This year’s Oscar-nominated animated shorts — sobering tales of war, assault, trauma, identity and regret — ask the question, what tools can filmmakers use to tell a poignant, but not exploitative or gratuitous, story about trauma?
The novel technique the directors Jared Hess and Jerusha Hess use in “Ninety-Five Senses” is the story structure: An inmate (voiced by Tim Blake Nelson) eating his last meal anecdotally reflects on each of his senses, telling tidbits of the life he had (and the life that could have been). Each sense is illustrated by different artists, in a different style, creating a kind of 13-minute anthology of a life — but that makes this understated film also feel a bit incoherent, with the vignettes lacking the build to bring the film to a satisfying emotional conclusion.
“Our Uniform,” a 7-minute selection from the Iranian director Yegane Moghaddam, packs a lot into a succinct reflection on her school uniform and the ways her culture’s restrictive fashion rules shaped her understanding of her gender and autonomy. Like “Ninety-Five Senses,” the narrative of “Our Uniform” is plain and direct, but the latter shows the most creative animation concept of the group; illustrations move against a backdrop of various fabrics, with characters running around buttons and along seams.
In the quiet but harrowing French short “Pachyderme,” from the director Stéphanie Clément, a young girl tells of her summers with her grandparents in the country. The robust art style — each shot is as beautifully shaded as a painting — and sedated narration create the sense of a Grimm fairy tale, showing how seemingly innocuous details can hide something menacing beneath.
The unspoken monster in “Pachyderme” mirrors the ever-morphing monster in the breathtaking “Letter to a Pig,” directed by Tal Kantor. In the film, a Holocaust survivor tells a classroom of young students about the pig who saved his life. Though the movie never details the atrocities of the war, it paints just as chilling a picture through incisive visual metaphors. The animation, which morphs from bare-bones line drawings in black and white to fleshy watercolor pinks to 3-D realism, creates a sophisticated, heart-wrenching account of a tragedy.
Juxtaposed with such a remarkable war story, Dave Mullins’s “War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko” feels pat. In an alternate World War I, soldiers on both sides find a way to connect. A telegraphed death and the idealistic crooning of John Lennon and Yoko Ono make this the least impressive of an otherwise strong category of films about the darker parts of humanity. MAYA PHILLIPS
