Best Animated Short - 2023: The Shortlist

It's that time of year again, when I dust off this blog and force myself to write about the films that can potential win the Oscar for Best Animated Short. Of course I haven't really paid attention to the race beforehand, not like Cartoon Brew who have kept track of animated shorts that qualified by winning festivals, then interviewing their directors. Of course, yesterday marked the day when I can no longer ignore the race, since it was the day that the Academy released the shortlist for several categories, including Best Animated Short. 

Ideally I'd write about the shortlisted films the day the shortlist was released, but I was driving to Pittsburgh on no sleep and went to watch a Pittsburgh Penguins game, so I really didn't have a chance to watch the trailers for each of the shortlist or learned a little more about these films. But now that I'm back home there's no excuse for me to delay. Of course I'm not going to be reviewing the films, since that's not the point (and also because I've seen barely any of them). Which makes me wonder why anybody would read this post.

Ranking the Oscar Nominated Shorts: 2012 - 2021

Welcome to a very special edition of the Best Animated Short blog. We are still a few weeks away from the Academy Award ceremony, where the Best Animated Short category has been relegated to second class status. Yet it is also the 90th year where the Academy has a category for Best Animated Short. Which means it's time for me to pull out an old favorite from when I was going back in time reviewing the nominated shorts: I'm going to rank the Oscar nominated films from the past 10 years by how much I enjoyed them.

If you've been reading my reviews over the past ten years you'll know that at the end of each review I rank the shorts by quality and by preference. However, both of these metrics are incredibly subjective, and quite frequently how much I enjoy a film goes a long way by how good I think it is. There are certainly times where I can recognize the artistry into a film I didn't really like, but they almost never claim the top spot in rankings by quality. Anyways, when I have to go back over the 50 short films that were nominated in the past ten years, I think it's easier to solely rank them by preference. That is what I did with my eight previous entries, and that is what I'm going to do here.

This edition is going to be different in certain ways from the eight previous rankings that predated this one. For those I had almost all of the films available to me in some fashion, and I was able to make those rankings every ten reviews, which usually took a few weeks. For these 50 films I had to wait for the Academy to announce their new sets of nominees, and to do that for ten years. That means a lot more time for my tastes to change and evolve than with my previous reviews, especially since there are several of these films that I haven't seen since I wrote the review in their respective years. I have watched all of the films again to make these rankings, so yes, there will be some discrepancies between my rankings in the individual reviews and this one. 

And also, just because a film is ranked low doesn't necessary mean I hated it. There are just that many more of the nominees I liked more than it. I think it is a testament to how well the Academy had been doing in formulating these nominees. It's just a shame that they would relegate this category to secondary status. Anyways, as in previous entries, I will be writing small blurbs about each film that will get longer and longer until they become mini-reviews. I hope you're getting all settled because here we go.

Best Animated Short Make-Up Review: Lorenzo (2004)

 

Well I didn't think it ever would, but it's finally happened. Walt Disney Corporations, one of the biggest and most powerful corporations has finally reached down into the dark depths of its mysterious vault and has unearthed one of the films that's been buried so deep, there were absolutely word about it for the past several years, leading some conspiracy theorists to postulate that the men in charge were planning on making it lost film a la Rippling Romance before finally coming to their senses.

No, I'm not talking about Song of the South. Instead it's another film that had been shoved deeper into animation purgatory. I'm talking about none other than the mysterious and legendary animated short form, Lorenzo.

It's Coming...

August 18...

FEAST wins Best Animated Short

Congratulations to Patrick Osborn and the rest of the staff at Disney Animation for winning the Best Animated Short Oscar for Feast. While I still felt The Dam Keeper was better, it's a lot more well deserved than Big Hero 6 winning for Best Animated Feature (but then again I'm obviously biased towards The Tale of the Princess Kaguya).

Best Animated Short - 2014

Well, it was almost a month ago that the Oscar nominations were announced, and sadly I wasn't able all of the nominated films until this past weekend, when they did the showings of the nominated short films in select theaters around the country. I had to drive overnight Thursday night to make it from Florida (where I had been to check out two of the Missing Five). And unfortunately I didn't have time to write the review until now*, almost a week after the showing, so you'll have to excuse the quality of these reviews. However, here it is, the review for the most recent batch of Best Animated Short nominees.

*it was mostly because I was driving all around the northeast visiting graves of 300-game winners. Yes, I sure have my priorities straight.

Best Animated Short 2014 - NOMINEES

The Oscar nominations were today, and while most of the Internet would be abuzz over some other major news such as The Lego Movie missing out on Best Animated Feature or Selma getting a Best Picture nomination despite its deplorably scathing portrayal of LBJ (seriously, is there a more BS film controversy this year?) but the main news for me and the main reason for why this blog exists (and has been lying dormant for the past several months) is for another reason entirely, one that most people would miss out.

The Best Animated Short category

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.

Best Animated Short - 2013

Well, I've finally done it. I've seen all of the nominees this year for Best Animated Short. Unfortunately, I had to do it by going to one of the showings sponsored by Shorts HD, thanks to the fact Mr Hublot is not yet available online. I probably would have gone anyways even if I was able to get to Mr Hublot in advance, but now everybody else that does film reviews for a living and those with far more insight into film and animation than I do would have their reviews out. I guess the only thing that sets me apart is that I've done reviews on the 81 other years of the category, but I doubt anybody will take care of that.

But anyways here comes my last full review of a set of nominees until next year's nominees. Unless I somehow get a chance to watch The Shepherd and Hypothese Beta or Lorenzo.

Best Animated Short 2013 - NOMINEES

And then there were five...

So earlier today the Oscar nominees were announced, and that means the lineup for the 82nd annual Best Animated Short contenders are out. Unfortunately I was busy with work earlier in the day so I didn't get a chance to make a post until now, but the five films that will join the annals of Oscar history below:

Ranking the Oscar Nominated Shorts: 1932-1941

Has it really been almost five months since the last time I posted one of these? Yes, after switching to the q 2 weeks posting schedule, I've had almost as much time pass as when I took the month and a half hiatus between 1972-1981 and 1962-1971. But I guess I just wanted to savor it, because this will be the last time I do one of these things until 2022, if this blog hadn't become abandoned like my other blogs. But you know how this works. I take the films between 1932 and 1941 that I reviewed over the past four months and rank them by how much I enjoy them. Simple as pie. Mmm...I like pie.

Best Animated Short - 1931/1932

Happy New Year, everypony! Hope it's a good one.

Let's kick off 2014 with my 81st - and final - review...at least until the Oscar nominations are announced on January 16, and there's a new set of five films to review*. After that I'll be doing my darndest to attend one of the showings of the nominated shorts and reviewing those. But for now, this marks the end of the reviews that have dominated my life for a whole 22 months.

*My predictions have somewhat changed since I posted about the shortlist almost two months ago. I talked to Steve Segal, the professor of my History of Animation course a year ago. He had attended one of the screenings and had only raves about The Missing Scarf, which certainly looked interested but the design seemed a bit too new for the old-fashioned Academy. However, he described the film as being surprisingly deep, and as we saw from A Morning Stroll two years ago, new fangled technology has never stopped a film from being nominated. So perhaps we will see The Missing Scarf. I've added it to the predictions, replacing Hollow Land. Of course, almost everybody over at Gold Derby is predicting a nomination for Room on the Broom. It may be populist enough to grab a nomination. Eh oh well.

Best Animated Short - 1932/1933

And then there were two. After almost two years of writing reviews nobody reads, I've almost completed my quest of reviewing the Oscar nominated short films. (Of course, I would already be done if I didn't go onto a three month hiatus last year or switch the reviews to every two weeks, which has eroded whatever support I was getting for this blog.)

But anyways, we are near the finish. If you're paying attention that you might have noticed that the review's title included two years instead of just one. That's not a mistake. In the early years the Academy considered films from an August to July schedule, just like what the Emmys do now, and the ceremony would be held in November. Then somewhere around this time the Academy decided that was stupid and decided to extend the eligibility period from July of 1932 to the end of 1933 and then going to a January to December eligibility for 1934, and that's the way it's been since.

Best Animated Short - 1934

Well, now we're really getting somewhere. It's been almost a month since the finalists were announced, and it's about a month before the Oscar nominees will be announced. According to some insider info the committee won't even be watching the finalists and voting on them until later this week. So for now it's just waiting and more reviews. Of course I've noted that since I've slowed these reviews down to just once every two weeks that my traffic had dried up. I was afraid that would happen, but I just haven't had much time to work on these reviews, what with work and also my desire to play some more Tokimeki Memorial. Oh well.

We're now in 1934. It is the year of the Gashouse Gang, when the St. Louis Cardinals so thoroughly trounced the Detroit Tigers in Game 7 that Joe Medwick had to be told to leave the game because the fans in Detroit were throwing food at him. There has to be a lot of hate when people were willing to part with food in the middle of the Great Depression.

Non-Nominated Highlight - The Band Concert (1935)

Well, today is the day Disney's latest film Frozen opens wide, which is all fair and good, but more importantly it also means that Oscar contender Get a Horse! will finally move from the film festivals to the general public. Yes, I've already gone to see it, and I've updated my thoughts on the film in my entry on the Shortlist (which you all must read because I'm getting desperate). And you can stay for Frozen, which is, you know, pretty good.

But today is also the week after the 1935 review went up, and while Three Orphan Kittens, Who Killed Cock Robin? and The Calico Dragon were good films, those were far from being the film animated film from 1935. No, there is one film that came out that year that topped them out and may as well be the best Disney film of all time. (At least the animation professionals polled by Jerry Beck sure think so.)

Best Animated Short - 1935

We are coming ever so close to the end of the line. Thankfully there's still the 2013 Oscar race to start preparing for, but the question now is what to do with this blog once I get through these last four reviews. Do I just sit around for a year and then spring into action every November when the next year's Oscar race comes into being? Do I make random posts about some other animation topics once in a while? Do I go ahead and review the Best Animated Feature nominees? That actually doesn't sound like a bad idea, but it'll take much longer than these reviews of short films whose films are short, but it still takes me hours to write them. I was toying around with posting these reviews on tumblr, but it hasn't amounted to much. We shall see.

Best Animated Short - 2013 - The Shortlist

So last year the list of qualifying animated short films were leaked to the public and I was able to make a post about it, which turned out to be one of my most popular posts. Well, it's been a year since then and I've been waiting for the list of qualifying films, but one never appeared. I went snooping around but the most I found was that the showing of the qualifying films had already happened back in October 22-23 or sometime around then. Well, a few days it came out that the Academy had come out with the shortlist of the films, which are the ten films that the Academy will meet again to decide on the nomination. So like last year, I will be writing on each of the films. The problem is unlike last year when a few of the films were readily available, only one of them fit the bill so far. So most of these will be just previous based on the trailers.

And of course just to show how useless this blog is / how hard it is to blog regularly, the list of finalists has been out for a week, but thanks to a combination of a hectic work schedule and an awesomely awesome pony convention (Nightmare Nights Dallas), this post only just now going up now when you were able to find the films practically everywhere else online.

Best Animated Short - 1936

Hooray! My COMLEX 3 is over and I can finally relax and enjoy myself at Nightmare Nights Dallas this weekend! How did it go, you ask? Well how should I know? I'm writing this three weeks early so I won't have to waste much more time studying. Oh the joys of getting a nice long queue.

Anyways, now that we're in the 1930s it's kind of weird to go back and see just how different things were, especially in the game of baseball. In 1936 there were only 11 300-game winners. 30-win seasons and .400 seasons were uncommon but not impossible. The first Hall of Fame voting was held as the BBWAA elected Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Babe Ruth (just one year removed from his last game), the late Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson. And a 17-year-old high school kid named Bob Feller is able to make it to the big leagues and strike out his age, even if it was against the hapless Philadelphia Athletics. Yes, things sure were different back in 1936. And yet the animated short films remain as timeless now as they were back in 1936. Some of them were, at least.

Best Animated Short - 1937

Well, in another week and a half I will be taking my COMLEX Step 3 exam. You'd think I'd be so busy studying that I won't have time to write these reviews, but well, I am studying, but you do have to have study breaks. The good thing about going to q 2 week reviews is that I won't have to take as many of these study breaks or something to waste my day on reviews. I mean, it's fun to do these reviews and all, but I hate how I spend an hour reviewing each film because I have to look up some interesting facts that often times don't have anything to do with the film.

Meh. I've got nothing to say about 1937. Let's just go on to the Oscars from that year.

Best Animated Short - 1938

To me, 1938 is one of those years like 1952 that really doesn't stand out. It really felt more of the same in baseball, as the Yankees won their third straight World Series title. Meanwhile Walt Disney won his seventh straight Oscar in the Best Animated Short category. And the films of 1938 were overshadowed by the Hollywood masterpieces that debuted in 1939. Still, if you look closer there are some things about 1938 that stands out.