“Affairs of the Art” is narrated by a boisterous middle-age woman named Beryl and purports to be about her budding artistic endeavors. Instead, she frequently digresses about the various obsessions of people in her family. Such as her sister Beverly who, as a child, had a number of disturbing fixations. Such as insects, dead animals, decay, pickling, mummification, Vladimir Lenin, taxidermy, and Trigger the horse. She also talks about her teenage son who, as a boy, dotted on an injured pigeon he rescued. After the bird was killed by a neighbor's cat, he concocted an elaborate revenge which began a lifelong obsession with complex machinery. Beryl attempts to talk about her art career but often gets distracted by the topic of her sex life. Finally, some advice from her successful sister convinces her to pursue her hobby full-time.
“Affairs of the Art” comes to us from director animator Joanna Quinn and is something of a sequel to her 1987 short, “Girls Night Out.” Quinn seems to delight in contrasting her cutesy character designs – chubby old women and wide-eyed moppets – with as many grotesque images as possible. A dead mouse and a quickly rotting human corpse are depicted in loving close-ups. At one point, the decapitated head of a pigeon is thrust right towards the audience. Nudity, especially of older and overweight bodies, is also a reoccurring motif. Beryl and her husband often get nude, stretching their flabby bodies in all sorts of ways. This fascination with exaggerated decay, of the living and the dead, extends to a story which strays on many surreal asides. My favorite is young Beverly's fantasy of meeting the mummified Lenin and soaring over Moscow with him.
It's a very odd little film. As is usually the case with the weird shit that gets nominated in this category, I'm assuming the animation is what caught the Academy's attention. And there's no doubt that “Affairs of the Art” looks incredible. There's a sketchy, painterly quality to the artwork. The characters move in fluid fashion and everything is extra detailed. While the subjects here are the kind of things you probably don't want to look at it, they are lovingly rendered. Perhaps beautifully drawing ugly shit and bringing it to life is Quinn's obsession. Menna Trussler's manic voice work as Beryl is also interesting, even if it threatens to become annoying as the short meanders on its way to the point. [6/10]
This Chilean short follows an unassuming looking middle-age woman through a typical week in her life. She bakes, has vivid nightmares/hallucinations, and displays a disturbing relationship with her dog. Once a week, she goes to an isolated building, creeps down to the basement, and tortures and murders the women kept there. Eventually, it seems her paranoia and fantasies catch up with her. If you're wondering why this short is so unnervingly vivid, that's because it's based on a true story: Ingrid Olderock was a professional torturer for Augusto Pinochet – the dictator who ruled over Chile from 1973 to 1990 – who specialized in tormenting other women.
“Beast” obviously deals with disturbing subject matter. The short actually shows a considerable amount of restraint in depicting the horrors Oderock carried out. (I'd recommended reading about the atrocities of Pinochet's reign if you ever want to loose some more faith in humanity.) Fittingly, “Beast” creates quite an unsettling mood. Its sound design and music are excellent, getting under your skin. It takes the viewer inside Ingrid Olderock's mind, showing a series of creepy nightmares and daydreams she has. The film never quite humanizes this terrible person – she remains stoic and unfeeling throughout – but does suggest that the cavalcade of terrors she wrought weighed on her to some degree.
Adding to this disquieting mood is the presentation. “Beast's” character designs look like creepy porcelain dolls, with unmoving faces. When brought to life with jerky stop-motion animation, the results is quite spooky. The short implies utilizes surreal sights – like an enormous bullet slowly moving through a house or faceless figures – and lots of judicial edits to imply the greater horrors it's about. It's an effectively disturbing film, designed to bring attention to these criminal acts. Considering there's almost no information about Olderock on the English language web – most of the articles about her relate to this film – I'd say that goal has been achieved. [7/10]
“BoxBallet” concerns two very different figures crossing paths. A brutish boxer and a graceful ballet dancer live in the same apartment building, initially unaware of each other. That changes after he retrieves her cat from a tree. The two begin an odd friendship and a budding romance, as she tries to introduce him to the joys of the more peaceful things in life and he charms her with gifts like a giant bag of sugar. The two begin to rub off on each other, allowing them to stand-up to the bullies in their lives: A handsy instructor at the ballet academy and a rival boxer with a more powerful punch.
The first thing you notice about “BoxBallet” are its likably exaggerated character designs. The ballet dancer is rail thin, her design not being much more than a series of straight-lines. The boxer is utterly grotesque, made totally of swollen lumps and sagging sinew with a noticeably crooked nose. All the character designs have that amusingly ugly angle to them. The second thing you notice about “BoxBallet” is how fluid much of the movement is here. The opening scene of the dancer racing from the theater to the subway train, a moment where a referee is sent spinning around the boxing ring by a stray punch, or the dancer's attempts to teach her new friend roller-skating all have an amazing sense of detailed movement to them. This pairs well with a soundtrack that blends classical music, ambient noise, and New Wave pop.
It looks good and it's an amusing watch too. The oddball sense of humor here really appeals to me, as this hideous boxer has a soft side which manifests itself in sweetly awkward ways. While it's easy enough to predict where it's going, this one balances its quirky humor and sentimental heart with some nicely demented animation. [7/10]
While the rest of the nominated films in this category were clearly meant to stand-alone as short films, “Robin Robin” was obviously designed to be a television Christmas special. The titular character is a young robin that has been adopted by a group of mice. She's been raised as a mouse and, until very recently, believed herself to be one. After her family has an unsuccessful attempt to steal some food from a human house, she sets out on her own to enter the home. Along the way, she meets a magpie who tells her of the “wishing star” atop the human's Christmas tree. He claims that, if one grabs that star, they'll have their heart's greatest desire. Robin decides to steal the star so she can wish to become a real mouse.
“Robin Robin” is a co-production between Netflix and Aardman, that beloved purveyor of British stop-motion whimsy. Like Aardman's best films, there's a wonderful tactile aspect to the animation here. The adorable characters are wonderfully fuzzy, like old vinyl dolls. The environments are beautifully detailed, looking like fantastically realized deserts. (This is especially apparent in the Christmas feast glimpsed in the final scene.) Everyone moves fantastically and smoothly.
As you'd expect from Aardman, it's an extremely cute production with just enough oddball humor to give it some grit. There are several musical numbers, none of which are that memorable. However, the voice cast – which includes Richard E. Grant as the magpie and Gillian Anderson as the house cat antagonist – are naturally hugely entertaining. There's some blink-and-miss-it gags here that made me chuckle, like the magpie munching on the bugs that assist him during his song. Or the one little mouse pooing a little after being frightened. It has a sweet moral about how family is something you find, not something you're born into. While not really about Christmas, the holiday trappings add some nice seasoning. Overall, “Robin Robin” is delightful. [7/10]
The last of this year's crop of animated shorts, “The Windshield Wiper,” asks the same question that Haddaway asked all those years ago: What is love? This theme is explored over a series of scenarios. A man sits in a bar, smokes a cigarette, and listen to men and women complain about their dating lives. A man and a naked woman sit on a beach, smoking and not talking. A pair of tattooed hipsters shop for milk in a grocery store, right next to each other, ignoring one another and scrolling a dating app. A Japanese girl stands on the corner of a tall building and considers throwing herself off. A man stands in the rain, holding a ragged bouquet of roses, and ringing a doorbell. And so on.
“The Windshield Wiper” ranks among this year's most pretentious Oscar nominees. Some of its images are laughably conceited. Such as the aforementioned tattooed hipsters, seemingly perfect for one another, who don't even notice they're standing next to each other because they are so absorbed in their cellphones. Or another moment, where a text conversation between two people – one clearly more invested in this relationship than the other – is displayed over an image of a satellite. Ya know, there's almost something profound there, how relationships are formed and people are connected across these invisible webs of data. Yet it just comes off as “phone bad” in the hands of a film as chronically high on its own farts as this one.
That smug attitude becomes increasingly obvious as this fifteen minute short winds down, with a montage of people loving and being together over a song that bluntly sums up the theme before concluding with a pithy – and meaningless – answer to the initial question. I can only hope that “The Windshield Wiper” got nominated because it's animation is interesting and not because of its faux-profundity. The CGI images are highly stylized, the color palette washed-out, and the cartoony but recognizably human figures often depicted from unexpected angles. It looks cool but is a puffed-up bit of nothingness otherwise. [5/10]
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