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Movies & TV

Oscar Shorts

OSCAR SHORTS at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King West) from Friday (February 7) to February 13. tiff.net. See listings.


Someone at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a dog person. Two of this year’s five nominees for best animated short feature scene-stealing pups, or artistic representations thereof – and they’re pretty damn adorable.

This week you can see them in the Lightbox’s annual Oscar Shorts screenings, which separate the animated and live-action nominees into separate packages.

The animated program (rating: NNN) runs about 80 minutes in total, and the aforementioned canines can be found in Mr. Hublot, a delightfully odd French comedy about a fussy little man who takes in a particularly chaotic puppy. The twist is that both characters – and everything else in their world – are mechanical in nature, letting directors Laurent Witz and Alexandre Espigares build an entire world of clanking metal objects.

The other dog-centric title is Room On The Broom, a British production with an all-star voice cast that includes Gillian Anderson, Rob Brydon, Timothy Spall and current best supporting actress nominee Sally Hawkins. Produced for BBC television, it’s pleasant enough but very clearly padded to fill a half-hour broadcast slot. The dog’s still great, though.

If you’ve seen Frozen, you’ll already have encountered Disney’s Get A Horse!, which puts Mickey Mouse (voiced, through the magic of digital audio restoration, by Walt Disney) and his friends through the 3D CG rendering process for a calamitous chase sequence. The other two shorts are vividly realized exercises in specific animation styles – Shuhei Morita’s Possessions in CG geometry, Daniel Sousa and Dan Golden’s Feral in hand-drawn minimalism – with minimal impact.

The 97-minute live-action series (rating: NNNN) has considerably more on its mind – though not all the pieces land as well as they should. Selma Vilhunen and Kirsikka Saari’s Do I Have To Take Care Of Everything? is a generic farce about a Finnish family racing to get to a wedding, and Anders Walter and Kim Magnusson’s Helium is the mawkish tale of a hospital orderly comforting a dying boy with tales of a fantastical afterlife.

The other three entries are far stronger. Mark Gill and Baldwin Li’s The Voorman Problem stars The Hobbit’s Martin Freeman as a psychiatrist confounded by a patient (Tom Hollander) who claims to be a god. And Esteban Crespo’s That Wasn’t Me takes a formulaic set-up about African child soldiers and European do-gooders and spins it into something murky, ugly and powerful.

But the real highlight is Xavier Legrand’s Just Before Losing Everything, a half-hour piece about a woman (Léa Drucker) making a desperate attempt to put her affairs in order before abandoning her marriage. It’s absolutely riveting and totally focused, and Legrand – a former child actor making his debut as a writer-director – makes excellent use of the limited running time.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @wilnervision

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