This past weekend I had the wonderful opportunity to return to the Academy Museum in the Mid-Wilshire Museum Row neighborhood Los Angeles (also known as the “Miracle Mile”) for two presentations on this year’s Oscar nominees. The first was for the Best Animated Short Film category, and this event featured introductions by the filmmakers themselves.
Arriving at the museum, I found that large Oscar statues had been installed on top of the red carpet leading into the state-of-the-art David Geffen Theater. Inside, projected slides welcomed guests to the Oscar-week Nominee Programs.
After introductions by representatives from the Academy Museum and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, we learned that there were 93 entries that qualified for the Best Animated Short Film category this year, which were eventually narrowed down to the five nominees. Then moderator Marlon West (a Disney visual-effects animator best known for his work on Moana, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, and The Princess and the Frog) took the stage to introduce the first filmmakers to be included in the nominees: director Tal Kantor and producer Amit R. Gicelter, whose short film Letter to a Pig is an unconventional, moving, and quite haunting tale about the Holocaust.
During her introduction, Kantor said she grew up hearing stories about the Holocaust from her grandmother and came to understand how the darkest atrocities can trigger coping mechanisms. She also remembered one story from a survivor about a hog who saved his life. “I wanted to take this personal experience and preserve it as a universal subject,” continued Kantor. “How does it affect our moral and ethical outlook on ourselves? Can we talk and learn about the past? Can we deal with our traumas without transmitting them to future generations? I poured in my hopes and worries about the future, and I never imagined that this would be relevant and crucial these days.”
The second nominee is entitled Ninety-Five Senses, and was introduced by filmmaker Jerusha Hess (writer of Napoleon Dynamite), who co-directed the short with her husband Jared. Jerusha talked about the “MAST” animation program and how it birthed this short, which she called the couple’s “most important film.” This movie focuses on a man on death row reflecting on where his life went wrong. It features six different animation teams creating the artwork throughout, as the narrator discusses each of the five senses. Actor Tim Blake Nelson (from The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, among many other films and television series) provides the narration. “We are so tickled to be here with these other nominees,” concluded Hess. “They really are beautiful. We are honored.”
Third was Our Uniform, created by Iranian filmmaker Yegane Moghaddam, who joked about how her movie was the shortest of all five, so she would keep her speech short as well. “My film is about school in Iran. These stories are shared by almost every Iranian girl who has gone to school. We put so much care into kids’ education, and we should never fill their hearts and minds with anything but love.” I was personally incredibly impressed with the very memorable style of animation in this short and how it was created entirely on various articles of clothing, some of which was on display in the Academy Museum lobby.
The penultimate Animated Short was Pachyderme, directed by French filmmaker Stéphanie Clément. “It’s my first time in Los Angeles. I’m really happy to be here,” began Clément as she took the stage. Pachyderme is a short film that took five years to be made, and it follows a little girl who visits her grandparents and the devastating events that transpire in what should have been a safe space. “I’m really honored to be here and watch my work. It means a lot. It’s a short film about traumatic memories and repressed memories. It’s really difficult to express myself with words, but I found that with animation it was helpful for me to communicate with others and to express a feeling that’s inside.”
The final Animated Short represented in this group of nominees was War Is Over!: Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko, and it was introduced by director Dave Mullins from Pixar Animation Studios and producer Brad Booker. “Thanks to Sean Lennon for taking a chance on us,” they began. This film follows two soldiers who play chess via carrier pigeons across enemy lines, and the common ground they discover through their game and their pet. “It was such a blessing to make a film like this in a very different way. Sean and Yoko believed in us, and we obviously couldn’t have done this without them choosing us. It’s been an incredible experience to meet the other filmmakers. There’s a real breadth of depth to what they’re trying to say. We tried to take [our] subject matter very seriously.”
Lastly, Marlon West came back out to the podium to wrap up the presentation by saying, “Animation people don’t like being up on stage and being in front of cameras,” so he encouraged the crowd to give them a big round of applause. Afterward I took some time to further explore the display in the lobby:
The 96th Annual Academy Awards will be broadcast this coming Sunday, March 10th on ABC. For more information on the Academy Museum, be sure to visit the location’s official website.