2009 Oscar-Nominated Shorts

Not all 10 entries of the Oscar-nominated live-action and animated shorts are mini-masterpieces, but there’s artistry to be found.

The live-action selections largely engage in meditations on guilt, cultural differences and aging. On the Line is a twisty drama concerning a tentative friendship between a German security guard and a pretty bookstore employee. By comparison, New Boy is a small shrug of a film, tracing the touchy-feely misadventures of an African boy enduring his first day in an Irish school. The familiar Toyland is set during the Holocaust and finds some poignancy in a gentile mother’s search for her missing child in Nazi Germany. The biggest missed opportunity is The Pig, an initially intriguing Danish deadpan comedy about an older man’s odd attachment to a painting of a pig. The clear winner is Manon on the Asphalt, a moving rumination that turns a young woman’s serious bike accident into an existential discussion on the fragility of connection.

The animation nominees are either deeply personal or playfully freewheeling. Somewhere in the middle is This Way Up, a soulful British comedy about a father-and-son undertaker team who brave boulders, rivers and Satan to get their assigned casket to the cemetery on time. Oktapodi is a forgettable Pixar-like adventure yarn about one determined octopus’s quest to save its true love from becoming dinner; actual Pixar’s Presto is dazzlingly animated but lacks the heart of the final two nominees. The minimalist Russian Lavatory-Lovestory looks like a New Yorker cartoon; its fable about a lovelorn bathroom attendant is satisfying romantic goo. Finally, there’s Japan’s La Maison en petits cubes, which follows an aging man whose towering house is being consumed by a flood, forcing him to enter the submerged floors and confront the memories held within them. This heartbreaking treatise on the inescapable clutter of life is among the best in the series.