Whatever it is that they’re feeding the people who select Oscar nominees in this category, can they please give some to the rest of the Academy? There’s a staggering amount of talent, imagination, emotion and creativity on display in this program, which features the five nominees as well as four additional shorts by such animators as Bill Plympton and Cordell Barker. Even if you’ve already seen the two most familiar nominees—Don Hertzfeldt’s epic-of-human-experience
World of Tomorrow and the Pixar entry
Sanjay’s Super Team that was shown with
The Good Dinosaur—you’ll get a fresh look at some of 2015’s best filmmaking of any kind. Gabriel Osorio’s
Bear Story tells the beautifully heartbreaking tale of a bear using his mechanical skills to create a happy ending he didn’t have in his life. Konstatin Bronzit’s
We Can’t Live Without the Cosmos chronicles the special friendship between two men training to be astronauts. And
Prologue, by veteran Disney animator Richard Williams (
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) is an intense pencil-sketched snippet of ancient warriors in bloody combat. “Everyone deserves to win” may be a cliché, but for this collection of masterworks, it applies.
By
Scott Renshaw