2019 Oscar Short Animated Nominees

 The animated shorts are all really good, as always.  But like the Best Live Action shorts nominees, there is a bit of darkness that runs through them.  Late Afternoon is done by the Irish animation studio that has done a number of feature length animated films that are very good.  This deals with a woman who is moving out of her house, we presume to go into a more supervised living situation.  She is reminiscing about her life when she was young.  It has a bittersweet quality to it.

One Small Step chronicles a girl and her father.  He encourages her to dream big, and she does indeed want to go into space, to be part of something big.  The trajectory of her childhood dreams becoming a reality also has a bittersweet end to it.

Weekends is from a Pixar animator, who depicts the shuttling between his parents as a child.  This is a wordless tale of bleakness, with a father who starts off being more of a playmate than a parent, and then movies into something less interested, and the mother is not much better.

This is really hilarious.  The story is by far the funniest, and the animation is the most rudimentary.  The animals are true to their base behavior, and the whole thing devolves as the group therapy session progresses.








And last but not least, is Bao, from Pixar.  I saw this first when watching The Incredibles 2, and while it is very clever, the ending is a bit grim.