Top Five Shortlisted, Non-Nominated Films 2009-2013

Earlier this week the Academy announced the shortlist for the animated short Oscar, and that marked the moment when the Best Animated Short race hits into high gear. The shortlist has ten films. Up to five of them will go into history as Oscar nominees, while the rest of the films will be forgotten by all but the most dedicated animation buffs, which is a major pity. I've been following the Best Animated Short race starting at the Shortlist stage since 2009, and there were plenty of films on the shortlist that missed out on a nomination that were worthy. I've already written about the shortlist in some previous posts, but in preparation for the announcement of this year's shortlist, I'm going to write about five films from the previous five shortlists that were most deserving of a nomination. There is going to be a lot of subjectivity, but I hope it will be a good look at some great films that were unfairly denied their chance of Oscar glory.

A note before we get started. I've seen only 24 of the 25 films on the shortlist, which I suppose is a decent total, but I did never did get to find Raul Garcia's The Fall of the House of Usher from the 2012 shortlist, which is a pity. The trailer sure makes it seem like an interesting film.

Best Animated Short - 2014: The Shortlist

Well, today marks an important milestone in the Best Animated Short race: the announcement of the shortlist for nomination. Each year films are qualified through festivals or qualifying runs, and the animation branch of the Academy sit through all of the films and rank them, and the ten highest ranked films make it to the shortlist for a larger branch to review. This year 58 films qualified, and today the Academy had released the ten films that will be moving on to a select screening in December. Eventually anywhere from three to five films would receive a coveted nomination.

Unfortunately, for the second straight year in a row we didn't get a full list of all of the qualifying films, but Cartoon Brew did preview some of the more highly regarded films from the festival circuit, which I previewed earlier. But even that was not foolproof, as two of the shortlisted films were not previewed in the earlier thread. But even still, these are the films that could end up with nominations this year. Let's sit back and preview all of them in more depth, just like what I did in 2012 and 2013.