Oscars 2024 – Best Animated Short Film

On March 10, the 96th Academy Awards ceremony will take place, honoring what many consider to be the best films of 2023. As a movie nerd, I make it a point to see as many of these movies as I possibly can. Unfortunately, I’m still behind on many of the bigger titles (Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro), so I can’t weigh in on the more popular categories just yet. However, I have managed to track down a number of the short films, and with any luck, I will have breakdowns of the other two shorts categories before long. For now, here’s my ranking of the films, and where to see them, if possible.

5. War Is Over!
This is the only one of the five short films that I would say I actually dislike. It’s animated in Unreal engine, which makes it about as visually exciting as you would expect. When the needle drop finally does occur, it’s about as ham-fisted and ideologically vapid as the celebrity “Imagine” video we saw at the beginning of the COVID epidemic. Did you know that war is bad? Thank goodness normal people can stop wars, provided that they want to. Also, “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” is at least the second worst Christmas song of all time, behind Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime”.

4. Letter to a Pig
A Holocaust survivor sits in front of a class of uninterested students and reads a letter he wrote to a pig. This is a step up in almost every way. The animation is sparse, but an original combination of abstract and realistic images. There is actual voice acting, and it doesn’t feel like it was made by a video game studio. However, its abstraction is its greatest weakness. At some point, the message of the film becomes muddled, and it is difficult to know whether this confused lesson is done on purpose. On a more personal note, I find this to be a particularly difficult time in history to listen to a story about Israelis striking out against their enemies.

3. Our Uniform
An Iranian girl reflects on her school days through her uniform. This short would be the obvious winner if the only criteria were the animation itself. The uniform of the title is not the main topic of the short, but serves as a literal background for the animation. The message is far clearer in this short, briefly touching on the expectations for women under an Islamic regime. And yet the tone of the short manages to be the lightest of all five nominees. Its greatest weakness is its length. At 7 minutes, it doesn’t have a chance to say very much, and the short film “Yellow“, which was shortlisted but didn’t make the cut, does this better.

Watch before it gets taken down:

2. Ninety-Five Senses
“A heartfelt depiction of a man facing his own mortality while reflecting on the grave mistakes of his youth.” This is the one that will probably win, and there’s a lot to like here. There’s a number of different animation styles, and Tim Blake Nelson is a good actor, even if he does seem to lean a little heavy on the accent here. My problem with the short is that halfway through its brief 14 minute run, we get a revelation about the narrator that completely pulled me out of it. I seem to be in the minority on this one, but I feel that 7 minutes is not enough time to re-humanize him.

Watch before it gets taken down:

1. Pachyderm (cw: child abuse)
A young girl reflects on her childhood stays with her grandparents, and the darkness that accompanied these visits. Probably too dark for the Oscar win. That said, it’s about a million times more subtle than “War is Over”, and it feels the most like a complete narrative. It definitely doesn’t leave you with a song in your heart, but it’s easily the short most worth your time.

Watch before it gets taken down: