This year's other Oscar-nominated live-action shorts are a mixed bag. Andrea Jublin's The Substitute is a lively but ham-fisted comedy that suggests a Roberto Benigni-directed episode of My So Called Life. The Tonto Woman, like last year's Cashback, is a long, expensive-looking short with excellent production values and zero soul. And co-directors Christian E. Christiansen and Louise Vesth's At Night depicts a you-go-girl sleepover in a Danish cancer ward, with women as beautiful (of course) as they are ill (of course). It's a well-meaning, terminal bore.
More impressive is this year's batch of animated shorts. Four of them feature truly poetic visuals, and the fifth, a prosaic riff on Prokofiev's musical tutorial, Peter & the Wolf, is hard to dislike. Josh Raskin's I Met the Walrus is a virtuoso illustration (using morphing, stream-of-consciousness images) of a 1969 interview with John Lennon. Both Madame Tutli-Putli (co-directed by Canadians Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski) and Even Pigeons Go to Heaven (co-directed by Samuel Tourneux and Simon Vanesse of France) tell quirky, haunting stories. Most notable, though, is four-time Best Animated Short nominee (and 1999 Oscar winner) Alexander Petrov's Moya Lyubov (My Love), a romantic coming-of-age story based on a 1927 Russian book that comes to life as a shimmering impressionist painting. Not just a slide show of pretty pictures, Petrov's imagery is both dramatic and fluid, propelling a 26-minute short that possesses the emotional impact and depth of a novel or feature film.