LITTLE ROCK — Most people receive the Oscars as an opportunity for a party, a chance to rubberneck the glitterati and to lament the gap between what Hollywood thinks is class and the movies people actually pay money to see. But for a certain kind of moviegoer, the real action is elsewhere, on what some people dismiss as the “minor” Oscar categories that honor films relatively few people have the chance to see.
This week, Market Street Cinema is showing The Oscar Nominated Short Films. They are divided into two programs - one for animated, another for the live-action short films competing for this year’s Oscar. It ought to be a boon to those who regularly complain about the difficulty of catching these films before the Academy Awards (they’ve traditionally been made available on DVD shortly after the ceremony).
It’s my sense that - thanks in part to the influence of film festivals - local audiences have become more attuned to the pleasures available in short movies. (The shorts programs at the Little Rock Film Festival have been especially popular in recent years, and as the tools of production become less expensive, more artists are liable to take them up. And most first films are short films.)
Of the two programs, I’d rate the animated shorts as slightly more enjoyable, in part because the films themselves tend to be more concise. While I’ve no idea how they might be sequenced in the program - I was given Internet links to streams of the films and so I watched them in random order, over a period of a few days. The first one I encountered was British filmmakers Grant Orchard and Sue Goffe’s delightful A Morning Stroll, which is based on “The Chicken,” a nonfiction piece by Casper G. Clausen that was published in The New York Literary Review in 1986.
The film takes off on the curious anecdote at the heart of the piece - a New Yorker out for his morning constitutional encounters a chicken walking down the sidewalk, which then climbs up a stoop and pecks on a door before being let inside. The filmmakers give us three versions of the story set in different time periods and utilizing different animation techniques, before offering an O. Henry twist at the end. While it’s considered a long shot for the Oscar, it did win a jury prize at Sundance and a British Academy Film and Television Arts award.
Indeed, the prohibitive favorite seems to be Pixar’s beautiful and poignant La Luna, a 7-minute tale that is the directorial debut of Enrico Casarosa (and which is scheduled to screen theatrically before Pixar’s 2012 feature Brave). Inspired by Italo Calvino’s short story “The Distance to the Moon,” it tells the story of a young Italian fisherman who, caught between his bickering father and grandfather, manages to forge his own way.
But as heartwarming as La Luna is, part of me will be rooting for William Joyce’s The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, a paean to the transformative power of books by the Shreveport based children’s book author and illustrator, who co-directed the film with Brandon Oldenburg. (Full disclosure: I worked with the remarkable Mr. Joyce 30 years ago.)
Rounding out the animated program are two Canadian films, the painterly and bittersweet Wild Life from Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby, about an Englishman exploring the Canadian territories; and first-time director Patrick Doyon’s cartoonish Dimanche (Sunday), about a little boy’s quest to entertain himself when his family makes a visit to his grandparents.
On the live-action side, the highlight for me was The Shore, a 31-minute film that stars Ciaran Hinds as Joe, an expatriate returning to his native Belfast with his American daughter. Joe left 25 years before, but now he means to reconcile with Paddy (Conleth Hill), his best friend until they were driven apart by “The Troubles.”
I also was moved by Raju, about a middle-class German couple who adopts an Indian orphan, and the Norwegian oddity Tuba Atlantic, a surreal and quirky film about the enduring bonds of brothers, which seemed designed to flummox the Academy’s notoriously conservative voters.
I was less impressed by Time Freak, a well-made yet silly time travel fantasy, and Pentecost, about an altar boy whose incompetence at serving Mass imperils his football (soccer) obsession.
The Oscar Nominated Short Films Grade: 88 (animated), 87 (live action) Cast: Various Directors: Various Rating: Not rated Running time: 90 minutes for the animated program, 120 minutes for the live-action program Languages: Mainly in English, but German, Gaelic and Norwegian with English subtitles
MovieStyle, Pages 31 on 02/10/2012