“Butterfly” is inspired by the life of Alfred Nakache, an Algerian-born, Jewish Olympic swimmer who lived in France in the thirties. It depicts an elderly man swimming out in the ocean. As he weaves in and out of the waves, he is flooded with memories of his life: Of learning to swim as a boy, of becoming an athlete and competing in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, where he came in ahead of the swimmers from Nazi Germany. He recalls meeting his wife and the birth of their daughter. He also remembers seeing the rise of fascism in Europe at the time. By the time the Occupation begins, he has been denied the option of swimming in public pools and soon is captured and sent to a prison camp. He is separated from his wife and daughter and never see them again. The memories still haunt him to this day.
The first thing you'll notice about “Butterfly – so named because Nakache was a butterfly style swimmer – is its art style. The fifteen minute film was, like “Loving Vincent” and “The Peasants” before it, done entirely with hand-painted animation cells. The result is a film that seems to be in constant movie, the colors and locations blending in and out of each other much like the running water that surrounds the main character. I'll admit, I did find the simplistic character designs of the film a bit distracting. A moment when Nakache gets literal stars in his eyes upon seeing his future wife for the first time struck me as a bit corny. However, the painted animation does create an interesting, unique look for the film.
Unfortunately, I wish “Butterfly's” narrative was as striking as its visuals. The use of shifting and flowing animation is fitting for a story about both memory and swimming. However, I felt like I never got an emotional bead on the characters. The dream-like elements, places and people shifting together or changing form, feels like an extra layer of artifice between the viewer and the characters. The scene where Nakache is called slurs and denied entrance into the pool are effecting but feel like the only time we see him experiencing prejudice before being shipped off to the camps. The abrupt ending also means the film concludes without much in the way of a feeling of finality. This is probably intentional. Nothing can heal the pain of losing his wife and child in so horrible a condition. However, it does make the film feel vaguer than it needs to be. [6/10]
“Forevergreen” comes to us from Nathan Engelhardt and Jeremy Spears, an animator and storyboard artist who have worked on a laundry list of high-profile Disney and Blue Sky films. Unsurprisingly, the short is very much in that style: It concerns an abandoned or orphaned brown bear cub, wandering through a snowy forest. After stumbling over a cliff edge, the bear is rescued by a near-by towering pine tree. The ever green raises the cub, providing it with pine cones to eat and teaching it to foster a budding sapling. After getting a taste of some potato chips, via an almost empty bag blowing into the tree, the now adolescent bear decides it is tired of pine cones. The ursine teenager finds an abandoned campsite and begins to eat the improperly disposed of trash, unwittingly starting a fire in the process. His old pine tree friend/surrogate parent arrives to protect and save him again, in the only way it can. Everyone learns an important lesson.
The Disney/Pixar influence on "Forevergreen" is extremely obvious in its somewhat mawkish and heavy-handed story. It clearly functions as both a metaphor for parenting, much in "The Giving Tree" vein, and a story about environmental responsibility. And I guess about how junk food is bad for you. While the final title card uses a quote for friendship, the relationship between the bear and the tree is clearly meant to be a child/parent one. A young adult wanting independence and eventually fucking up, needing their parent to swoop in and save them despite it all being the child's fault, is a fairly standard narrative. A tree being a stationary thing does bring an interesting physical dimension to the final act but what follows is clearly another stand-in for how a parent will sacrifice everything for the kid they love. Like I said, it's not the least bit subtle.
Despite having the sappiness and commitment to tugging heart strings that you see in the worst Pixar shorts, I still kind of liked "Forevergreen." Mostly because the animation is neat. This is a digitally animated film but the character models are designed to have a weighted, rough, wooden look. Once again, CGI animators are figuring out that intentionally invoking puppetry or stop-motion animation is actually more appealing than hyper-realism. "Forevergreen" also plays out in a higher frame rate than animation usually does, adding to the intentionally stylized movements of the characters. I wish this interesting animation was attached to a less maudlin story but, at only eleven minutes long, I can handle it. [6/10]
“The Girl Who Cried Pearls” is another short that offers a lot on the surface but never quite comes together for me as a whole. It begins with a young girl, within an opulent mansion, searching through her grandfather's office. She uncovers a pearl in a keepsake box. He explains the story behind it: When he was a lad, he was homeless. To stay warm at night, he begins hiding outside the apartment of a family of three. From his spot, he can see the mother within beating her stepdaughter. When the girl is sad, she cries a perfect white pearl. The boy attempts to trade the pearl for cash at a pawn shop and the broker, after some haggling, agrees to give him a single dollar. He doesn't believe the boy's story but, when a jeweler confirms the pearl's excellent condition, the broker is eager to buy more. The boy quickly realizes that, in order to gain more pearls, he would have to make the girl within the apartment cry more. Which he doesn't want to do because he's falling in love with her.
While “Forevergreen” attempts to emulate the look of stop motion animation, “The Girl Who Cried Pearls” actually is. The animation is excellent, the characters moving with a surprising fluidity. The models have an intentional uncanny quality to them, giving an interesting feel of eeriness to the short. This is more apparent in the flashback sequence. During these moments, the characters are depicted with unmoving puppet faces, presumably because the grandfather is telling this tale and moving the characters like a puppeteer. The figures move within hyper-detailed settings that are impressively grimy. The amount of work and attention to detail that went into “The Girl Who Cried Pearls” is evident every minute of its runtime.
The story within is an interesting fable. This would seem to be a story about how, in order to make money in this world, we must compromise our ethics. The jeweler informs the broker of the story of Eve crying pearls upon exiting the garden of Eden, saying a pearl of sorrow is priceless. The broker sure is eager to put a price on it though. His cutthroat cheating of the lad, giving him dollars for something worth far more, points to what a untrustworthy character he is. His actions teach the lad to be similarly ruthless, apparent in the hard bargain he gives at the end. This is before a twist in the narrative that changes everything that came before. However, the short still ends on a sudden note of ambiguity. I feel like if another minute or two had been allowed to expand on some of these ideas to a fuller degree, I would like this one more. Still, pretty interesting and fantastic to look at. [7/10]
Probably the most understated of this year's animated short films, in both animation and content, is “Retirement Plan.” It is, simply, the recently retired Ray going down a list of all the things he plans to do now that he's no longer working. His long list of proposed activities vary wildly. He hopes to take better care of his body, organize his desk top, clean out his e-mails, read more, play more video games. He hopes to expand his horizons into new activities, like hiking and paragliding becoming knowledgeable about wine and attending an orgy. The grandiose plans the man has for his future are contrasted often with the reality of how these things will play out, often going less well than he expected. “Retirement Plan” goes further to, showing the man reaching the end of his life and beyond as well.
“Retirement Plan” nicely balances a quietly absurd sense of humor with some more pathos. Humor arises from both the specificity of the man's plans and how he often seems to revise his decisions. Whether he's actually making these choices in real time or simply imagining how they'll go is hard to say. Either way, the cuts from his plans to, say, enjoy hiking or get a pet to how that might actually play out are well timed. Domhnall Gleeson's voice over is quiet but pointed, especially in the choices of how the man specifies his plans. Such as becoming a wine expert but “not in an annoying way.”
At first, I wondered if even a seven minute long short could sustain a structure built entirely around listing activities. However, you notice that, after a while, the imagined version of the man begins to noticeably age. He's in a retirement home, soon enough. His announcement of “wanting to take better care of his body” contrasts grimly with his decaying physical form. Quietly, “Retirement Plan” comments on how what we plan for our futures and what we actually get are sometimes at odds. How what we think we want often is not what we expect. And how the little events in life sometimes before more meaningful when placed in a larger context. This is easily my favorite of 2026's crop of animated shorts. [9/10]
“Retirement Plan” nicely balances a quietly absurd sense of humor with some more pathos. Humor arises from both the specificity of the man's plans and how he often seems to revise his decisions. Whether he's actually making these choices in real time or simply imagining how they'll go is hard to say. Either way, the cuts from his plans to, say, enjoy hiking or get a pet to how that might actually play out are well timed. Domhnall Gleeson's voice over is quiet but pointed, especially in the choices of how the man specifies his plans. Such as becoming a wine expert but “not in an annoying way.”
At first, I wondered if even a seven minute long short could sustain a structure built entirely around listing activities. However, you notice that, after a while, the imagined version of the man begins to noticeably age. He's in a retirement home, soon enough. His announcement of “wanting to take better care of his body” contrasts grimly with his decaying physical form. Quietly, “Retirement Plan” comments on how what we plan for our futures and what we actually get are sometimes at odds. How what we think we want often is not what we expect. And how the little events in life sometimes before more meaningful when placed in a larger context. This is easily my favorite of 2026's crop of animated shorts. [9/10]
From Konstantin Bronzit, the director of 2014 nominee “We Can't Live Without Cosmos,” comes “The Three Sisters.” It concerns a trio of women, each one slightly taller than the other, that live on an isolated island. During a delivery of supplies, their bag of money tumbles into the ocean. With no other option for in-come, they decide to open up the fourth room in their home to a renter. A burly sailor soon arrives to take up the residence. Each of the sisters develop a crush on the man, all three competing to earn his attention. And he seems quite willing to give each of them the same treatment. This leads to conflict, both between the sisters and between what they all seem to want.
“The Three Sisters” is visually orientated almost like a comic strip. The camera usually looks onward on the small island and its inhabits in profile. The film zooms in on events as they happen but the film largely maintains the perspective. Also much like a comic strip, this progresses in a largely episodic fashion. Taking place over the course of a week, we see a different sister have an interaction with the sailor every night, usually with an amusing punchline at the end of the encounter. Such as the shortest sister passing out from apparent lust upon getting a whiff of the sailor's manly musk.
Ultimately, the intentional distance the short keeps between the viewer and the cast of characters makes it a little harder to get into its world. We never learn why exactly all three sisters are attracted to this man, other than presumably his machismo being that overwhelming. All we can really do is react to the sight gags on display. Some of those fairly amusing, such as the reaction to the tallest sister trying to make herself attractive. At the beginning of the short, a seagull grabs a big fish. By the end, it has been reduced to a skeleton. That was a nice touch. This certainly lacks the pathos of “We Can't Live Without Cosmos” and there was a chance for some deeper emotion too, in the story's conclusion. At least there is a happy ending, of sorts. Definitely the odd ball of this year's animated short nominees. [6/10]
“The Three Sisters” is visually orientated almost like a comic strip. The camera usually looks onward on the small island and its inhabits in profile. The film zooms in on events as they happen but the film largely maintains the perspective. Also much like a comic strip, this progresses in a largely episodic fashion. Taking place over the course of a week, we see a different sister have an interaction with the sailor every night, usually with an amusing punchline at the end of the encounter. Such as the shortest sister passing out from apparent lust upon getting a whiff of the sailor's manly musk.
Ultimately, the intentional distance the short keeps between the viewer and the cast of characters makes it a little harder to get into its world. We never learn why exactly all three sisters are attracted to this man, other than presumably his machismo being that overwhelming. All we can really do is react to the sight gags on display. Some of those fairly amusing, such as the reaction to the tallest sister trying to make herself attractive. At the beginning of the short, a seagull grabs a big fish. By the end, it has been reduced to a skeleton. That was a nice touch. This certainly lacks the pathos of “We Can't Live Without Cosmos” and there was a chance for some deeper emotion too, in the story's conclusion. At least there is a happy ending, of sorts. Definitely the odd ball of this year's animated short nominees. [6/10]
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