Animated Short Finalists, Ranked

by Nathaniel R

"Once Upon a Studio" brings decades of Disney together

We love animation but we know we give it short shrift here at the site. So let’s rectify that, at least in miniature during this final quiet moment before the official Oscar nominations. I've recently seen all but one of the finalists for Animated Shorts (the missing piece: I'm Hip by two-time Oscar nominee John Musker). Though no one asked, I've ranked them in ascending order of preference after the jump. It's worth mentioning that to get to the finals you've already bested nearly 100 other contenders so the overall quality is high. I say that so you aren't offended if #14 is your favourite, which it very well might be! Each person's personal rank would surely vary.

Okay, now on to the nostalgia exercizes, sentimental messages, surreal head trips, disturbing images, and slapstick antics...

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Review: "Your Fat Friend" Is a Sigh of Relief and a Necessary Reflection

by Cláudio Alves

Not to be indulging in self-pity, but I think it's fair to say that existing as a fat person in our world is a complicated affair. And I'm not talking about the physical realities of being fat. Instead, it's how people see and treat you that irks, how so much of our society is full of insidious anti-fat bias, from the doctor's office to pop culture, from total strangers to those who call themselves your friends. Social codes so often teach us to conflate fatness with moral rot, laziness, stupidity, the worst of humankind, and something worthy of disgust. Feeling unlovable, inward hate is the inevitable endpoint. What's worse is that when you try to call attention to it, you're often met with euphemistic justifications or treated as if what you're saying is nonsense.

Even those who putatively sympathize can be doing more harm than good, confusing what they feel for empathy when it's pity. Look no further than last year's The Whale, an odious work that proposed a humanizing view of fatness by reveling in its assumed tragedy. And yet, many people I respect loved it, expounding about its "merits" in ways that had me question what they must think when they gaze upon my person. Well, they were not alone, seeing as that trash won two Oscars. To them and others, I'd like to propose Jeanie Finlay's Your Fat Friend as a necessary watch. While not a perfect documentary, seeing it felt like releasing a breath I didn't know I was holding…

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Best International Film: Pakistan's "In Flames" & India's "2018"

by Cláudio Alves

Considering the Academy's general disinclination to honor horror cinema, it's always surprising when the genre pops up amid Best International Film submissions. This year, Pakistan is one of the brave countries that didn't let genre bias stop them from selecting a scary movie for the Oscar race. Zarrar Kahn's In Flames is the lucky flick, a Canadian-produced meditation on grief, trauma, and poisonous patriarchy bound to unnerve viewers. Neighboring nation India didn't dip their toes into nightmare cinema but sent a disaster picture that's horrifying in its own way. Juan Anthany Joseph's 2018 dramatizes a real-life catastrophe that befell the state of Kerala…

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Best International Film: Poland's "The Peasants" & the Philippines' "The Missing"

by Cláudio Alves

As Guillermo del Toro loves to remind us, animation is cinema. It's not a genre but a medium with its own particularities and styles, distinct idioms, and formal grammar. This year, some countries have taken these values to heart, selecting animated works to represent them at the Oscars. Curiously, two of them offer original ways to consider Rotoscoping as an animation practice, defying those who dismiss such films as lesser. They are Poland's The Peasants, from the same team behind Loving Vincent, and The Missing from the Philippines. Between painterly ravishment and digital befuddlement, these filmmakers take Rotoscope cinema to its limits and beyond…

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Best International Film: Italy's "Io Capitano" and Belgium's "Omen"

by Cláudio Alves

Immigrant stories manifest across multiple Oscar submissions this year. There's Sweden's Opponent and Australia's Shayda, with their focus on Iranian expats trying to rebuild in another nation, as well as a vital narrative thread in Germany's Teachers' Lounge. The films from Italy and Belgium turn their gazes to Sub-Saharan Africa, though their perspectives are inverted. Io Capitano considers an odyssey from Senegal to the Italian shore, while Omen starts with a Congolese immigrant looking back to his origins. One is a journey in search of a new life, the other a reflection on an old life left behind. 

Each proposes a cinema hinged on the tension of modern realism and folkloric tradition, dictating wild tonal swerves and keeping in line with many of the most interesting African films in recent memory…

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