film
While there are many great Oscar-nominated short films this year, Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow stands out.
Big movies come in small films
Coming to a theater near you: Oscar-nominated shorts by Michael J. Casey
I
t may be Hollywood’s biggest night, but the Academy Awards are much more than a TV show that trots out Hollywood’s elite and validates a life spent making movies. In a very real sense, those little statues open big doors. And not just for the top echelon, but for those lost in the thick of a long broadcast. Which is why the three short film categories — animation, live action and documentary — are the ones to seek out. All of these filmmakers have big dreams, but due to financing and distribution, they must start small. If they prove themselves on this stage, then doors open where there weren’t doors before. However, tracking down shorts is no easy task for the non-festival going public, which is why ShortsHD is giving a theatrical release of the year’s nominees. There are four total packages — due to its length, the documentary category is split into two programs — to cover all 15 nominees.
Your animated show of shows Of the three categories, animation stands strongest with entries from Pixar, Aardman and genuine independents. Pixar’s entry, Sanjay’s Super Team, is a child’s eye into the fantastical world of television and religion connecting generations through storytelling. A reminder that for true-believers, be they religious or commercially devoted, no matter how far-out the story seems, it is always true to those whose hearts are open to wonder. But Sanjay’s Super Team is not the best nominee for this year’s Oscar. Nor is it the second-best. The Russian film, We Can’t Live Without Cosmos, lacks the computer-generated wizardry of Pixar’s entry, but manages to achieve a greater sense of empathy with a cruder animation style. Here, two life-long friends push each other, and compete against one another, for a chance to go to outer space. It builds slower than Sanjay, but Cosmos proves that sometimes simplicity makes deeper connections. Simplicity is the hallmark of Don Hertzfeldt’s work, and with World of Tomorrow, Hertzfeldt’s achievement isn’t just the best of the bunch, but one of the year’s best movies altogether. Combining simple stick-figure drawings with dazzling abstract backgrounds, Hertzfeldt bites off the whole of humanity by employing time-traveling clones to remind past selves that the world we inhabit is a beautiful one, but that beauty is transient. The end result is as funny as it is heartbreaking. World of Tomorrow may be the best, but the other nominees aren’t anything to shrug at. Bear Story — a Chilean computer-generated animation — tells the story 62 January 28, 2016
Boulder Weekly