This is your annual chance to predict the winners (and have the edge in your Oscar pool)! A perennial hit with audiences around the country and the world, don’t miss this year’s selection of shorts. The Academy Awards take place Sunday, March 27.
Animation Program Guide:
“This year’s animated shorts program is sprinkled with seriously grown-up content. Aardman Animations’ ‘Robin Robin‘ is the closest thing to what people have come to expect from this category: a whimsical, stop-motion fable about an abandoned robin that has been raised by mice — and hence behaves like one, sneaking into people’s homes for crumbs of food. With characters sculpted from felted wool (rather than clay), and voice work by Richard E. Grant and Gillian Anderson, it’s the sole family-friendly offering this year.
At the other end of the spectrum is the deeply disturbing Chilean film ‘Bestia,’ which uses stop-motion ceramic characters to tell a surreal tale of torture and psychic rupture under a secret-police state. It’s a bizarre, violent and virtually wordless nightmare. A more conventional narrative can be found in the Russian ‘Boxballet,’ about the romance between a spaghetti-thin ballerina and a muscle-bound boxer, but it’s a far cry from a stereotypical love story. ‘Affairs of the Art,’ a hand-drawn sequel to three earlier animated shorts by Joanna Quinn — all featuring a character called Beryl — follows, appropriately enough, a woman’s obsession with making art.
Using a collage of dialogue, part improvised and part scripted, and gorgeous Photoshop ‘paintings’ by Spanish director Alberto Mielgo, ‘The Windshield Wiper‘ is a meditation on love — or, rather, its impermanence, perhaps even its impossibility. The shortest of the five nominees at 15 minutes, it bites off the largest theme: the pain of separation and disengagement in a world mediated by electronic screens and virtual relationships.” -The Washington Post
Rated R. The animated shorts program contains violent images, strong language, nudity, sexual situations, animal abuse, bestiality, mature thematic elements, including suicide, and smoking. Children 17 and under will not be admitted under any circumstances.
ANIMATED SHORTS PROGRAM (Running time: 97 minutes)
Robin Robin – Dan Ojari and Mikey Please, UK, 32 min.
Boxballet – Anton Dyakov, Russia, 15 min.
A viewer caution card will appear onscreen prior to the final three films.
Affairs of the Art – Joanna Quinn and Les Mills, UK/Canada, 16 min. (Includes nudity, language and adult themes)
Bestia – Hugo Covarrubias and Tevo Díaz, Chile, 15 min. (Includes disturbing imagery, animal abuse, bestiality, and graphic violence)
The Windshield Wiper – Alberto Mielgo and Leo Sanchez, USA/Spain, 14 min. (Includes nudity, sex, and adult themes)
