Small Time
On the whole, this year’s Oscar-nominated animated shorts are stronger than the live-action contenders. Nine of the 10 nominees, along with five other 2006 animated shorts, open Friday at the Screenland Theatre (1656 Washington).
Even the weakest entries offer a high level of craftsmanship. Disney’s handsome The Little Matchgirl, adapted from the Hans Christian Andersen story, overwhelms the narrative with a maudlin tone, and the CG-animated Maestro, directed by Géza M. Tóth, spends five minutes building to a finale joke that you’ll probably see coming long before then. On the bright side, Lifted, the directorial debut of Oscar-winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom, continues Pixar’s tradition of superb short films. (Unfortunately, technical limitations will keep Lifted from screening here.) Even it, however, pales in comparison with writer-director Torill Kove’s glorious The Danish Poet, in which a narrator (voiced by Liv Ullmann) tells the unbelievable story of how her parents met, touching on the mysteries of love, creativity, happiness and chance with such poignancy and sweet humor that the film’s 14 slender minutes feel very nearly perfect.
Several of this year’s short live-action nominees suffer from high-concept ideas marred by too little follow-through. In The Saviour, writer-director Peter Templeman follows a Mormon evangelist’s adulterous affair but oscillates between feeling superior to his religious protagonist and showing him compassion. The glibly satirical West Bank Story turns the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a West Side Story parody. Instead of seeming brave and astute, it comes across as too pleased with itself and not nearly cutting enough. Chronicling an impoverished Senegalese community, writer-director Javier Fesser’s well-meaning Binta and the Great Idea has far too many story lines for its 30-minute running time.
The Oscar should go to Spanish director Borja Cobeaga’s Éramos Pocos, a black comedy about a spoiled father and son who must finally learn to cook and clean for themselves when Mom abandons them — unless they can convince her aging mother to move in and take care of them. Unlike many of these nominees, Cobeaga’s film packs enough surprises and revelations that its impact is far greater than its length would suggest.
