Oct 27, 2016

2017 Short Film Oscar Nominations: record number of films nominated

This year, 70 animated short films were nominated for the Academy Awards in the animated short category, a record for this category. This is a significant increase from 2014 and 2015, when there were 58 and 60, respectively, and more than double the number from 2010, when there were only 33.

In this article we present the 33 films we consider top contenders. Unlike some Academy Award categories, such as Best Foreign Language Film, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences does not publicly release a list of all films that qualify for awards in the animated short film category, but Cartoon Brew has obtained a complete list of short films that qualified. Our list considers only those films that have qualified.

What is striking is not only the number of films, but also the rich diversity of the short films that qualified, in terms of technique, style, and content. The Academy is, more than ever before, a treasure trove of outstanding work. The Academy has often favored commercial fluff (such as "The ChubbChubbs" and "anybody-") over technical and artistic merit, but this is not the year to make that mistake.

The Academy conducts multiple rounds of voting before selecting its nominees in the animated short film category. Currently, a volunteer panel of active and lifetime members of the Academy's Animated Short and Feature Film Division is reviewing the nominations. This group will view all 70 short films and evaluate the work. The 10 most highly rated films will be selected as finalists, which the Academy plans to announce around November.

These 10 films will then be screened again, this time by a larger group of short films and animated feature films. This round of voting will determine the five nominated films, which will be announced on Tuesday, January 24, 2017. The final vote to determine the Academy Award winners is open to all Academy members.

One of the shortest films to make it through the preliminary round is BAFTA winner Ainsley Henderson's "Stems" (Scotland), a sweet little meditation on the beauty of stop-motion animation; PES's "Fresh Guacamole" and Ted Petock's "The Crunch Bird," among other shorts, have been nominated in the past.

Meanwhile, this year's longest film, Rob Vallee's "Pear Cider and Cigarettes" (Canada), has a running time of 35 minutes (the Academy defines a short as under 40 minutes). An animator and designer who has had a significant impact on commercial animation over the past decade, Vallee proves to be an impactful director in addition to all his other skills. It is a grittier, rougher, more personal story than the typical animated short, and the Academy's short and feature animation categories are made up of older, more conservative voters, which could put it at a disadvantage. It is a one-of-a-kind story suited to Valley's style and production techniques, and is one of the gems of animation of 2016.

Another notable short is "Erlking" by legendary Swiss animator Georges Schwizgebel. Based on Goethe's poem "Erlkönig" and set to music by Schubert and Liszt, Erlking is filled with mesmerizing patterns of movement and color that will be familiar to fans of Schwizgebel's work. It was one of the most well-received short films of 2015 by festival programmers and critics.

The National Film Board of Canada has two films in competition this year: Franck Dion's "The Head Vanishes" and Theo Ushev's "Blind Vaysha". Like Schwizgebel's film, Ushev's "Blind Vaysha," the story of a young girl who can see the future with one eye and the past with the other, counts as a more accessible and easy-to-understand story.

The expressionist linocut style that Ushef uses in "Blind Vaysha" is not the only film that recalls the printmaking style. Céline Deveau's Le Repas Dominical (France) tells a more contemporary story in printmaking style of a gay young man trying to survive an awkward weekend brunch with his family. The short won the César, French cinema's highest honor, this past February.

Of the five films nominated for the Cartoon d'Or, four were nominated for this year's Academy Award. The other three films are Sous tes doigts (Under the Finger), directed by Marie-Christine Cortes (France); Peripheria, directed by David Coquard-Dassault (France), which won two awards at Annecy; and Daniel Alike" directed by Martínez Lara and Rafael Cano-Méndez (Spain), which won the Goya earlier this year.

Stop-motion shorts, for whatever reason, often offer stories and ideas that deviate from traditional storytelling, and some of the quirkiest Oscar nominees of 2016 are Kangmin Kim's "Deer Flower" (Korea), BAFTA-nominated Simon Cartwright's "Manoman" (UK), Joanna Rytel's "Moms on Fire" (Sweden), and Alyx Duncan's "The Tide Keeper" (New Zealand), among other stop-motion techniques use of stop-motion technology.

Patrick Osborne, who won an Oscar for Disney's "Feast" a few years ago, has produced another quality piece with "Pearl," a VR experience created for Google's "Spotlight Stories." The custom-created film version follows the same storyline as the VR version and works well as a theatrical viewing experience.

Speaking of Disney, the company is pushing two short films: "Inner Workings" by Leo Mazda and "Piper" by Alan Barillaro. For the past six years, Disney or Pixar has been nominated every year (accounting for 20% of all nominations during this period), regardless of whether they have actually produced an Oscar-worthy film. (Two of those six nominations have been for "The Paper Man" and "Feast.")

This year, Disney will face competition from its own employees: Pixar artists Andrew Coates and Lou Hamou-Raj won the top prize at SIGGRAPH and has been viewed more than 8 million times since it was posted on Vimeo a few weeks ago, making it one of the most viewed animated shorts ever posted. Several former Pixar players are also competing: Dice Tsutsumi and Robert Kondo, whose first short, "The Dam Keeper," was nominated for an Oscar in 2015, are back with their CG short "Moom."

France funds more animated shorts than any other country, and the maturity of the short film industry is evident in the submissions: Fabrice Luang-Vija's "He Who Has Two Souls" is a sensitive story of an Inuit man coming to terms with his gender identity Donato Sansone's "Journal animé" is a creative tour de force that examines the darkness of contemporary global events through a French lens. His latest work, "The Empty" (France/Korea), attempts to visualize memory, a subject that is not easy to portray.

Other notable works include: