#that picture is extremely underwhelming but i appreciate the sentiment

[realisaonum]

It's my 13 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

[cookinguptales]

SO. Some thoughts on the shorts presentations.

(Note: I only go to the live-action and animated ones; the documentary shorts are harder to see in my city and frankly, they’re often too intense for my current mental health.)

I went to see the shorts yesterday and like I said earlier, I thought the live-action shorts were generally very good and the animated shorts were generally a waste of time and In A Heartbeat was fucking robbed. The live-action shorts were mostly based on true stories, oddly enough, but they were still beautiful.

(This is two years of underwhelming animated nominees and I’m like ughhhh bc some years everything is amazing but recently I’ve not been agreeing with their picks at all.)

I’m about to discuss like 13 shorts, so it’s all under a cut.

Live-Action Shorts

DeKalb Elementary

I have to be honest with you, considering our current political climate, I started crying from the moment this short started until it ended. Like I saw the title come up on the screen and I was like OH NO. The short is based on the real-life school shooting at Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy, and I teared up just typing that sentence. However, this school had one of the few “happy” endings of a shooting; a receptionist at the school started talking to the shooter and calmed him down until he could admit that he really needed medical help and didn’t want to hurt anyone. She probably saved a lot of lives, and this dramatic interpretation of her 911 call is really deeply touching. The acting was really incredible, and the connection between the two of them was palpable without lessening the terrifying suspense of the moment. A really beautiful and deeply affecting short.

(Though, all that said, I wonder at the decision to create a mostly apolitical short about school shootings in today’s climate…)

(cw: guns, threatened violence, mental health issues)

A Silent Child

Surprise, I cried through this one, too! A Silent Child is a short about a young deaf girl in the UK whose parents refuse to learn sign language or teach it to her. This is a depressingly common experience in real life, and watching this girl’s nanny teach this girl sign language and seeing her really come alive now that she could truly communicate, neither the mother’s jealousy and self-consciousness nor her eventual decision to fire the nanny and forbid her child from ever using sign language again surprised me.

To keep a somewhat objective approach, I do think the end of the short was a bit maudlin; it seemed kind of odd that the girl, in that situation, would choose to sign “I love you” — this seemed more heartstring-yanking than something that felt realistic. That said, the rest of the short was really heartbreakingly realistic. It’s a personal subject for me; deafness runs in my family and my little sister is profoundly deaf. My parents started learning sign language the day she was born and made sure I did, too. I grew up in a truly bilingual household and didn’t understand until I was much older that many hearing parents don’t do this for their children. At first I was sitting in the theater like “well, my parents knew it might be a possibility; they were prepared before she was born” but then it is revealed that the mother in this short knew of a family history as well; her utter self-involvement and ego become more and more clear throughout the course of the story.

The short presents a very complicated familial relationship that felt very foreign and very familiar to me at the same time, and I’ll admit I cried a lot. Despite some shortcomings in the character writing, it really is a very important topic to talk about. I think I would have preferred that the emphasis be a little less on the nanny’s feelings and a little more on the girl, but it was overall a very good short — and notable for using an actual deaf actress and real BSL.

(cw: Ableism, child abuse)

My Nephew Emmett

This is a dramatic retelling of the experiences of Mose Wright as he tried to save his 14-year-old nephew, Emmett Till. If that name is familiar to you (and if it’s not, google this important case — but guard yourself for some deeply upsetting events and imagery) then you can probably figure out about how this short went. The story is a familiar, if horrifying one, but this film is interesting in that it doesn’t show much of the part we’re all familiar with. There isn’t that much graphic violence (IIRC, punching a boy in the stomach, manhandling him, and threatening folks with guns is the extent of it), and the very famous pictures of Emmett Till post-attack are not shown. (Though they are evoked in animation during the credits.)

Instead, this film really focuses on the emotional build-up of the event, and very palpably expresses the horrors and tensions of living during this time period in this place while black. There is some absolutely gorgeous imagery in this short, and some of the images of Mose sitting up all night with a gun, waiting for his nephew to come home, will stay with me forever. The acting and cinematography are top-notch, and there is a sort of dignity to these people that is not always afforded in shorts that can easily become misery porn for fascinated gawkers. Really just beautifully, meaningfully done. Media based on true stories like this can sometimes be wooden or insensitive. This was neither. A familiar story, but a breathtaking short.

(Cw: extreme racism, including racial slurs, violence, child death)

The 11 o’clock

In a year full of strong contenders, this Australian short was a glaring weak point. It’s a film about a psychiatrist who gets a patient who believes he’s a psychiatrist, and the rest of the fairly predictable short is pretty much just who’s on first shenanigans that get annoying very quickly. Also, after the powerful DeKalb Elementary, it felt uncomfortable poking fun at people with mental illness and using personal delusions for comedy.

But hey, at least it was short.

Watu Wote (All of Us)

Though it was a great year, this was probably my favorite of the shorts. As the film introduced itself as being about racial tensions between Christians and Muslims in Kenya, I was kind of bracing myself for some of the frankly racist/xenophobic content I’ve seen in some past years. However, this short was actually about an event in 2015 during which the militant group Al-Shabaab stopped a bus with an eye towards killing the Christians onboard, but were thwarted by the Muslim passengers who protected their Christian co-riders with, quite literally, their lives.

The short follows a Christian woman who is traveling home to visit with her sick mother, and the trip clearly terrifies her. It is later revealed that her husband and child had been killed by anti-Christian radicals years before and she still views Muslims with a large amount of wary mistrust. She clashes with other passengers on the bus, but she is shocked when the bus is pulled over and the Muslim passengers immediately move to protect and hide her. There are some truly tense scenes during which she is hiding from the militants and Muslim passengers are arguing with them about how un-Muslim their actions truly are. The short is not without bloodshed.

The short could have veered into being preachy at any time, but was instead a very raw depiction of these religious and ethnic tensions in this part of the world. While you could not fault the protagonist for being wary after her experiences, a lot of catharsis is felt when she realizes that there is a large difference between the men who killed her family and the terrified yet heroic passengers on her bus. It’s a true story and one respectfully told. I’d heard about the event when it happened, but didn’t know all the details; it was nice to have these heroes (particularly the fallen ones) commemorated in a moving short like this. The acting and directing was incredible, and again, I cried. A lot. I cried through basically this entire shorts presentation with a short break during the psychiatrist one, during which I ???ed a lot.

In a time where there is so much anti-Muslim sentiment in the world, I think this film made a very powerful statement, and I was glad to see it. I cannot believe this was a student film.

(Cw: ethnic/religious discrimination, blood, violence, death, child endangerment, mentions of dead children)

Honestly, this was a very strong year for the live-action shorts, and I would happy if any of the non-Australian shorts won.

Who I think will win: My Nephew Emmett or Watu Wote

Who should win: Very, very narrowly, Watu Wote

Animated Shorts

Negative Space

This is a French stop-motion film, and probably my favorite of the animated shorts this year — not that that’s saying much. It was kind of slight, frankly speaking, but the animation was really inventive and it was a joy to watch, at least, even if it was mostly just a guy relating a brief anecdote about his deceased father. Besides praising the really visually interesting animation, I’ll admit there’s not much to say about this one.

(Cw: death, you see an open-coffin funeral)

Garden Party

Beautiful animation, for the most part, but like. The entire plot is that a bunch of frogs take over this rich guy’s house after he’s murdered, which is…again, not that much of a plot. I guess the main point of it was “nature doesn’t care about riches or human life” and “corpses are funny”, which I’d tend to agree with and disagree with, respectively. While I appreciated the rising tension as you notice all the creepy details of this broken-into house in the background of cute frogs cavorting, the “punchline” of this short, which was a detailed close-up of the prior resident’s mutilated, bloated corpse that’d been sitting in the pool is just like. Pointlessly disgusting, and after watching a short about Emmett Till, it felt almost unconscionably callous. Honestly I was like. Mildly interested for most of it, and completely repelled by the end. People talk about this short’s “dark sense of humor” and I’m mostly just reminded of all those edgy assholes I met in college and was happy to never meet again.

(Cw: violence, very, very grotesquely graphic depictions of a corpse)

Lou

This one is Pixar’s inevitable nomination, and it’s very… Pixar. Idk, this one was kind of fun to watch, had a typical slightly-maudlin moment of sentimentality at the end, but it really wasn’t Pixar’s finest. It’s a pretty slight film about a bully befriending a sentient lost and found and learning to Be A Good Dude along with some stuff about the cycle of bullying that was dealt with too briefly to really be hard-hitting. What was odd to me while watching it is that I found myself thinking “wow, this animation does not seem up to Pixar’s usual standard”, which really surprised me. Like, it’s by no means bad! It just reminds me of the work that Pixar was doing several years ago, y’know? All in all, kind of cute but ultimately forgettable.

Revolting Rhymes, Part 1

(Longer review because this one was a half hour long as opposed to the rest, which were all 5-7 minutes.)

Ugh, okay. So the Academy, in their infinite wisdom, keeps nominating children’s specials for this award. They’re typically long-winded, rhyming adaptations of children’s picture books with subpar animation, and while Revolting Rhymes was better than The Gruffalo or Room on the Broom, I still felt my eyes glazing over. Plus, frankly, I take issue with this “short” even being eligible. It’s not a short. Shorts (in the Oscars) are 40 minutes or less. Revolting Rhymes is a two-episode miniseries that makes up one hour-long children’s program. In other words, if you see this at the short’s presentation, you will only see the first half of the story. (I googled the second half when I got home so I could properly review it.) They just split it into two; that doesn’t make it two discrete shorts. But I digress.

So this is your typical fairy tale retelling, and while I liked some aspects of it, others were trite and overdone. It was fun seeing Red Riding Hood go full vigilante, I suppose. It was actually frustrating as hell, especially because of In A Heartbeat’s snub; Revolting Rhymes really seemed like it was about to go to the f/f place with Red and Snow White. I was starting to get interested. These women were fighting for each other, giving each other flowers, embracing, leaning against each other, they eventually move in together… Like it was pretty fucking gay. AND THEN THEY NO HOMO’D IT AT THE END. I even looked up the second half to be completely sure. So that was really going to turn me against this film anyway because there’s nothing more tiring of getting one of those “in the future, they are gal pals and Red grew up and had kids!!” epilogues, especially when an actual queer love story was utterly ignored in favor of subpar shorts.

That aside, though, it’s just overly long, predictable, and kind of dull after a while. Frankly speaking, it’s for children and it doesn’t really have great crossover appeal for adults.

(Cw: pretty intense non-graphic violence, some sexist overtones, no homo-ing)

Dear Basketball

This short is just incomprehensible to me. It’s a short poem by Kobe Bryant that’s animated by the legendary Glen Keane with music by John Williams. Which should tell you how bewilderingly weird this whole scenario is. The whole time I was like “Is this a vanity project? How did he get such talent to sign on for such a self-indulgent little film? Did he just start throwing money around? Are both of these men closet Kobe fans?” Like I really don’t understand what even happened for this film to get made. It was inexplicable.

I guess it’s exactly what you’d expect. Kobe Bryant has written a saccharine poem about how much he has always loved basketball, and how he is now sad he has to give it up. It’s beautifully animated with a sweeping score. I am deeply confused, and cannot understand why this was even nominated in the wake of the #MeToo movement, considering the allegations against Bryant.

*shrugs???*

(And the highly commended shorts. IN A HEARTBEAT DIDN’T EVEN FUCKING MAKE HIGHLY COMMENDED, FUCK THE OSCARS COMMITTEE TBH.)

Lost Property Office

Another short about a lost and found…? I mean, okay, why the fuck not, this year is clearly a debacle anyway. This one was basically about a guy who works for the MTA lost and found, and he’s being let go because no one ever claims anything. The film, to be fair, does have a really interesting visual aesthetic… But the direction it goes in, again, is just kind of like. Okay. Not exactly emotionally gripping.

(Cw: no one actually commits suicide in this, but the short very clearly utilizes imagery that conjures up suicide)

Achoo

Trite little film about a dragon I’m supposed to think is cute but I really thought was kind of gross and annoying. It’s this thing about how this annoying dragon wants to make a fireworks display better than the mean bully dragons and he sneezes goop everywhere and uses chemicals (which feels like cheating..?) and accidentally invents fireworks. It’s always, uh, awkward when there’s a piece of animation that does some cutesy depiction of another culture’s faux “mythology”, and this one really didn’t particularly do it well.

Weeds

Short about a dandelion (I guess? They didn’t really look like dandelions, but oh well.) trying to move from a dead yard to the yard next door full of sprinklers. It dies before it makes it and its seeds float over to the lawn. Then you get some inspirational quote about NEVER GIVING UP and I’m like okay but it died???? It didn’t make it????? Is this some really depressing point about the struggles of immigrant parents or something or did you actually think this was inspirational?

Forgettable.

Who I think will win: Negative Space or Revolting Rhymes Who I think should win: In A Heartbeat

IN A HEARTBEAT WAS ROBBED NEVER FORGIVE NEVER FORGET.