This year’s Oscar-nominated animated shorts tell compact tales about first kisses, sweets and an old-fashioned children’s TV show, along with more adult topics such as PTSD and hair transplants.
‘Beautiful Men’
Nicolas Keppens’ “Beautiful Men” uses deadpan humor to poke at a vulnerable side of masculinity: hair loss.
Keppens went to Istanbul for work and found himself at a hotel breakfast in the presence of men in Turkey to get hair transplants. “It was a room full of bald men,” he recalls, and while you might expect boisterous behavior, “it was totally silent. It was tender and touching, seeing this image we don’t usually get of manhood.”
He says that the reactions to the film have been fairly gender-specific, with men sighing, “Yeah, it’s not easy losing your hair,” and women “seeing more of the comedy because they see their husband or boyfriend or whatever in it. If some others see more of the tenderness in it, that’s also a good thing.”
‘In the Shadow of the Cypress’
“In the Shadow of the Cypress” tells the story of a traumatized sea captain with PTSD and his daughter, whose lives change when they discover a beached whale.
Written and directed by Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani, the deceptively simple-looking, wordless film is deeply metaphorical: It springs from Molayemi’s prickly relationship with his father and Sohani’s father’s serious injury during military training.
“We researched a lot about Iranian veterans suffering PTSD, their families, their relationships, and it had a lot of impact on our scenario,” Sohani says.
Among the challenges the Iranian filmmakers faced: U.S. sanctions. “Sanctions and the subsequent economic crisis caused a lot of problems; our currency is shrinking every day,” Molayemi says. Equipment and basic living costs kept rising, and in the end, the film took six years to complete.
‘Magic Candies’
In the Japanese short “Magic Candies” (inspired by a Korean kids’ book), an isolated young boy buys intriguingly colored hard candies that give him the ability to communicate with a person — or animal or object — opening up his world.
“More than you think, actually, people around you are thinking about you and caring about you,” says producer Takashi Washio through an interpreter. “When you notice that, it’s different.”
Director Daisuke Nishio’s gorgeous visuals may fool viewers into thinking it’s stop-motion, but it’s actually meticulously designed and rendered 3D CGI. “We decided if we just created it by stop-motion, it wouldn’t go beyond the original storybook,” Washio says. “I love every bit of this film, because if you look into every scene and cut, there is a true intention behind it.”
‘Wander to Wonder’
The most objectively insane nominee has to be writer-director Nina Gantz’s “Wander to Wonder,” a cockeyed, absurd look at the unusual denizens of an old-fashioned kids’ TV show, who have to cope with a real-life disaster. Funny and touching, an Easter egg-loaded cross between Ray Harryhausen and Charlie Kaufman, it manages to generate concern for their plight, their Shakespearean recitations and their gherkins. That may be because Gantz was also dealing with a very serious situation in her own life.
“I went through this experience of grief myself,” she said of the film’s evolution. “With absurd humor, I could tell this story with a little bit of lightness.”
The gherkins “symbolized for me the last thing you have in your cupboards when you run out of everything. It starts from the last gherkin jar, and from there it all goes south.”
‘Yuck!’
No matter the outcome on Oscar night, the contest for cutest animated short has been settled: It’s French writer-director Loïc Espuche’s chronicle of a kid’s first kiss, “Yuck!”
Children at a family campsite spy grown-ups and teens kissing, exclaiming their horror (as Espuche noted kids doing at a screening of one of his shorts that featured a kiss, filling him with delight). But when one boy starts to have stirrings toward one of his friends like those they’d watched, his lips turn a glittery hot pink for all to see. “Red is more adolescent love or adult passion,” says Espuche. “There is something more naive in the pink with the glittery effect. When I was a kid, I ate candies that sparkled on my tongue. I wanted to re-create this sensation.
The kids are so disgusted by people kissing, “but at the same time, they can’t stop talking about it.”
