L'ami meilleur de l'homme

2013 Oscar®-nominated animated shorts

Crit

These programs tend to have about the same assortment every year: you've got the dramatization of a beloved children's book, voiced by A-list (or at least B-plus-list) actors (the harmlessly engaging Room on the Broom); the polished Disney and/or Pixar piece (the brilliant if sadistic historical précis of how we watch moving pictures Get a Horse); the lush francophone silent (the machinery parable Mr Hublot); and the expressionist back-to-nature piece (Feral, remarkable for its strategic obscuring of facial details).

What this one has that I don't recall seeing recently is the Japanese ghost story with subtitles that are equally challenged grammatically, syntactically, and logically (Tsukumo [Possessions]). Could not help imagining this as the short in front of the bizarre haunted house "classic" Hausu.
 

My pick? Feral moved me the most, Get a Horse! wowed me the most, but Mr Hublot seems the likely (and worthy) winner. 

As always, we had some bonus films to pad out the program to feature length, the most notable of which was The Missing Scarf, which pushed me near groaning with its New Agey positive messages until veering suddenly and without warning into the darkest nihilistic existentialism. 

2013 Oscar®-nominated live-action shorts

Crit

OK, I've finally seen a nominee (Aquel no era yo [That wasn't me]) that just infuriates me with its inartistic and grotesque didacticism, one that has no reason to be here other than to remind us that hey, you know what? War really is hell. Ugh.

Nothing else ughworthy, but nothing wowworthy either. Avant que de tout perdre (Just before losing everything) is a surprisingly conflict-free day-in-the-life story of a woman escaping with her two children from her abusive husband; Helium is a restatement, as if we needed another, that the best thing we can do for a dying child is tell him a pretty lie; and Pitääkö mun kaikki hoitaa? (Do I have to take care of everything?) is--and I mean this literally and descriptively, not in disparagement--simply a joke, complete with unsurprising punch line.

So I guess my pick, by process of elimination, is The Voorman Problem, about a psychiatrist (real movie sort-of-star Martin Freeman) assigned to assess a prisoner (Tom Hollander) who thinks he's a god. It's not really anything special either, even though the question of "why does this plot element seem so familiar to me?" was answered in the end credits: the story is adapted from a section of David Mitchell's number9dream. The plot element in question is the retroactive elimination of Belgium; bummer guys, and after finally making the World Cup.