The animation shorts category at the Oscars is usually a space where imaginations run wild. This year’s nominees are no different. ShortsTV, a short films channel that has been bringing the Oscar nominees from all the shorts categories to Indian theatres in recent years, has collaborated this year with BookMyShow Stream on which 2021’s nominated animation shorts are now streaming as a combined package.
Here are my reviews of each of the nominated films:
Genius Loci
Director: Adrien Merigeau
Cast: Nadia Moussa, Georgia Cusack, Jina Djemba
Language: French
At one point in Genius Loci, the protagonist Reine (voiced by Nadia Moussa) hears a piece of music she cannot decipher though it has a profound impact on her. “That was beautiful. It was like a tornado playing music,” she says. Those words pretty much sum up French filmmaker Adrien Merigeau’s short that is in contention for an Oscar this year: it is like a tornado making an animation film.
Reine is a loner with a vibrant inner life, who shares a small flat with an infant and his mother Mouna (Jina Djemba). Home is a refuge, but it also gives Reine limited space. It is a place she finds unsettling and calming by turns. One day when she wanders away into the city, in the hustle and bustle of the vast urban landscape she finds chaos and colour that she can, inexplicably, connect to.
Merigeau, who was the production designer on the Oscar-nominated feature Song of the Sea, uses an unpredictable parade of images in this fantasy flick to re-examine conventional definitions of solitude and loneliness. In the city as seen through Reine’s eyes, colour gives way to black and white and back to colour, and a Picasso-like deconstruction of thugs in a pedestrian subway is followed by ordinary pieces of paper metamorphosing into live shapes that would do any Origami artist proud.
Genius Loci is visually intriguing and oddly poetic.
Rating: 3.25 (out of 5 stars)
***
If Anything Happens I Love You
Director: Michael Govier, Will McCormack
Cast: None
Language: English
Loss is the theme of actor-writer-director duo Michael Govier and Will McCormack’s If Anything Happens I Love You, a silent drama about the chasm that develops between two people when their 10-year-old daughter dies. Instead of sustaining them through their sorrow, memories of their beloved child cast a giant shadow on the couple’s relationship.
The differing ways in which individuals grieve is exemplified by a telling scene featuring the family’s playful pet cat while the parents sit far apart, unable to converse or even look at each other.
Govier and McCormack (who is credited as one of the story writers of Toy Story 4) have opted for a sparing use of colour in minimalist sketches backed by Lindsay Marcus’ thoughtful music, a blend that serves to underline the emptiness of the lives playing out on screen. When the cause of the child’s death is revealed, it might seem to some like too fleeting a mention for such a serious issue, but If Anything Happens I Love You is not about the politics of violence – it is about the people left behind.
Hollywood heavyweight Laura Dern is one of the executive producers on this project, which has enough emotional heft to make it worthy of its spot among its fellow nominees.
Rating: 2.75 (out of 5 stars)
***
Opera
Director: Erik Oh
Cast: None
Language: No dialogues
Erik Oh’s short is the busiest of the nominees in this category, although it is dialogueless, does not even opt for a background song as If Anything Happens I Love You does and does not shift locations either. Opera focuses throughout its eight minutes and 50 seconds running time on the inner workings of a giant pyramid that resembles a modern-day video game or a contemporary corporate structure as much as it harks back to Biblical imagery of slave labour or anything and everything that you might wish it to be.
Opera is about the cycle of enslavement and rebellion that homo sapiens seem to be stuck in, the elevation of false gods that will inevitably be pulled down, blind faith, questioning minds, human civilisation and time itself.
If you think about it, the implications of this fascinating short are quite depressing, bringing to mind the human refusal to learn from historical blunders recorded for posterity in texts and archaeological remains, despite which our species insists on playing out the same mistakes, the same idol worship, the same foolishness over and over and over again.
The detailing in this film’s animation is stunning. The richness of the goings-on on screen means it is impossible to take it all in at one go, making Opera a prime candidate for repeat viewing.
Rating: 4.5 (out of 5 stars)
***
Yes People
Director: GÃsli Darri Halldórsson
Cast: Helga Braga Jónsdóttir, Ilmur Kristjánsdóttir, Jón Gnarr, Kristján FranklÃn Magnús, Sigurður Sigurjónsson, Þorvaldur DavÃð Kristjánsson
Language: Icelandic
A day in the life of residents of a comfortable middle-class urban apartment complex like any other anywhere in the world – this is what writer-director GÃsli Darri Halldórsson explores in the cheeky, funny, lively short, Yes People. An elderly couple who epitomise the “opposites attract” cliché live contiguous to another who spend their time in companiable silence, a mischievous young boy tries to escape the watchful eye of an older relative, and others find ways to drown out their amorous neighbours.
Barring their racial markings and foreign tongue, the characters in Yes People could well be the inhabitants of any among the zillion condominiums dotting Gurgaon or Mumbai’s landscape. This film then is about the universality of the human experience, despite our surface differences. Yes People is sweet and fun.
Rating: 3.5 (out of 5 stars)
***
2021’s Oscar-nominated animation shorts are available in India on BookMyShow Stream. Oscars 2021 will air in India on 26 April.
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