Oscar Shorts: Animation and Live-Action is a mixed bag

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      This year’s crop of live-action Oscar-nominated filmlets is a mixed bag, with some otherwise fine material compromised by slickness and overfamiliarity, as in Talkhon Hamzavi’s “Parvaneh”, the 25-minute tale of a lonely Afghan girl stuck at an asylum centre in the Swiss Alps. When she heads into Zurich to send money home, she has an adventure with a city girl and—well, everyone learns something! A similar gloss coats the 14-minute “Boogaloo and Graham”, about Belfast brothers given baby chicks to raise at the height of the Troubles.

      On a much higher level is “The Phone Call”, from the U.K., with the great Sally Hawkins as a help-line volunteer who spends most of the short’s 21 minutes with an unseen Jim Broadbent, calling during what sounds like a suicide attempt. It’s stellar work, let down by a forced, feel-good ending.

      Fortunately, there’s still a solid hour in the remaining pair. Israel’s 40-minute “Aya” stars Danish great Ulrich Thomsen as a musician who thinks a Jerusalem woman (Jellyfish’s Sarah Adler) is at the airport to give him a ride—and she doesn’t correct him. The most unusual item is “Butter Lamp”, a French-Chinese production in which a travelling photographer takes pictures of Tibetan nomads before every kind of background but the best one, as revealed at the end.

      Showing in a separate program are five nominated ’toons, supplemented by four more, three of which are relatively weak: Bill Plympton’s typically nonsensical “Footprints”, which at least shows some improvement in his repetitive drawing style; the mercifully brief “Duet”, a black-velvet painting for those who haven’t heard about heterosexual love; and France’s “Sweet Cocoon”, a bug’s-eye view in predictable CGI mode—although it does have a nifty ending. The other also-ran, Quebec’s rural-set “Bus Story”, will give a “Blackfly” buzz to all who grew up with those squiggly-looking NFB cartoons.

      Best of the frontliners is likewise from our film board, in collaboration with Norway. Torill Kove’s clean-lined “Me and My Moulton” looks bittersweetly at her childhood, circa 1965, and is her third visit to this category. As good, but much darker, is “The Bigger Picture”, combining beautifully painted surfaces with stop-motion animation to look at two U.K. brothers facing their mother’s decline. Disney’s “Feast” and “The Dam Keeper” are too anthropomorphically ordinary to really stick. But the Dutch-made “A Single Life” crams enough living, and awesome design, into two swift minutes to remind us just how great (and wicked) cartoons can be.

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