Comedy is hard. Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s plenty of genuinely funny people out there, but what’s funny between friends often just lands with a dull thud on screen.
Thankfully, the Oscar-nominated short film Instead of Abracadabra is not only hilarious, but it has a sweetness that sets it apart from all the other nominated shorts.
Would you be surprised to find out that slavery still exists around the world? Probably not.
Would you be surprised to find out that more people (over 27 million) are enslaved now than at any other time in world history? I certainly was.
You know, I’ve seen other reviewers/bloggers lament about how weak they think this year’s crop of Oscar-nominated live-action shorts are. Maybe they’re right. Maybe not.
But at least one of the entries felt more notable because of what it could have been, rather than what it is. And that missed opportunity is the short film The New Tenants.
I won’t pretend to know what makes a truly great film. I think I know what many of the ingredients are, but there’s just something that’s often hard to identify that gives a really powerful film its impact. And sometimes when you’re watching a strong film, even a short, you may not fully “get” how good it really is until a few days after, when you’ve had a chance to think about it.
Miracle Fish is that kind of film.
Watching the annual crop of Academy Award-nominated animated shorts is always a treat. But this year’s films made me wonder why it is that animated shorts are allowed to be both entertaining and thought-provoking, while feature-length animated films are generally disposable?
Making the rounds in cinemas over the next few weeks is the 2010 Oscar Shorts program, a compilation of both live-action and animated shorts up for this year’s Academy Awards.
One of the favorites in the animated category is Spain’s entry, The Lady and the Reaper.
Claymation is just another word for artistic insanity. It takes the hand of a sculptor, the timing of an editor, the heart of a storyteller and the vision of a great director.
Nick Park, then, would be a mad genius. He has been nominated for six Oscars for his animated films, and won four. I hope he has room for another.
Some of you may be old enough to remember MTV. You know, the cable network that used to show music videos and cool animated shows like “Aeon Flux?”
They recently removed the actual words “music television” from their iconic logo, which isn’t really a surprise since they haven’t showed an actual music video since 1998. But if the digital short “Codehunters” is any indication of what the network is planning to do in the future, that’s fine with me.
We live in a branded world. In fact, if you consciously counted every single logo you saw in any given day, chances are you’d be both amazed and appalled. The average American can identify the Apple logo at a glance, but couldn’t tell you who the British Prime Minister is.
But the Oscar-nominated animated short film Logorama turns our product-placement-driven society on its head, creating a world of anarchy, violence and chaos.
