The short films that
are nominated for Oscars in the category of “Best Animated Shorts” are showing
now at the IFC Film Center in New York. Most years we read a list of the
winners without having seen these films. I got hooked on this when we were in
Montreal last year and spent the better part of an afternoon watching short
films at a museum there. The wonderful thing about New York is that, if you pay
attention, sooner or later you can find anything here.
Director Sanjay Patel's Sanjay's Super Team (U.S.)
is a delightful tale of a young Indian boy who longs to watch his favorite
superheroes on TV but is pulled away by his devout father who wants him to
participate in morning prayers. Although at first sullenly resistant, the boy
eventually uses his imagination to channel the Hindu gods into his fantasized
adventures. The end is charming, and the inclusion of then and now photos of
the two characters' real-life inspirations is a nice touch.
We Can't Live Without the
Cosmos (Russia), is Konstantin Bronzit's effort about
two best friends who undergo training to become cosmonauts. Inseparable from
early childhood, they breeze through the training, with luck of the draw determining
which will be sent on a mission first. While the ending is not a typically
happy one, it proves surprisingly moving by the end.
Gabriel Osorio's Bear Story (Chile) is a haunting if narratively
opaque fable about a sad, elderly bear who treks every day to a street corner
where he exhibits a mechanical diorama. For the price of a coin, passersby can
peer inside and witness the story of a bear who longs to return to his family
after being taken captive by a traveling circus. It does not take long to
realize that the story being presented in the diorama is the presenter’s own.
The World of Tomorrow (U.S.), directed by Don Hertzfeld, features
stick-figure characters and abstract backgrounds in its convoluted sci-fi tale
of a little girl given a tour of the future by a third-generation clone of
herself who delivers numbing, existential observations about the intermingling
of humanity and technology.
About midway through the program, the
screen noted that the final film was not suitable for children, and suggested
that people who had brought young children might want to leave the theater
before this last film was shown. Prologue (U.S.) directed by Richard
Williams (Who Framed Roger Rabbit), is a six-minute exercise in brutality in which a
frightened little girl watches a quartet of Spartan and Athenian soldiers
engage in a battle to the death. Featuring animated full-frontal male nudity
and extreme red-drenched gore (against the black and white drawings), I suppose
it could be said that it is visually captivating. But its reason for being
included in this otherwise impressive group of films, or its reason for being made
at all, is a mystery to me.
Have a good week.
Love,
Rebecca
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