The portmanteau genre remains stubbornly alive, if only because awards season keeps on bringing us enjoyable anthologised releases of short films up for prizes. And so it proves again as British-based Shorts TV is releasing all the shorts up for Oscars this Sunday. These are in three categories – live action, animation and documentary – and it is in the first of these I have to say we find something mildly controversial which I have heard discussed by British industry professionals with pursed-lipped disapproval.
Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, his 40-minute Roald Dahl adaptation for Netflix starring Benedict Cumberbatch, is up for a live-action short film Oscar. Anderson is entitled to be nominated of course. But … erm … aren’t the short film categories for new film-makers, emerging talents, the up-and-comers who need an early boost? Not for the established honchos who may see a tempting path to their first Oscar win? Isn’t Anderson a little like Seinfeld’s Kramer, who takes up karate and is allowed to brutally dominate a class of little kids because they are technically at the same skill-level as him?
Well, Henry Sugar is undoubtedly good, although it’s not my favourite in this category. That would be Vincent René-Lortie’s fierce Invincible, based on the true story of a teenage boy and his desperate break from juvenile detention; it has an excellent performance from Léokim Beaumier-Lépine as the troubled boy at the story’s heart. Lasse Lyskjaer Noer’s Knight of Fortune is a Danish film about grief and male loneliness: a desolate widower can’t bear to look at his wife’s body in the casket in what appears to be a hospital morgue, and he finds himself in a bizarrely chaotic alliance with another man in the same situation. It’s an amusing film, though tilting towards the sentimentality that so many short films need to achieve a quick closure. The After is an intense and ambitious piece with a strong lead performance from David Oyelowo about a tragedy’s aftermath from Nigerian-British photographer and artist Misan Harriman; the direction is fluent, although the script feels unconvincing at the very end. The wooden spoon in this category, I have to say, goes to Nazrin Choudhury’s deeply silly Red, White and Blue: a careworn single mother with two kids is devastated by a positive pregnancy test and goes out of state to get an abortion. There’s a giant twist, facilitated by an outrageous narrative cheat involving some absurdly and unnaturally cheerful behaviour on the part of one of the characters.
In the animation category, I have to say I found a fair bit of that tweeness and preciousness that somehow manages to pervade this division. Dave Mullins’s War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko, is the fanciful tale of first world war soldiers on opposing sides playing chess via carrier pigeon. But I very much enjoyed Jared and Jerusha Hess’s Ninety-Five Senses, with Tim Blake Nelson voicing Coy, an old guy looking back at his life. It has the tough humour and bruising reality that mostly never appears in animated shorts. Tal Kantor’s Letter to a Pig, with its pen-and-ink-style monochrome design, shows a Holocaust survivor talking to an inattentive class of teens about his brutal experiences hiding out from Nazis in a pigsty, with the pig becoming a scary, complex symbol of his need for revenge. Stéphanie Clément’s Pachyderme is a complex piece about childhood (in a spirit of contrition here I should concede that my initial response to it misinterpreted the film: there is a point to its (excellent) illustrations and it fully deserves its nomination) [see footnote]. Yegane Moghaddam’s Iranian film Our Uniform is about her memories of her restrictive school uniform growing up in Tehran, being made to chant: “Down with USA, down with Israel, down with England”. It has an elegant cut-out style, though there is a loss of nerve in the film’s initial “disclaimer” saying that she does not intend to criticise those who choose to wear the hijab. We don’t need a disclaimer: the film should speak for itself.
In documentary, my winner would be John Hoffman and Christine Turner’s The Barber of Little Rock, about Arlo Washington, a charismatic young African-American who had a barber training school and expanded into providing credit for local black businesses. I preferred it, marginally, to The Last Repair Shop, about the heroically committed musical-instrument-repair facility that Los Angeles provides to students at no cost; this film, though estimable, seemed almost euphoric about its own importance. Sean Wang’s Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó is a thoroughly charming portrait of the friendship between two very elderly Chinese ladies who live together. S Leo Chiang’s Island in Between is a very eye-opening study of Kinmen, the Taiwanese island right on the Chinese coast, a place drenched in national pride and suppressed fear of what China might do; they, after all, will be the first to know. The creepy, culture-war fad for book banning in American schools is tackled by Shiela Nevins in The ABCs of Book Banning, and she takes the bold and invigorating approach of interviewing the children themselves, who seem admirably level-headed. It’s a good film which covers the various books that have been banned, restricted or challenged, though the child-centred approach means that adult-level analysis is ruled out.
It’s an enticing, eclectic collection.
• 2024 Oscar Nominated Short Films are in US cinemas now and UK cinemas from 9 March.
• This article was amended on 9 March 2024 to reflect Peter Bradshaw’s change of view of Pachyderme. An earlier version described the film as “a sweet, but unexcitingly tasteful childhood memory”.
