Exploring the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts of 2004, 20 years on
The animated feature films and shorts present at the 77th Academy Awards, which honored the films of 2004, perfectly encapsulate 2004 as the year American animation broke; the fairly young award for Best Animated Feature had seen a push and pull between computer and traditional animation, with its first winner Shrek proving to be such a behemoth both critically and financially that the entire industry would be pressured into abandoning traditional animation. None of 2004’s feature nominees were traditionally animated, and Disney appear only as distributors of PIXAR’s triumphant The Incredibles. The short-form category — which at least throws Disney one bone — in large part follows suit, though it isn’t lacking for surprising, artful entries even among its computer animated nominees. This year these nominees celebrate their 20th anniversaries
links to the films discussed herein are included with each film — these are, with the exception of the National Film Board of Canada’s Ryan, unofficial sources.
2004 (the 77th Academy Awards)
The Nominees:
- Ryan (Chris Landreth) (the winner)
- Birthday Boy (Sejong Park and Andrew Gregory)
- Gopher Broke (Jeff Fowler and Tim Miller)
- Guard Dog (Bill Plympton)
- Lorenzo (Mike Gabriel and Baker Bloodworth)
Ryan is a prickly, visionary portrait of artists — its titular artist, Ryan Larkin, an animator for the National Film Board of Canada whose life imploded while he was in the midst of an upward career trajectory in the 1970s, and the artist behind the film itself, Chris Landreth, who posits that his subjective perspective on Larkin’s life and work can only ultimately reflect back on his own. Landreth calls his animation style “psychorealism,” which manifests as quasi-“photorealistic” computer animated renderings of people with phantasmagoric accents, i.e. psychic pains made physical in sharding, deconstructing faces. The film plays out as an interview between Landreth and Larkin, the latter of whom has been living in varying degrees of houselessness and addiction since leaving the NFB in 1982. Landreth provides clips and artworks from Larkin’s work with the NFB, including short segments from his Oscar-nominated short film Walking (a masterpiece) and his final short film Street Musique; these are augmented with a computer animated avatar of Larkin dancing his way through these clips, with Landreth even adding nods to Larkin’s mentor, Norman McLaren (the film even concludes with a direct homage to McLaren’s masterpiece Pas de Deux). Landreth attempts to be observational in his illustration of his subject’s own radically observant animation style — Walking in particular is a triumph of humane detail — using his own strange, often grotesque, but undeniably indelible computer animation techniques to mirror Larkin’s own attention to the obscure characteristics of his animated subjects.
The result is a film that beautifully — but despairingly — highlights the daisy chains of artists and animators that exist in the margins of their medium, progenitors for entire formal movements that persist in states of disarray and obscurity while the medium’s mainstream carries on upon the foundations they set. Norman McLaren beget Ryan Larkin beget Chris Landreth — and Landreth depicts with terror the broken legacies left by our forbears — whether mentors or parents. It’s a surprising — albeit appropriate and well-deserved — winner of its award. When presented with the honor, Landreth speaks to the camera, out into the televisual ether where Larkin may be watching, and he tells him the award is just as much for him.
Ryan Larkin — who had, prior to his departure from the NFB, also been nominated for the animated short film Oscar for Walking — would successfully resume commercial animation work in the ensuing years. He died three years later in 2007.
Chris Landreth, who had also previously been nominated in this category for his short film The End, has not been nominated since this victory.
Birthday Boy is a melancholy portrait of the persistence of childlike wonder in a war-ravaged landscape. A young Korean boy ventures through an abandoned village, play-acts the combat of the Korean War he has seen play out in his ghost town, a war that seems to have taken his family as well as the rest of the town; he stares on in wonder at planes flying overhead and trains carrying tanks rushing through the village. Computer animated, aiming for relative realism in its details, the film suffers in the uncanny valley intrinsic to computer animation from this period, but remains emotionally evocative and well-directed. Its writer and director, Sejong Park (박세종), was studying animation in Australia at the time of its production; though this honorific is nowhere to be found in Wikipedia or IMDb, Park was only the second Oscar nominee of Korean descent in the history of the Academy (after Korean-Chinese-American Christine Choy was nominated for her documentary feature Who Killed Vincent Chin), and was the first nominated for a film specifically set in and about Korea. He has since been credited as an animator and visual effects artist on only a couple productions, none since 2007, and thus has not received any further nominations; Birthday Boy remains an exemplar of diasporic Korean art, discussed, for example, in a chapter of 2009's Diasporas of Australian Cinema.
Gopher Broke is a cursed and hideous production that concludes with a computer animated gopher getting crushed by a cow’s ass in slow motion. It’s an exemplar of a misbegotten pivot taken in animation during this period that remains in vogue — a kind of tech demofication of cartooning that renders the slapstickery of a Looney Tune in three dimensions, robbing it of any sketchy or painterly beauty or satisfying physical fluidity. It operates with the same animal-on-a-mission formula as one of those numerous short films starring Ice Age’s Scrat; here, a gopher living under a road oft-travelled by produce trucks attempts to rob the trucks by digging a ditch that knocks their produce loose onto the road. His schemes are thwarted one after the other by other grotesquely-rendered scavengers who come to steal the fruits of his labor. The final truck carries the aforementioned cow, and as the gopher is hoisted by his own pitard and is crushed by a cow knocked loose from its truck, we mercifully cut to credits.
For its age, Gopher Broke could certainly look worse, but it speaks to a period where animators tried to adapt two-dimensional character design into three-dimensions with catastrophic results. Everything is too angular, and neither too-real nor too-cartoony; the gopher is a soulless creation.
In all likelihood those who nominated the film for such a high honor were unaware of its remarkable legacy. It was produced by Blur Studios, brainchild of filmmaker Tim Miller, who would eventually direct Deadpool. Blur is a prolific and ever-present VFX and animation studio; with Miller as its head, the studio has produced title sequences for David Fincher films, VFX for Marvel films, and countless cinematics for video games, eventually using their clout and history with David Fincher to create Netflix’s animation anthology series Love, Death + Robots (which has itself been a dependable outlet for contemporary animators, including some nominees in this very category). Whether Miller and Blur’s success is a net good for the industry is hard to say; their macho, quasi-edgelord aesthetic has made animation a more respectable and mainstream prospect (because kids = not serious / entertainment, MEN = very serious / ART) but has, y’know, also falsely equated seriousness with these edgy characteristics. Less debatable is the impact of Miller helming Deadpool and giving Ryan Reynolds cultural superiority; this is a jailable offense that may, hopefully, be someday resolved.
Gopher Broke’s director and Blur company man, Jeff Fowler, eventually made his feature directorial debut with Sonic the Hedgehog, which Miller and Blur Studios produced (though Blur was not responsible for the controversial human-toothed Sonic design). Blur and its staff simply will not stop winning. Thank you Jeff Fowler for helming this scene, which, because Sonic the Hedgehog was one of the last films I saw in theaters before the pandemic, lives in my head rent free.
Neither Jeff Fowler nor Tim Miller have yet received another Oscar nomination.
Guard Dog marked a return to the Oscars for prolific cult cartoonist Bill Plympton, who had been nominated for the same award for his sweet, strange 1988 film Your Face. Plympton’s style, in the vein of the alt comics and political cartoons popularized at the same time he was studying visual arts and starting out as a young cartoonist in the late 60s and early 70s, is the platonic ideal of 90s alternative media; his loose, sketchy work belies its occasional morbidity and surreality, and it found natural homes in mainstream magazines and newspapers, MTV, alt weeklies, and the Cannes Film Festival in equal measure.
Guard Dog follows a hyperactive little dog on a walk through the park; he barks at everything he sees, from a little girl with a jump-rope to a butterfly fluttering by, with Plympton providing thought bubble vignettes detailing the dog’s gruesome, paranoid thought processes (the girl wants to decapitate his owner with the jump-rope, the butterfly wants to devour him). It simultaneously captures the hilarious, clueless vigilance of our domesticated animal friends as well as anxiety and paranoia itself; it understands how sensible fear and anxiety can feel when one’s subconscious is able to intrude with such grotesque fantasias of possibility.
It’s lovely in spite of its potential cartoonish garishness; its soft pastel color scheme, its subtle, behavioral character animation, its irreverent but keen psychological empathy — these all wrinkle satisfyingly against its rougher edges. This feels perfectly reflective of Plympton’s ethos as an artist; he describes himself as a kind, genial guy who appreciates the opportunities for odd, surreal expression permitted by animation — he understands the utility of darkness as catharsis.
As is often the case with these short film nominations, this nomination is probably as much about recognizing the film as it is the artist; Plympton’s remarkable productivity (24 short films and 3 feature films) between his earlier nomination for Your Face and his second for Guard Dog saw multiple sea changes in the world of animation — that stretch encapsulates virtually the entire duration of the Disney renaissance, for example, and saw the emergence of PIXAR, Dreamworks Animation, and the increased popularity of anime in US culture. Plympton is a Sisyphean presence in the world of animation, a visionary perfectly attuned to his chosen medium that plugs away amid the incessant passage of time.
The titular dog of Guard Dog would go on to become the “Mickey Mouse of Plymptoons,” Plympton’s production company, appearing in a number of his other shorts and features. Plympton has remained prolific, with his steady stream of annual short films arriving as expected in the ensuing decade or so, and he’s also contributed a segment to the ABCs of Death anthology franchise, animated eight couch gags for The Simpsons, and has been working on his eighth animated feature film. He has not yet received a third Oscar nomination, but one imagines it’s only a matter of time.
Lorenzo, the fifth and final nominee, is a Disney film directed by a staple of their 90s Renaissance, Mike Gabriel, who co-directed The Rescuers Down Under and Pocahontas. Lorenzo is an orphan from Disney’s Fantasia projects, originally conceived in the 1940s and, upon rediscovery of the concept in the late 90s and early 2000s, considered for a segment in an ultimately abandoned third Fantasia film. As such, it’s primarily about the relationship between image and music. It’s a darkly comic story of a fluffy, privileged cat whose tail is brought to life as cosmic comeuppance for his cruelty; the anthropomorphic tail drags its host on a destructive tango through the film’s stark, painterly, quasi-Parisian streets, fountains and alleys. It has the mix of traditional animation and digital augmentation that characterizes this latter era of the Disney Renaissance, though the twin techniques don’t clash too aggressively, instead resulting in a fluidity that perfectly matches the tango music that scores it. Its colors are vibrant, its environments beautifully minimal and well-rendered, and, amazingly, it follows through on the violent implications of its black comedy; it probably helps that the short wouldn’t find a home in a Fantasia film or at the start of a Disney or PIXAR feature, but would instead play before the Garry Marshall dramedy Raising Helen (a bizarre and enigmatic fate for an animated Disney short, but we could stand to see more off-kilter programming decisions like this from today’s sheepish entertainment conglomerates). It’s ultimately the most conventional of these nominees — simple, entertaining, proficiently produced, and stylistically old-fashioned; with some tweaks it would have fit right in with the low-stakes and vibe-y films of Wolfgang Reitherman’s reign with Disney animation in the 60s and 70s.
Gabriel would continue working with Disney in the ensuing 20 years, primarily as a member of larger animation teams and eventually in a consultant role that Disney today labels part of their “Creative Legacy” studio team (I have no idea what exactly this is and the official Disney website for it sheds very little light on it). He has not directed another film, short or otherwise, and thus has received no further nominations. Lorenzo, bafflingly, is not available to view on Disney+.
Unlike the previously covered 1994 ceremony, there was no “funny sketch” about animation to introduce the animated shorts category at the 77th Oscars. The animated shorts section is preceded by a suitably reverant presentation of the live action short film nominees from Jeremy Irons.
After Andrea Arnold’s victory for her short film Wasp, Irons is traded for Laura Linney, who ultimately matches Irons’ gravitas in discussing her own medium, introduced with reference to animation’s lineage going all the way back to the form’s ostensible inventor, Winsor McCay. These segments, wherein the nominees are read off as a camera swoops to each one within the crowd itself, is really strange and novel; I like it, but it’s not a huge surprise that it didn’t become the format going forward, as it tends to be a little bit confusing which of the three or four people in the row are the nominees being mentioned…Bill Plympton being an adorable exception:
As previously mentioned, Ryan’s Chris Landreth goes home with the Oscar, honoring Ryan Larkin in his speech. He concludes praising the Academy for continuing to highlight and support short form work.
