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.

It's coming...

Rainbow Dash is excited! She's not the only one!

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

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.

Rainbow Dash is as Awesome as She Wanna Be

 And you know she wants to be as awesome as she can! And she can be very awesome!

Best Animated Short 2015 Possible Contenders

Yes, I know I haven't written a post in...three months. (It's been that long already?) That doesn't mean I've gone MIA. I've just been busy with other things. I had some other non-Oscar related animation posts in mind, but I just hadn't had much time to work on it. As a result, I'm afraid I've probably lost whatever readers I did have during this lengthy hiatus. But oh well. It's time to look ahead to the Best Animated Short race for this year.

We're getting to the time when the Academy screens all of the qualified shorts for its voting members to whittle down to the shortlist. Back in 2012 we had the entire list of qualified films as obtained by voter Michael Sporn. Unfortunately, Sporn's tragic passing means we won't have easy access to this list like we did in 2010-2012. Still, the cycle of Best Animated Short will continue, and there will be films in competition for the shortlist.

Luckily for us, we have other animation historians hard at work looking at animation news, including the fellows at Cartoon Brew, where we obtained the longlist from 2010-2012. We don't have the complete list, but editor in chief Amid Amidi has compiled a list of some of the stronger contenders for the award. It's not going to be the complete list, and some on this list may not actually qualify, and I don't necessarily agree with some of his statements in the intro, such as "the category remains among the most obscure of the Oscar categories" or "this is the first-ever attempt by any animation media outlet to highlight the contenders in this Oscar category" (unless he meant this year), but this is the best we have to take a look at the films that we may be focusing on in the next three months.

Get the complete list here, or look at the individual films after the break. (Most are trailers. Some are interviews with the directors. A handful are complete films. Then there's Konstantin Bronzit's We Can't Live Without Cosmos, where we can find nothing as far as videos go.