The envy of all the dead

Oscar-nominated animated shorts

Crit

Geez, even the animated shorts exhibit a dearth of people of color. There are, in fact, more animals than nonwhite humans. That said, the nominees are almost uniformly excellent.

• Sanjay's Super Team--Indian-American father tries to overcome his son's passion for superheroes. Story is pretty routine, but the visuals are colorfully gorgeous.
  
• World of Tomorrow--Even if I hadn't been a Don Hertzfeldt fan for ages, this weird futuristic conflation of adorable innocence and sobering fatalism would probably be my pick. Simply brilliant.
  
• Historia de un oso (Bear story)--A heartbreaking parable of pogrom and slavery designed to make you never want to go to a circus again, and also a smart metastory that sometimes makes you forget where you are. The second- or third-best of a strong field.
• We Can't Live Without Cosmos--And this is the other second- or third-best nominee, a Russian The Right Stuff with a much stronger love story.
• Prologue--Most notable for being shown last, after the unnominated films always included to pad the animated program, with a caution to parents about nudity and violence. Two Athenians, two Spartans, Tarantinoesque bloodflow, the least good of the bunch.

Unlike most years, none of the extra films was good enough to make you wonder why something else was nominated instead: If I Was God, a rather banal memoir; The Short Story of a Fox and a Mouse, a standard cute-animal fable, very stylish and very French; The Loneliest Stoplight, which you can probably imagine from the title; and Catch It (no link found), which raises the question, Can meerkats climb trees, and if not, what are those supposed to be?