The 2018 Oscar-Nominated Short Films - Animation/Live-Action

[StevePulaski]

To begin, once again, I'd like to say a big thank you to ShortsHD, who has been exceptional in finally making the Oscar-nominated live action, animated, and documentary short films accessible to the mainstream public. Once upon a time, you'd have to traverse festivals, be an accredited film critic, or do your own sleuthing on public television in hopes to find at least one of these short films, let alone in time for the Academy Awards themselves. Now, for a few dollars, you can watch the shorts on Amazon, iTunes, DirecTV, and various other video-on-demand platforms, or make a trip out to a local theater and see them on the big-screen.

I continue my now (shockingly) five-year-old tradition of reviewing the nominees for Best Live-Action and Best Animated Short Film a few days prior to the big night.

Animation:

Dear Basketball (2017)
Directed by: Glen Keane

Rating: ★★

Dear Basketball serves as the companion piece to a love-letter NBA all-star and future Hall of Famer Kobe Bryant wrote to Derek Jeter's "The Players' Tribune." The short, which is merely five minutes long, has Kobe reciting the words of the titular poem, which recount his decorated 20-year career during which he gave his "mind and body, spirit and soul," so he puts it, as well as the most he could've given — his all.

Director/animator Glen Keane captures Kobe's youth and professional career through rapidly changing, scribbled pencil-sketches that messily blur both ends of the spectrum for the basketball pro. The climactic point in the short comes when Kobe admits the moment he recognized it was time to call it a career and say goodbye to the basketball, the object and the game. This, of course, followed his later years with the Los Angeles Lakers, with whom he spent his entire career, which was plagued by a perfect storm of injuries and inconsistent locker-room and coaching turmoil all at once.

Dear Basketball, as a poem and a short film, is undoubtedly cathartic for Kobe, whose acclaimed short-film nonetheless arrives on-scene at the time of the intense #MeToo movement combating sexual assault, the repercussions of which Bryant is not far removed. It's an emotionally obvious short, with a lot of saccharine moments and the kind of lines athletes themselves find profound, while the rest of us are left mumbling to ourselves, "there has to be more." Indeed, there just has to, and that added substance does not come in the form of an occasionally overbearing John Williams score either.

Directed by: Glen Keane.

Negative Space (2017)
Directed by: Ru Kuwahata and Max Porter

A boy packs his father's garments for him in Negative Space.

Rating: ★★★

Negative Space concerns a young boy, whose relationship with his father is defined by the way he taught him to pack luggage. The meticulous process involves folding shirts and pants in a particular way so as not to take up more space than necessary. It continues with socks being rolled up as tightly compacted circles of cotton and a belt snaking around the perimeter of the bag. As the boy grows older, he goes beyond using this process to pack his own garments to packing his father's for him. He longs for the texts from his father, upon his arrival at wherever his job needs him to go, that read nothing else but "Perfect," in response to a bag well-packed.

The short, directed by Ru Kuwahata and Max Porter, uses a unique style of stop-motion animation, where the characters and backdrops look as if they were made from paper mache. It provides a scrappy look in the best possible way, and the crystal-clear narration makes every line up until the final one, unambiguous. At only five minutes, it's hardly a tax, though its long-term impact remains to be seen with me. Ask me again during next year's batch of shorts what I think of this one.

Directed by: Ru Kuwahata and Max Porter.

Garden Party (2016)
Directed by: Illogic Collective

Rating: ★★★½

Garden Party is a splendid endeavor with hyper-realistic animation that puts all motion-capture animated films that try to achieve this kind of lifelike realism to shame. The animation here is so vivid and clear that the fact that it focuses on amphibians, such as frogs and toads, is a treat since we can see the patterned details of their scales and multi-colored bodies pop with texture.

The band of creatures find themselves smitten by the presence of a filthy mansion, with overgrown shrubbery and flea-infested confines suggesting simple foreclosure until the twist is revealed. In the meantime, the frogs play in the pea-green swimming pool, while the toads feast on what they can find. One toad manages to get himself lodged in a glass-jar in an attempt to devour the macaroons inside. He gets out, no fear, by the only obvious way he could. I'll leave that for you to discover.

Garden Party is guiltily amusing in its simplicity and its nuanced look at the primitive and goofy nature of mother nature's most beloved inhabitants. While its ending might be atonal given the playfulness that dominates the first half, it reveals itself as an inadvertent mystery in a delightful bait-and-switch. The short is the kind of pleasant surprise the Oscars are supposed to unearth.

Directed by: Illogic Collective.

Live-Action:

DeKalb Elementary (2017)
Directed by: Reed Van Dyk

Bo Mitchell in DeKalb Elementary.

Rating: ★★★½

DeKalb Elementary is a bone-chilling exercise in suspense, made all the more timely with the horrors of the Parkland high school shooting still so fresh in the American collective conscience. It concerns the 2013 incident in a DeKalb elementary school in Georgia where a man armed with an AK-47 entered the facility's main office. After firing a few warning shots, he was calmed by the school bookkeeper, who diffused the situation while on the phone with a 911 dispatcher. After several minutes, the gunman permitted the police to enter the school and arrest him, all thanks to the gentle hands of a woman who undoubtedly saved countless lives that day.

The gunman in the short is played effectively by Bo Mitchell, but the best performance comes from Shinelle Azoroh, who does the emotional heavy-lifting throughout. While Mitchell evokes some strong humanity through his careful sobs and the trickles of information he reveals to the administrator, Azoroh cycles back and forth between motherly and authoritative, collected while deeply scared. The short exhausts one over the course of 20 minutes, building suspense as anyone's worst nightmare unfolds. Its slowburn, real-time nature packs an emotional wallop, one that, if you're like me, will seem some long-absent tears as the drama unfolds. DeKalb Elementary is a sturdy character-piece that shows one person's response to a potentially devastating situation with arguably necessary compassion. The problem is, however, the impulse to throw something and react with violence is far too apparent in the front of our minds, if coherent thoughts are even present at all during such a situation. I, for one, hope I'm never forced to find out.

Directed by: Reed Van Dyk.

The Silent Child (2017)
Directed by: Chris Overton

Maisie Sly.

Rating: ★★★

The Silent Child's aesthetic gloss and sentimental nature, along with its blatant messaging at the end, render it less a conventional short-film and more of a PSA that begs for disabled children to have a safe home in our schools. The setup is one that makes it easy for us to loan our empathy. Joanne (writer Rachel Shenton), a social worker, is hired by a wealthy but overworked couple to teach their deaf six-year-old daughter Libby (Maisie Sly, who is deaf in real-life) sign language. Joanne diligently works to teach Libby a new method of communicating, but initially finds it difficult given her parents' unwillingness to learn the language as well.

Nonetheless, she's diplomatic and courteous in her daily teachings, and develops a strong bond with Libby. Beyond its core moral, the short is a compelling look at how the growing demands of an overworked culture (not just America, as this is a film from the United Kingdom) put children at a disadvantage, leaving one of their only outlets to be television and technology. Libby spends quite a bit of time in front of the TV, and if she isn't there, she's sitting quietly at the dinner table, ignored by her family while awaiting the next arrival of her language teacher.

The Silent Child raises a real concern going forward. Many parents of deaf and mute children understandably want the best for them, but they are burdened by the costliness of specialized care and the pressure to send them to school in hopes they'll wage a decent living down the road. The latter, however, is a risky move given that most schools are not equipped with programs or branches designed to help children with hearing or visual impairments. The message The Silent Child presents is a vital one, and Shenton and Sly are so charismatic together that it's hard not to believe they're close in their own personal lives. There just might be a bit too much sentimentalizing here to get much more excited than that.

Directed by: Chris Overton.

My Nephew Emmett (2017)
Directed by: Kevin Wilson Jr.

Emmett Till (back left, Joshua Wright) is hounded into a pickup by the husband of the woman at whom he allegedly whistled in My Nephew Emmett.

Rating: ★★½

My Nephew Emmett provides us with a new perspective on the story of Emmett Till, this one shown from his Uncle Mose Wright, played by L.B. Williams, with whom Emmett was staying in Money, Mississippi in 1955. It's during his sudden shift from Chicago to the sleepy Mississippi community that Emmett was picked up by a couple of goons along with the husband of the woman at whom he allegedly whistled in broad daylight one afternoon. Upon learning of this from a local man, Mose ponders the consequences all day until nightfall comes and the aforementioned townspeople knock on his doorstep and use violence to tear the boy from him and his wife.

Writer/director Kevin Wilson Jr. offers a seldom explored angle on Emmett's story, and enhances it by using Laura Valladao moonlit cinematography to his advantage visually. The result is a tone-conscious exploration of escalating events that led to a brutal death proven to be a result of a false story in modern context. Outside of that, however, Wilson Jr. pulls back on the suffocating suspense of the third act by showing and not telling the outcome. We cut to black where we expect only to pick up for a few seconds until the entire thing is eclipsed by another fade that signals we've hit the conclusion, despite our awareness that there is still more of the story to tell. All the sullen ambiance Wilson Jr. and Valladao look to build through tone and inky blue atmospheres is sacrificed in the final minutes, resulting in a serviceable but largely underwhelming look at a national tragedy that has become one due to, among many reasons, how incredibly personal it is.

Directed by: Kevin Wilson Jr.

The Eleven O'Clock (2016)
Directed by: Derin Seale

Damon Herriman and Josh Lawson.

Rating: ★★★½

Derin Seale's The Eleven O'Clock could certainly be reworked into a compelling short-play, the likes of which would emulate the zealous nature of something like David Ives' All in the Timing. Despite it's Australian origins, it's a recognizably British farce about a psychiatrist named Dr. Phillips, played by the short's writer, Josh Lawson, who becomes face-to-face with a patient, Nathan Klein (Damon Herriman), who believes he is also a psychiatrist. The screwball setup leads to both men treating the other as their patient, finding great confusion and hysteria in deciphering the appropriate side of the desk on which to be as well as communicating with their secretary, who is none the wiser amidst the situation.

A brilliantly funny sequence in this perfectly concise 13-minute short comes when Dr. Phillips tries to engage his patient in a game of word association, where the timing between Lawson and Herriman is nothing short of exceptional. The two performers pick up on the comic beats of one another in uproariously funny ways, and The Eleven O'Clock never grows tiresome because it is so effectively measured. In the lesser hands of a writer, this could've been a trainwreck. In the assured hands of Lawson, with the slick direction of Seale, it is a short worthy of its Oscar nomination.

Directed by: Derin Seale.

Watu Wote/All of Us (2017)
Directed by: Katja Benrath

Abdiwali Farrah.

Rating: ★★½

Watu Wote/All of Us concerns Jua (Adelyne Wairimu), a Kenyan Christian traveling near the unsafe Kenya/Somali border, where Christians are often apprehended and routinely killed. Jua finds herself greatly uneasy around the passengers aboard a crowded bus, most of whom Muslim, and finds even greater distress when her only method of transportation is seized by the terrorist group, Al-Shabaab, led by Faysal Ahmed, whose radicals urge the Muslims aboard to oust the Christian passengers. A true story, Watu Wote is sure to highlight the selfless move of the bus's passenger, Salah Farah, played by Abdiwali Farrah, a Muslim who shielded a Christian from being shot by an Al-Shabaab member as the group was dispersing.

Watu Wote/All of Us is largely a kumbaya crying for unity, with little character and broadstrokes of morality holding it back from achieving something more humanistic. For many, its most credible quality will show that it's not just white people who stereotype and generalize Muslims, but rather other races as well, and this is something writer Julia Drache might have wanted to explore further. Instead, it's a largely unmemorable affair, succumbing to the same kind of generalities its lead character makes without reservation.

Directed by: Katja Benrath.