Burrow (USA, 6 minutes)
Director: Madeline Sharafian. In perhaps the quaintest of the five animated shorts, a female rabbit digs for new digs only to repeatedly find herself invading the space of other burrowing creatures. This process continues until she learns going it alone isn’t nearly as fun and rewarding as joining together to form a community. What Sharafian, an artist on the Oscar-winning “Coco,” lacks in imagination is handsomely compensated by superior animation techniques and a fastidious attention to detail. Still, it fails to unearth much emotion. Grade: B-
Genius Loci (French, 16 minutes)
Director: Adrien Mérigeau. No arguing the inventiveness of Mérigeau’s distinctive pen-and-ink style, but his deep dive into the inner-emotional world of a young, lonely Parisian woman is just too esoteric to comprehend. It’s visually pleasing watching the constant shapeshifting of people, patterns and pets, but for what purpose? And at 16 minutes, it becomes a bit of
Cinema Chat: French Exit, Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts, Godzilla Vs Kong, And More
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Review: Oscar-nominated short films reflect the year of upheaval in which they emerged
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Each year, the Oscars’ shorts categories are an opportunity to spotlight a breadth of imagination and emotion across all filmmaking cultures, and for 2021 the sampling reveals a well intentioned tapestry of upheaval’s ripple effects.
The live action slate is marked by stories of interactions in which proximity doesn’t always imply easy understanding. For the Palestinian father and young daughter venturing into the West Bank in Farah Nabulsi’s understatedly tense “The Present,” a simple shopping trip to buy mom a gift is a humiliating reminder of institutionalized otherness with each security checkpoint ordeal. The divide between haves and have-nots is more strategically hidden in Israeli filmmaker Tomer Shushan’s “White Eye,” in which a man’s late-night discovery of his stolen bicycle triggers a confrontation with a stranger whose world is very different. Shushan’s one-take storytelling style is ill-considered, but the well-acted scenario still carries the weig