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THE OSCAR NOMINATED SHORT FILMS 2009

Written by Edward Moran

 

At this year’s Oscars, ten films are in contention for best short film. Five of them are animations (Lavatory Lovestory, Oktapodi, This Way Up, La Maison en Petits Cubes, and Presto); five of them are live action films (New Boy, On the Line, Toyland, The Pig, and Manon on the Asphalt).

My favorites in the animation category are This Way Up and Lavatory Lovestory, which win by a long shot over their competitors. All five live-action films are quite good, so it’s harder to make a decision, but I think The Pig and New Boy are winners, if only because of a hard-to-pin-down charm factor: each of these films simply make me smile (and shed a few tears) in a way that the others don’t.

This Way Up, by Smith and Foulkes, is a delightfully irreverent animation in which two seemingly proper British undertakers try—but fail—to give their “loved one” what used to be called a “decent Christian burial.” Mishaps abound: the hearse is crushed by a huge stone set into freefall by a series of events that only Rube Goldberg could have thought up, leaving the hapless corpse suspended from a tree branch at one point. But there’ll always be an England, and the stiff-upper-lipped morticians slog on through catastrophe after catastrophe (remember the Perils of Pauline?) till they finally consign their charge to the earth. That surreal, raucous “dance of death” segment is amazing, combining the energy of a New Orleans jazz funeral with the hallucinations surely induced by an Irish wake. Rest in pieces, indeed!

Konstantin Bronzit’s Lavatory Lovestory is a poignant vignette about a lonely Russian babushka who leads a dreary life as a public restroom attendant until one of her customers starts showering her, anonymously, with flower petals, transporting her into a fantasy world where true love is just a flush away. Watch for the surprise ending.

It was a tough call, but The Pig, a Danish film by Dorthe Warnø Høgh emerges in my mind as the best of the live action shorts. Another poignant tale of Asbjørn, an elderly pensioner who falls in love with a painting of a smiling pig in his hospital room while he awaits a colonoscopy. The pig becomes his guardian angel, and he is infuriated when it is arbitrarily removed from the wall so as not to offend the sensibilities of his Muslim roommate. A brouhaha erupts when the latter’s son crumples a drawing of the pig that Asbjørn makes to replace the missing painting. The film, a parable about tolerance and the clash of cultures in a modern democratic society, raises important questions that are being asked across Europe today. But the true resolution comes when the two elderly patients, alone at last, begin to share details about their illnesses, and it is revealed that the Muslim man has been blind all along.

In a similar fashion, Steph Green’s film, New Boy, probes the clash of cultures in modern Ireland when Joseph, an African boy, is thrust into an elementary school classroom that is far different than his father’s school in Africa. Taunted and bullied by his classmates, Joseph experiences bittersweet flashbacks to school life in Africa. When his Irish schoolmates pronounce him “dead” for not fitting into their culture, Joseph remembers how his own father was abducted, and presumably killed, by soldiers who invaded his classroom one day. But in the end, all is well as Joseph and his tormentors ultimately recognize their common bonds (and bondage) as schoolchildren.

A program of short films.
The animated “Lavatory Lovestory” by Konstantin Bronzit, Russia “La Maison en Petits Cubes (House of Small Cubes)” by Kunio Kato Japan, “Oktapodi” from Gobelins, l’École de l’Image, France; “Presto” by Doug Sweetland, United States; and “This Way Up” by Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes, Britain. The live-action “Auf der Strecke (On the Line)” by Reto Caffi, Switzerland and Germany; “Grisen (The Pig)” by Dorthe Warno Hogh, Denmark; “Manon Sur le Bitumen (Manon on the Asphalt)” by Elizabeth Marre and Olivier Pont, France; “New Boy” by Steph Green, Ireland; and “Spielzeugland (Toyland)” by Jochen Alexander Freydank, Germany.
Released by Shorts International and Magnolia Pictures.
Total running time: 2 hours 11 minutes.
These films are not rated.