Ranking the 2023 Academy Award Nominees for Best Animated Short
Year after year, when the Oscar-nominated animated shorts make their rounds, they turn out to be some of the most artistically stunning work honored by the Academy. The fact that they’re almost all new discoveries only makes it more exciting somehow.
Here’s my ranking of the five nominated animated short films, with a pretty important caveat: I think they’re all fantastic, and every single one of them would be a worthy winner. From five through one, we’re only talking about varying degrees of greatness. Only one is currently available on a streaming service, so watch for the showcase to come to your local art house (Feb. 17 in Salt Lake City).
5) The Flying Sailor (8 min., directed by Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis) – The fact that it’s the shortest of the five nominees is probably the main thing that keeps it this low on the list, since it doesn’t have quite as much time to build to an emotional climax. But the filmmakers employ a terrific mix of stop-motion, conventional animation and live-action snippets to capture a real-life event—the survival of a Canadian sailor caught in the explosion of a TNT-carrying cargo ship in Halifax Harbor circa 1917—as a life-passing-before-your eyes experience that takes on cosmic dimensions.
4) An Ostrich Told Me That the World Was Fake and I Believe It (11 min., directed by Lachlan Pendragon) – The synopsis is fairly easily summarized as “The Matrix with stop-motion characters,” as telephone salesman Neil (voiced by director Pendragon) starts to notice evidence that his existence is being manipulated by external forces. Pendragon employes a meta-structure that allows us to see the filmmaking in progress even as we see Neil getting “red-pilled.” As journeys into existential terror go, this one is wonderfully full of dark humor.
3) Ice Merchants (14 min., directed by João Gonzalez) – There’s some phenomenally efficient visual storytelling on display in this story of a father and son living in a house suspended from a mountainside, selling ice to the people in the town below as part of an incredibly ritualized journey. It rather unexpectedly and powerfully turns into a narrative about people whose lives are affected by climate change, with Gonzalez’s simple, hand-drawn animation and minimalist color palette turning into a tale of familial love and resilience.
2) The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse (34 min., directed by Peter Baynton and Charlie Mackesy) – Co-director Mackesy’s 2019 graphic novel is adapted into a sweet, beautiful odyssey involving a lost young boy (voiced by Jude Coward Nicoll) helped on his journey to find home by a mole (Tom Hollander), fox (Idris Elba) and horse (Gabriel Byrne). I suspect some folks will roll their eyes at the simple koans that make up the characters’ conversations, but somehow they work magically as part of a visual style where the scrawling “guide lines” of the character animation makes them feel more fragile and in need of friendship, and the wintry watercolor-style backgrounds keep the focus on an internal journey. [Available via AppleTV+]
1) My Year of Dicks (25 min., directed by Sara Gunnarsdóttir) – An adaptation of Pamela Ribon’s memoir, it follows 15-year-old Pam (voiced by Brie Tilton) on her quest to find a worthy beau to take her virginity. Each of the five individual chapters brings its own particular spark of visual imagination, from shifts to anime-style characters to an awkward conversation between Pam and her dad that does to her body what the experience is clearly doing to her brain. It’s hilariously potent in its detail about the mix of romanticism and confusion in that time of life, with an ending that’s delightfully satisfying, and somehow turns it into the sexiest thing imaginable to watch someone helping another person put on their clothes.