Exploring the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts of 1984 and 1994
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been around for almost 100 years and they’ve yet to find a way to be normal about the medium of animation. In recent years the discourse within the confines of the show itself was so diminishing and infantilizing toward the medium — to the point that winners of awards for animation almost had to defend themselves and their chosen medium in their speeches — that in the most recent ceremony they commenced the show with the award for best animated feature, giving (Fascist Psy-Op™) Dwayne The Rock Johnson a platform to wax poetic on animation as a fundamental component of the cinematic form, definitionally linked to it; that this apologia for the Academy and its presenters’ various digs at the medium over the years came from an actor who proudly announced a live action remake of Moana less than a month later illustrates the potential bad faith of these highfalutin’ proclamations.
Nonetheless, the Academy has had an awards category for short form animated filmmaking since 1932, their fifth year — sixty years before they bestowed a Best Picture nomination on an animated film (1991’s Beauty and the Beast) and seventy before they finally introduced a category honoring animated feature films…which they were, naturally, very normal about.
But yes, they have been honoring the medium of animation in the short form space for almost a century. Here I aim to explore two sets of nominations reaching new decennials in 2024; the 1984 and 1994 lineups, celebrating their 40th and 30th anniversaries of release this year.
links to view the films are included herein; these are, with a couple exceptions (thankful as always for the National Film Board of Canada), unofficial. Some of them are in better quality than others; unfortunately, one of the films that would most benefit from being viewed in high quality — the film Triangle — is in the worst condition. If anyone knows of a high quality version available of this film, please let me know!
1984 (the 57th Academy Awards)
The Nominees:
- Charade (Dir: Jon Minnis) (the winner)
- Doctor DeSoto (Dir: Morton Schindel & Michael Sporn)
- Paradise (Dir: Ishu Patel)
Charade, the winner this year, is a funny little lark; its director, Jon Minnis, is a bit of an enigma, primarily reported on for this film and its Oscar victories. The film, which Minnis completed with markers on paper in a summer while an animation student at Sheridan College, is an extended joke about a charades player who can’t get his companions to guess the titles of films no matter how obvious he makes them (e.g., he transforms into a shark for Jaws, puts on a Superman suit for Superman, etc.) Meanwhile, his competitor comes out, does a small, obscure gesture, and the players get the answer instantly. Minnis has quite a gap in his filmography after this win; he has various credits for character and storyboard design, writing and direction on a number of obscure animated series through the early 2000s and little else. Jon Minnis, where have you gone? Why have you forsaken us? What does winning an Oscar for an animated short film lead to?
Doctor DeSoto sees an illustrated children’s book (notably authored by the writer of Shrek, the adaptation of which became one of the first Best Animated Feature nominees) brought to life with charming, sketchy fidelity. A mouse dentist, the titular Doctor DeSoto, decides to make an exception to his “no predators” policy to assist a fox with bad teeth, and then DeSoto and his wife find themselves needing to scheme to prevent the fox from devouring them at his next appointment. It’s gentle but strange — ultimately, a kind of reversal of the Zootopian notion that animals can coexist productively together, wherein DeSoto is correct in his prejudices. But it’s an inventive short, with amusing vignettes before the proper plot kicks in showing how the diminutive DeSoto manages to perform dental work on animals of disparate sizes. Co-directors Morton Schindel and Michael Sporn were prolific adapters of children’s books; Schindel founded Weston Woods Studios, which has an unimaginably long filmography full of titles that would be familiar to any Caldecott-obsessed child of the last several decades. DeSoto was both Schindel and Sporn’s only nomination.
Paradise is by far the best of these three nominees. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), who along with Walt Disney are the most dependable presence in this category, and directed by Ishu Patel, the film employs a multitude of techniques to tell the story of a blackbird who becomes envious of a bird of paradise kept in a palace near their desert abode, and who strives to beautify themself in order to live the same charmed life. Like so many of the most accomplished animated films, short or otherwise, this is a film about transformation, fluidity, motion, depth. The chalkily-rendered blackbird moves with authentically birdlike mannerisms through gorgeously layered paper-thin landscapes; the palace they aspire to occupy glimmers, otherwordly, composed entirely of walls and pillars of light; the characters dance against painterly, psychedelic backdrops to Gheorghe Zamfir’s transcendent score (the main panflute theme of which will be recognizable to any fan of Kill Bill Volume 1). The film, primarily an aesthetic marvel, is, in its turn, a fable; a warning. Its beauty contains in it an autocritique; something this accomplished is by definition chained to certain constraints — it is, whether for its creator or for its viewer, a prison with invisible bars. Ishu Patel, an animator with the NFB who produced films, cultivated his techniques at the institution and ultimately taught there until the early to mid 90s; he eventually returned to his native India and travelled to Ghana, Yugoslavia, Korea, and Japan to teach animation. As far as I’ve been able to tell, animation instruction remains his primary mission. Prior to Paradise’s nomination, he had been nominated in the same category for his 1974 film The Bead Game, also produced with the NFB.
It’s typical that such an accomplishment not be rewarded with the actual prize; the overriding theme of the Oscars tends to be one of rewarded averages, and Charade, despite its simplicity, does contain a charm that would likely have swayed the most number of Academy voters, where DeSoto’s childish origins would perhaps be looked upon with a degree of inferiority and Paradise could be viewed as too much of a technical accomplishment in lieu of narrative heft or satisfaction. Nonetheless, in the annals of animation, it’s appreciable that a film as beautiful as Paradise was recognized at all.
1994 (the 67th Academy Awards)
The Nominees:
- Bob’s Birthday (Dir. David Fine & Alison Snowden) (the winner)
- The Big Story (Dir. David Stoten & Tim Watts)
- The Janitor (Vanessa Schwartz)
- The Monk and the Fish (Michael Dudok de Wit)
- Triangle (Erica Russell)
Bob’s Birthday is, in spite of its sadsack middle-aged milieu, extremely charming and very funny; it didn’t come as too much of a surprise when I learned that it became a backdoor pilot for a television show named for and about its married couple protagonists Bob & Margaret, who even in the brief runtime of this short are rendered with a bit more richness and consideration than one might expect from a somewhat cliched 90s husband-and-wife dynamic. The short involves a dentist, Bob, instantly hitting a mid-life crisis on his 40th birthday; while he laments at his job, his wife Margaret prepares a surprise birthday party with all of their friends. Bob comes home despondent and, before Margaret can warn him, he emerges into their living room bottomless with just a dress shirt on and begins complaining about all of their friends, who are hiding behind various pieces of furniture in their living room. It’s simple, straightforward sitcom stuff rendered with wit and amusing, blocky character design. Its directors, couple David Fine and Alison Snowden, went on to write and direct multiple seasons of the subsequent television show, multiple other shows (including Shaun the Sheep), and were eventually nominated once again for the same award for their 2018 short film Animal Behaviour (a similarly charming piece).
The Big Story is an incredibly brisk minute-and-a-half parody/homage to multiple eras of Kirk Douglas newspaper films; three characters, renderings of Douglas at various ages (though, in a nod to his agelessness, they all look almost exactly the same), argue over who’ll cover “the big story.” The design of the Douglases is sharp and funny, and their voices, all performed by Frank Gorshin, are amusingly on-point; ultimately, it’s just a solid joke. It also exists in full as a pencil test that highlights its well-directed character animation. Its animators, Tim Watts and David Stoten, were caricaturists who have had long careers since on the animation staffs of various Hollywood productions. This was their only Oscar nomination; it was honored in the same ceremony as Pulp Fiction, notable because Quentin Tarantino apparently loved the short and wanted it played before screenings of his film; let’s go back to this idea folks! Spare us thirty minutes of commercials and play more short films before movies!
The Janitor is a sketchy, and sketched, metaphysical short about God’s cosmic janitor, who takes the blame — and the credit — for the Great Flood and Christ’s ascension, which he handled while God was doing the hard work of designing and creating the larger cosmos. The stream-of-consciousness monologue that forms the backbone for the animation, written and voiced by Geoffrey Lewis, is beautifully performed; the animation appropriately feels as improvisatory and loose as his narration. Its director, Vanessa Schwartz, has only this as a credit as director and thus this is her sole nomination; she has been involved in the art departments of various films and in the same year worked as an assistant animator on Tales from the Far Side, adapting Gary Larsen’s similarly strange, irreverent comic strip.
The Monk and the Fish is a short comical meditation that was part of an anthology of French animation also released in 1994, Le Petit Cirque et autres contes. The film, primarily composed of watercolor backdrops and a single India inked little monk character, is like an illustrated parable; a monk becomes obsessed with a single fish in a pond where he meditates, and he eventually chases it into places considerably more abstract. The watercolor landscapes are beautiful; the animation of the monk is somewhat more simplistic and cartoony, and the tonal clash this creates is frustrating. Where it goes is ultimately intriguing and satisfying, but the clowning it takes to get there isn’t particularly substantial. Still, in 1994, before the onslaught of computer-augmented animation, there is a floor for how poor animation of this level can be; it’s a technical marvel in spite of its faults. Director Michael Dudok de Wit is perhaps the most prestigious of all of the filmmakers discussed herein; by the time of Monk’s release and nomination, he had been a storyboard artist and animator at Disney, and he would go on to win this award for his short film Father and Daughter and be nominated for his first feature film, The Red Turtle, a lovely, metaphysically enigmatic fantasy film co-produced by Studio Ghibli.
Triangle is an experimental, abstract illustrated dance film, sort of combining the twin traditions of experimental animator Norman McLaren, whose masterpieces Pas de Deux and Begone Dull Care feel as if they’re colliding in Triangle’s fluid interminglings of sound, color, and form; two dancers rendered in sharp, stark, chalky outlines have their dance invaded by an abstract shape, which complicates their choreography and finds their embodiments rendered harsher and more ambiguous. At only 8 minutes it is nonetheless perhaps somewhat overlong; that said, moments such as one midway through where the chalky geometric dancers cast shadows upon a brick monolith in the background has such astonishing, unfathomable depth and detail that its technical merits are undeniable. It may not reach the heights of its influences, but it is nonetheless a worthy effort, and speaks to the remarkable labor that goes into the medium.
The winner of this lineup, Bob’s Birthday, is perhaps a worthier winner than Charade was in its year, but it continues to demonstrate the aforementioned law of averages; neither the most technically accomplished nor the most moving or insightful, but nonetheless incredibly endearing, easy to like, and thus reward.
It was a year with a classic Oscars bit about animation; after Tim Allen presents the award for best live action short, he gives way to a prepared segment wherein Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck present the animated category. This is…surreal, particularly when the nominees are read in Bugs Bunny’s faux Flatbush accent (e.g. “Bob’s Boithday”) — they mercilessly do not have Daffy Duck sputter through any of these titles or names. The Oscars love a bit like this, but where were the Looney Tunes in the cultural consciousness in 1994/1995? The industry was, perhaps, prepping the American public in advance for Space Jam fever to strike in 1996…
