, fair enough.

For me, at least, when I complain that something in popular media is manipulating me, it sometimes has to do with the valence of the manipulation but often it is tied to the deftness of the manipulation. If it seems like the author is yanking me around in a heavy handed way but thinks they are using a light touch it's really bothersome.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:53 PM on December 19, 2018

I remember shortly after I had my first child watching a movie about kids in danger or some other parent-related thing and realizing I suddenly had a new button that Hollywood could push. I resented it.
posted by straight at 11:54 PM on December 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

Like to have seen Mamoon giving a shout
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:34 AM on December 20, 2018