This is not about movies for babies nor is it about movies made by babies. No, this is serious. This is about what I like to call “Hollywood’s little bundles of joy”, or what you may know as “short films”. But unlike babies, I’m not going to take it easy when I talk about these moving pictures. No, when these movies drool, I’m gonna let them know about it. No “oohs and ahhhs” or “goo-goo gaa-gaa” from me. This post is gonna be more like “No, that’s not Ok, that’s weird, you’re not going to make any friends that way”. So get ready for my look at this year’s Oscar nominees for live action and animated shorts.
Confused and Stressed
Some of you may know of my fabled life-challenge to complete a Checkverse mission every week. If not, now you do. So for this week, I watched 10 lil movies. Here’s the proof:
Notice something different?
…
Um no, that’s always looked like that. ☹
…what’s different is I did two missions this week.
Usually I pace myself. Usually I put my prude cap on and plan out what missions to work on next so I don’t have dry spells. But this week I said screw it. This week I lit the candle at both ends and put it in the microwave. This week is a double feature.
Animation = Obfuscation
The first batch of films I watched for the “Short Film (Animated) Oscar Nominees 2015” mission. I’m a big fan of animation. In fact, I’d already seen one of the films “World of Tomorrow” three times already and ordered it on Blu-ray. It’s my pick for the win.
On the whole, what’d I think of these films? Overall, they felt like abstract art. “Sanjay’s Super Team” was pretty straightforward (it’s by Pixar) and “World of Tomorrow” was abstract, but easy to grok, but the other three left me perplexed.
I have a bunch of questions, but they’re spoilerly so skip this bulleted list if you haven’t seen this films. If you have, maybe you can answer them:
- In “Bear Story” is his family dead? Is the boy with the coin significant? Or is this just a simple recreation of events that happened in Chile?
- In “We Can’t Live Without Cosmos” are the astronauts brothers or lovers? Does the guy who replaces the dead one signify something? Or is this just a simple story about dealing with loss or dreams meeting harsh reality?
- In “Prologue” is this conflict meant to represent one that happened? Why is everyone naked? Does getting stabbed in the taint mean something? Who is that kid who witnessed it?
So yeah, overall I was pretty confused after watching those animated shorts. I usually overthink or underthink art. It’s rare that I think it the right amount.
Live Action = Hit ’em hard
The second batch of films was for the “Short Film (Live Action) Oscar Nominees 2015” mission. Maybe it’s just this year’s nominees, but man the live action shorts were stressful and depressing. Other than “Stutterer” (which I thought had a delightful mechanic, despite its predictability), this year’s nominees really wanted you to feel something and for me, that feeling was: not happy.
Duck! Spoiler bullets!
- My favorite of this set was “Everything Will Be Ok”. It’s not a surprise that he’s kidnapping his daughter, that’s not the point. The point is for you to feel tense and bad for half an hour.
- “Ave Maria” was funnyish and culturally critical.
- “Shok” was sad and tense, but unfortunately featured clearcut good/evil which I’m never a fan of. It also highlighted that I know nothing about the Kosovo War.
- As I mentioned “Stutterer” had a cool mechanic. This was the most fun of the films. I think the big lesson was, you can be ashamed about more than one thing.
- The last film I saw was “Day One”. This felt a little propaganda-ee. On top of that, it seemed like every minute of the film wanted to shock you more than the last and then remind it’s only her first day by showing the title (“Day One”) right before the credits. I liked this the least of the short films.
Cultural restrictions, differences and difficulty communicating seemed to be pretty popular themes in this bunch, but overall they seemed to just want to stress me out.
Summin’ It Up
It felt like the movies this year wanted to take their mediums to their logical extremes. The animated shorts wanted to be super metaphorical and the live action shorts wanted to be super real and gritty. It was an interesting dichotomy. It might end up as a trichotomy though, because I didn’t realize there were documentary shorts to watch till today, so I’ll have to do that at some point too. I hope you enjoyed my critique of these baby movies. If you see/saw them, let me know what you think/thought.
Till next time,
Anton
This concludes The Debriefing — Episode 12: Baby Movies.
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