Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts 2018

Dear Basketball: This love letter from Kobe Bryant to the game of basketball had mediocre sketch animation - like it incomplete and this was a working storyboard - and Kobe Bryant narrating.  It was a paean to Kobe himself, a long bragfest thinly disguised in love-of-game-made-me-great rhetoric.  This was the most difficult of the bunch to watch and yet it won the Oscar.  Wow, in the year of #MeToo, the 2003 rape accusation and out of court settlement didn't stop the Academy from giving the big prize to Kobe.

 

Garden Party: Frogs jump around an abandoned and overgrown garden.  Slowly, it becomes clear that something bad happened during the final party at this mansion: bullet holes, broken windows, an open safe.  At the end, a dead body bobs to the surface of the pool when the frogs accidentally turn on the fountains.  Though the animation is impressive, this is nothing but juxtaposing the comic antics of frogs with a crime scene.  Meh.

 

Lou: On a school playground, the kids are all called back to class and leave toys behind.  A mysterious figure zips through the playground, collects it all, and dumps it in the Lost and Found box.  Notable, the letters L, O, and U are missing from Lost and Found.  The mysterious figure proves to be the lost items: baseballs for eyes, jacket for body, baseball glove for a hand, etc.  When the kids come back out, Lou alerts the kids that the items are in the Lost and Found box.  Then a bully starts taking them and Lou has to teach the bully a lesson.  Animation is outstanding, which is no surprise since it is a Pixar production.  Cute.

 

Negative Space: A man demonstrates the process of properly packing a suitcase to get the most use of the space.  He explains how his father taught him and he used to pack his father's suitcase when he would go on business trips.  Odd though it was, he and his father had bonded on packing suitcases.  Today, he has packed a suitcase to attend his father's funeral.  Alone with his father who is laid out in the casket, his only thought is at all the wasted space.  Funny.  The animation is peculiar, appearing to be paper mache figures and settings.

 

Revolting Rhymes: The longest of the bunch at 29 minutes - the other 4 combined only amount to 25 minutes, it was also the best.  It tells a variant of some noteworthy fairy tales.  There are the 3 little pigs, Red Riding Hood, and Snow White.  The tale is told from the perspective of a wolf who seeks to correct the record while talking to a matronly woman in an unassuming diner.  She can't hold back a cheer when he tells the death of his nephew who tried to eat Red Riding Hood but she is later sympathetic to the wolf when the second nephew meets an untimely end trying to eat the third pig.  This is taken from a Roald Dahl story and is immensely entertaining.  It ends on a cliffhanger!  Highly recommended.