Best Animated Short Film: Ranking Every Oscar Nominee
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
We have now reached the Academy Award categories that honour entire films; the only group remaining that isn’t an award for a whole film — feature or short — is Best Director, which I will cover right before Best Picture. I’m going to go through the three shorts categories first. I love doing these rankings, because these used to be the categories I would overlook the most when I was younger. Why did I care about some short films I had never heard about? I couldn’t feel any more differently now. Short films are a difficult undertaking, and some of the most interesting experiments are in short form (likely because of budget, time, and resource based concerns). To see a short done well is quite a revelation. I hope you check out some of these short film nominees, because these filmmakers deserve the support. We’re starting off with the animated short film candidates. Here are your nominees.
Biggest Snub: New Moon
This Colman Domingo-starring short was such a unique adaptation of a stage production. A monologue turns into a lucid, psychedelic experience illustrated with cool, soothing colours, all on top of a black canvas to make us feel like we’re sitting in a dark theatre (or are hallucinating within our minds). This turns the dictation of one’s life story into such a trip: one that calms me more than anything. The meditative New Moon would have been a welcome addition amongst these other candidates.
5. The Flying Sailor
Loosely inspired by the tragic Halifax Explosion of 1917 — where two ships crashed near the docks of Halifax and claimed nearly two thousand lives (with nine thousand further injuries) — The Flying Sailor places us in a unique time period. It takes a major crisis and turns it into a somewhat goofy short: the titular seaman being knocked out of consciousness and through the universes and abstract planes of time and space. It’s a little humbling at times and reminds us of our fragility within the bigger picture of life itself, but I feel like the short ends before it really begins, and it only says so much when it could have done even more. My feelings on The Flying Sailor have warmed up over time, but I still feel like it’s the least realized of the five nominees.
Rating: 3.5/5
4. My Year of Dicks
After Riz Ahmed had to announce this nominee one early morning, the world was likely trying to figure out: “what on Earth is My Year of Dicks??” Well, it’s actually a pretty fascinating short that actually feels like micro films compiled into one anthological experience. Sara Gunnarsdóttir’s adaptation of Pamela Ribon’s personal experiences as a teenager in the 90s (via the memoir Notes to Boys: And Other Things I Shouldn’t Share in Public) is perfectly captured in a “dear diary” recollection of all of the jerk-offs she dated while trying to discover love and herself. Each vignette starts and stops like little snippets being shared with us, and the semi-rotoscope animation feels like the doodles within a journal while a teen’s mind wanders (“how do I really feel about how this all went down?”) With the kind of edge that Daria, Liz Phair, and Alanis Morissette carried in the 90s, My Year of Dicks is a great time capsule to a place, mindset, and set of discoveries.
Rating: 4/5
3. Ice Merchants
This minimalist short is gorgeously animated, and it carries so much narrative weight while telling nearly none of its storytelling components. Ice Merchants feels like a fable for a new age, and it’s the kind of short film that likely will only get its rounds because of its nomination. I feel like it will make a splash once more people see it, because it is so effective while working with so little: not much time, very few colours, and no real dialogue. It still works, and its emptiness actually works to its advantage, as we feel the void of this reality and the punishment of error. I needed time to see how I felt about the short at first, but Ice Merchants gets better and better the more I reflect on it.
Rating: 4/5
2. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
This short warmed my heart so much. The tricky thing about longer shorts (what a paradox) is that they can feel like they linger for too long and maybe lose the precision that shorts can possess. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse seems like it is one of those films that kind of keeps going at first, as the titular child meets… well, the cast in the rest of the title. Even though this short is beautifully animated (and, my God, is it ever), it feels a bit aimless. Or so it seemed. Once it gets to the crux of the union of all of these different creatures, this short begins to show its true colours: warmth amidst the cold winters of the world. There’s somehow this knack for feeling like the wandering ways of life and our heart’s realization of the comfort we’ve been blessed with all along here, and that’s not really an easy sensation to capture. Towards the end of this film, I actually got teary eyed. Revisiting it again only strengthens how important those opening acts are; we should never overlook or take for granted the loving souls that touch our lives. This reminds me so much of Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman: a comparison that can only mean good things.
Rating: 4.5/5
1. An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It
I’m a sucker for good meta storytelling, and An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It (to be known as An Ostrich from here out, because yeesh…) has this in spades. What makes An Ostrich special is that it knows how to use its abstract nature so well: a claymation figure becomes self aware of his own existence, as we view much of the short through a camera and can even see humans animating him at extreme speeds. Like a behind-the-scenes feature with a pulse, An Ostrich is quirky yet brilliant. The more absurd the short gets, the more free it is. It is an existential nightmare that is conveyed with a myriad of stop motion symbols to great effect; I am particularly blown away by the zoetrope finale (I won’t say more). If you are a fan of the works of Charlie Kaufman, I cannot recommend this short enough. To everyone else, An Ostrich is still a must: this short is quite something, and it has to be seen to be believed.
Rating: 4.5/5
Who I want to win: I’d love if either An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It or The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse won.
Who I think will win: Given AppleTV+’s reach and success with The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, I’ll give this stunning short the odds at this point.
Tune in tomorrow for our next Academy Award category! We’re reviewing every single nominee on every weekday.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.