Best Animated Short - 1998

We have arrived to the wonderful year of 1998, currently my favorite year for reasons that are beyond this blog. That was the year that I became a fan of the Oscars. I'll go into more detail about this in the next entry, but suffice it to say I was hooked after watching the ceremony in March. I committed the list of Best Picture winners to memory, and would spent the next several months watching as many of them that I can. So when the nominations were announced in January, I was all over it. Of course, at the time I was all over the Best Picture category, and that was where I focused most of my attention. That was the year Saving Private Ryan burst onto the scene, showing that there was still hope for the summer blockbuster. I saw it on its re-release after the nominations were announced and that was who I was rooting for, but even then I had heard about the Weinstein Machine, and knew nobody could top Shakespeare in Love.

Best Animated Short - 1999

We've now reached the 1990s in our Best Animated Short journey. I remember this as being the year when I first took notice of this category before the ceremony, although not necessarily in a good way. 1999 was the height of Pokemania, and I was caught in the middle. I played the games (although the only games were Red, Blue, and Yellow) and devoured the anime. I was well aware that the first movie was coming out in September, as the Japanese version was my favorite movie at the time. I convinced my mom to take me to a showing on its premiere, even though it was a Wednesday. Needless to say, I was deeply disappointed by the quality of the dub. Not only did the translation dumb down the story, it inserted pointless errors (i.e. Team Rocket calling a Scyther an Alakazam), and had pretty insipid voice acting. It was the moment that not only contributed to the cooling of my Pokemon Fever, but also destroyed my faith in dubs in general. There was one thing that I didn't find so bad: Pikachu's Summer Vacation, the short film that played before the feature.

Best Animated Short - 2000

Well, we've reached the final year of the second millennium, or the first year of the third millennium, depending on your stance on these definitions. At any rate, this year's Oscar race started out to be quite special, as the Chinese film 臥虎藏龍 (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) earned ten nominations, including Best Picture.  Yet it ended up kind of a downer. While it won four Academy Awards in the end, including Best Foreign Language Film (the first for a Chinese film), it lost out on the two top prizes. Losing Best Picture was not entirely unexpected, but losing the Best Director award was a bit more crushing. 李安 (Ang Lee) won the DGA award, which should have made him a front-runner. Instead he became only the sixth person in 50 years to win the DGA and lose the Oscar. He would eventually win the Oscar in 2005 for Brokeback Mountain, but it would have been better to see him win for a Chinese film.

Anyways, enough of that tangent. This is supposed to be about Best Animated Short. There was something quite different about the race in this category, although this difference was once quite common. What is this difference? Well, there was only three nominees. It was the first time in nine years that happened, and it hasn't happened since. So why was there only three nominees? Well, it would be helpful to review the rules for the short film categories as stated on the Academy Awards website.

Best Animated Short - 2001

So we've come to the ceremony ten years ago. This was the year that Lord of the Rings made a splash onto the scene, leading people to wonder whether or not this would finally overcome the Academy's bias against science fiction or fantasy films that cost Star Wars a Best Picture Oscar. (In the end, it wasn't.) This was also the first year of the Best Animated Feature Oscar, which Shrek pulled off the win over Monsters Inc. But it wasn't a total loss for Monsters Inc., as it helped end Randy Newman's streak of nominations without a first win at 16, when he won for his song "If I Didn't Have You." (The record is now at 20, held by sound mixer Kevin O'Connell). And then there's the Best Animated Short category. This was the first year when I became aware of the nominees of the year. Before then the nominees had always been nameless art-house independent films that I never really cared about, and that the popular stuff never gets nominated (more about that in a later entry). Then a few days before the Oscars, I went to IGN and saw this article showcasing the Oscar nominated animated shorts. They seemed interesting, but I wouldn't watch them for another five years, except for one of the nominees which I saw later that summer.

Ranking the Oscar nominated shorts: 2002-2011

Well, lets pause and take a break here. I've reviewed ten years worth of Oscar-nominated animated shorts, and since the history of this category can be broken down into eight ten-year blocks, we should pause and take a look back every ten years. And how would I look back? Well, I like making ranked lists, so I figure why not rank the films by how much I liked them? There have been a total of fifty nominated shorts, meaning that there was five nominees every year. It's the second time in a ten year stretch that has happened, and the first one was 2001-2010. I've seen 49 of the 50 nominees, so it's a good time to reflect on the shorts that I just saw.

And remember, this is solely by how much I liked the short. There are excellent films that rank low because it didn't click with me, and mediocre shorts that rank highly because I have terrible tastes.

NULL: Lorenzo (2004)
It's the film Disney refuses to release, a fact that still drives me absolutely nuts.

Best Animated Short - 2002

We have come to 2002. In many ways this was the most memorable Oscar ceremony, even more so than 1997, the first one I saw. It's got Michael Moore blasting the Bush administration while accepting the Best Documentary Feature Oscar for Bowling for Columbine. It's got Eminem winning the Best Original Song Oscar for Lose Yourself in 8 Mile without even performing it. It's got Adrien Brody laying one on Halle Berry after becoming the youngest Best Actor winner for The Pianist. Most importantly, it featured the one award that made me forever loyal to the Academy Awards: Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (aka Spirited Away) winning Best Animated Feature.

Best Animated Short - 2003

Welcome to my review of the Oscar nominated animated short films from 2003. So we are in 2003. The big news this year was that The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King won all 11 nominations, thus tying it with Ben-Hur and Titanic for the films with the most awards. (West Side Story could have been on the list if only it had won Best Adapted Screenplay over Judgment at Nuremberg . :() I remember posting the results on Nintendo NSider after the awards. I'm pretty certain I included the Animated Short award, but I glossed over it as I didn't care about the award back then. How things have changed.