The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore
Of the three Oscar short film categories, the animated category is reliably my favorite and 2012 does not disappoint. While it has the single weakest entry of all the short films, it also has the two strongest. As with the Oscar nominated live action and documentary shorts, ShortsHD and Magnolia pictures are once again bringing these terrific films to theaters in advance of the upcoming Oscar telecast. They’ll also be available for purchase worldwide from iTunes beginning February 21. To find a theater where the shorts will be playing and to try your hand at predicting the eventual winners, checkout the ShortsHD website.
Meanwhile, here are my own thoughts on each film followed by my prediction as to which one is the most likely to win come Oscar night.
Click here for reviews of the live action shorts, click here for reviews of the documentary shorts or read on for reviews of the animated shorts…
The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore 
Rendered in crisp CGI, The Fanastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore mixes elements of Wizard of Oz and children’s fairytales in a dialogue free and borderline surreal exercise of pure imagination that turns out to be a lovely ode to the simple magic of books. Sitting down to write his own book, a man is whisked off by a storm a la Dorothy Gale, but he’s deposited in a land of black and white instead of the other way around. That is until the books arrive filling the world with color. These are sentient, two-legged books that eat alphabet cereal for breakfast (naturally!) and become sick only to be revived when they’re read. The neatest touch is a Humpty Dumpty book where the character is animated and interacts with our hero literally by having the pages cleverly flip back and forth in a series of moving frames. Flying Books is simply a delight from start to finish.
La Luna 
Some of Pixar’s best work in the last several years has been the clever short films that play before their monster hits. While La Luna isn’t quite the best of this year’s Oscar crop, it’s still among the best of Pixar’s output in general. Substituting pure imagination for overt cleverness, La Luna tells the story of a young boy being taken out on his first trip as a sort of custodian of the moon. The nature and means of doing this job are where the pleasures of the cartoon lie so I don’t really want to say anything more about them. Suffice it to say the whole thing is lovely and it’s all topped off by a typically winning score by Pixar regular Michael Giacchino. Though the boy and his two quarrelsome elders talk, it’s in a vaguely Italian sounding sort of gibberish. The story itself is conveyed entirely through pantomime.
Wild Life Wild Life uses an intriguing mixture of computers and hand painting (the figures were outlined in Flash, printed, painted, rescanned and composited back in the computer) to tell the dreamy, melancholy story of Canada’s “remittance men,” often second sons of English gentlemen sent to the colonies to make their way. Mistrusted by the local population and ill equipped for the hardships the Canadian frontier presented, these men nevertheless nobly tried to do the best they could. While it’s also rooted in historical fact, the strength of Wild Life lies in the wonderful mood it evokes and in the stylistically fantastic imagery. Check out LiC’s interview with the filmmakers here.
Dimanche/Sunday 
Nearly monochromatic and super-stylized in the manner printed comics, Dimanche follows a little boy who uses his imagination to inject a little excitement into a drab world dictated by adults and full of boring adult activities. Dimanche is whimsical, but in a rather unappealing and nonsensical way. The flat artwork is unique and interesting, but it’s not quite enough to really put it over. By itself, it might work, but it kind of gets buried by the other stronger entries. Check out LiC’s interview with the filmmaker behind Dimanche here.
A Morning Stroll 
Based on Casper G. Clausen’s true story The Chicken which first appeared in The New York Literary Review in 1986, A Morning Stroll shows a passerby who is surprised by a chicken walking down a city street and up some steps where it taps on a door and is let inside. The incident is repeated in 1959, 2009 and 2059 in increasingly more sophisticated styles of animation ranging from what looks like pen and ink line drawings to full on 3D computer animation. There’s kind of a little twist at the end, but the whole thing is mostly pointless, nonsensical and dull.
Oscar Prediction: In the last couple of years, the winner in the animated short category has have always been drawn from my least favorite of the entries. I’m obviously completely tone deaf when it comes to what Oscar likes in this regard so this year A Morning Stroll will probably be the winner. In my perfect world, the sublime Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore or La Luna would win and part of me really thinks it will be the former, but because of my chronic inability to predict this category I’m sticking with A Morning Stroll for the win.
Filed under: Review
It’s difficult picking this category. Sometimes AMPAS goes for the edgy, other times for traditional.
I think MORRIS LESSMORE is going to take this. I could see LA LUNA or WILD LIFE taking it though. A MORNING STROLL is fun but slight, I can’t really seeing it win.
DIMANCHE is the only one of the nominees I didn’t really connect with.
I actually liked Morning Stroll a lot – it’s not only entertaining but has gravitas to it, which of course AMPAS voters might like. La Luna seemed one-note and therefore falt to me except for the one visual element you didn’t mention that makes it fun to watch. Certainly the most ambitious and complex film of the bunch is Morris Lessmore – which may win – but it seems too busy for my taste despite its visual brilliance. To my mind, Morning Stroll has a coolness factor going for it and is more straightforward and less complex than Morris Lessmore.
I’m like you, Craig — often times my least favorite wins, so I’m either really good at predicting or really bad. I’ll go with Morning Stroll.
The only nice thing I have to say about Morning Stroll is that it was short. What had gravitas about it to you? I think I missed something.
You’re right about La Luna being sort of one-note. Its simplicity is part of the appeal for me, but I can see how that one probably isn’t going to win.
I wasn’t sure about Morris Lessmore at first, but paying a little attention to it, it really won me over. You might be right though in that it takes too much thought to warrant consideration, but I hope not.
Nevertheless, I’m predicting the goddamn chicken movie.
Gravitas in the sense that it was social comment. I also liked the animation style. It was cool.
I guess I didn’t really respond to the social commentary. I liked the style of the first repetition, but the latter two I thought were ugly and the little twist at the end just didn’t really register with me.
Like I said, Craig, yours and my reactions to the shorts diverge more frequently than with feature-length films — maybe it has something to do with running time.