Quote: On the Animated Short Films (2009)

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Ed González of The House Next Door has recently posted his take on this year's Oscar-nominated films in the Animated Short category, a take which - despite its typing error(s) - more often than not accurately describes also my take on these 'quaint' short works. In particular:

• "In the last few years, [the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences] has accorded spots in this category to quite a number of films fixated on death. [...] This year's The Lady and the Reaper [English title; hyperlink added; lays] on the sentiment thick in its early moments before devolving into a familiarly anarchic spectacle of opening and closing doors that poorly tips its hat to the infinitely more inspired work of Warner's Dadaïst impresario Chuck Jones.
• "Infinitely worse, though, is Nicky Phelan and Darragh O'Connell's meaningless trifle Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty [hyperlink added], in which a bizarrely voiced granny inexplicably terrorizes her sexually ambiguous granddaughter with the banal bedtime story of a mean old fairy who damns a curvy lot of younger ones to death should they ever lay themselves to sleep.
• "Bound to get more attention is Nicolas Scherkin's apocalyptic Logorama[hyperlink added;, ...] impressive insofar that the filmmakers incorporated over 2,000 logos into their story [yet still] crudely drawn, with its message - that we live in a world so saturated by media and advertising that it's only a matter of time [until such saturation] gets the better of us [...] - feeling easily and predictably delivered."

Though I don't conclude by sharing Mr. González' views on the deserving winner of this group of five films - especially in my own awards (see my nominations here), primarily because Aardman Studios' A Matter of Loaf and Death had qualified for nomination in this category last year (see here) - I did appreciate the accurate majority of his observations of these films, observations which were also fairly funny - idea(l)s of sexual conformity in appearance (e. g., "sexually ambiguous granddaughter") aside.