Oscar live action, animated shorts

Disney’s “Paperman” is one of the Oscar nominated animated shorts on limited release before the Oscars.

By ROGER MOORE
McCLATCHY NEWS SERVICE

Silence is golden in this year’s collection of Oscar-nominated animated short films, packaged together for limited theatrical release so that we can all see them before Oscar night.

Five different films, none with a word of dialogue, showcase a wide range of animated styles in demonstrating the endless possibilities of the medium.

They are: Disney’s “Paperman,” a black and white (with touches of red) romance between an office drone and a girl he almost meets on the train; the wondrous anime-styled “Adam and Dog,” a Garden of Eden account of how Dog discovers Man, Man discovers Dog, and Man ditches Dog when Woman shows up;  Timothy Reckart’s almost-as-touching “Head Over Heel,” a stop-motion clay animated story of a long-married couple who live upside down from each other in a house that aimlessly floats — him on the floor, her living on the ceiling, lovers no longer connecting — until the day he finds her old ballet slippers. Events are set in motion to bring them together again.

The Longest Daycare

There is also “The Longest Daycare,” a politically barbed “Simpsons” story of Maggie’s first day at the Ayn Rand School for Tots. She is condemned to the “Nothing Special” wing of the school but finds inventive purpose in defending a caterpillar ready to turn into a butterfly from her creepy kid nemesis. And finally, there the stop-motion animated “Fresh Guacamole,” which, inventively treats grenades as avocados, baseballs as stuffed with dice and lightbulbs as low-hanging fruit that can be mashed up and served with poker chips as the green goodness of guacamole. Cute.

Also playing are the Oscar-nominated live-action shorts, five films of differing styles and tones, but each polished to near perfection — short films so good you’re dying to see feature-length versions of every tale told here.

Tom Van Avermaet’s Belgian “Death of a Shadow” is a sublimely spooky and romantic ghost story set around World War I.
Yan England’s “Henry” covers the same ground as best picture nominee “Amour,” and does it in 21 minutes. “Henry” is one thing “Amour” never manages to be – achingly romantic.

“Asad” is filmmaker Bryan Buckley’s intimate tale of a Somali boy who must choose between the traditional way of life in his village — fishing from a dory he rows out to sea — or the country’s growth industry, piracy.

“Curfew” has been chilling and charming film festival audiences over the past year, a blacker-than-black comedy about a junkie lured out of his death tub (he’s slashed his wrists) because his sister needs a baby sitter. The bratty and precocious Sofie resists bonding with her “irresponsible” uncle, and the uncle can’t resist hitting a bar and a crack house during their long night together.

Even the weakest film in the field, “Buzkashi Boys,” has wonderful child actors and an arresting setting — Kabul, Afghanistan, where the two boys, a blacksmith’s son and a homeless kid, long to compete in the sport of dead-goat polo (Buzkashi).

The Oscar nominated live-action shorts go into limited release as one full program in select theaters between now and Oscar night.

MOVIE REVIEW
Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts
***½
Rating: Not rated
Running time: 88 minutes

Oscar-Nominated Live Action Shorts
***½
Rating: Not rated
Running time: 107 minutes