Jan 01, 2010 Logorama is a simple satire but one that does well to capitulate almost a century of corporate culture. It's brought to life by segments of colorfully animated rotor-style 3D animation which punctuates the style of logos with cell-shading. The film's lack of a coherent story is in itself a nod to brainless blockbuster entertainment as it is. I thought, “Oh, this is a short film about logos coming to life. They’ll probably sing and dance and do some boring shit I won’t much care for.” But this was more like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas coming to life with Ronald McDonald as a madman and a police force full of gung ho Michelinmen.
Easily the best of the 2010 Best Animated Short Film nominees, Logorama may still lose the golden statuette to far better known nominee Nick Park and his Oscar nominated Wallace & Gromit short film, A Matter of Loaf and Death. While there's nothing particularly wrong with Park's Wallace & Gromit short, the simple truth is it's the same ole' Wallace & Gromit we get time after time after time. Is that a bad thing? It works, yet this marvelously inventive and beautifully constructed animated short film is undoubtedly the class of the bunch amongst the 2010 nominees with its bittersweet satire of the commercial world in which we live.
Logorama's story is cohesively incohesive if that makes any sense. It shouldn't actually make sense and that's really the point of Logorama, which perfectly blends virtually every corporate logo imaginable into virtually every aspect of life and a film that intertwines cop dramas, family dramas, a 2012 style end of the world scenario and just about everything else in between. What else is in between? In the film, police chase an armed criminal through a version of Los Angeles comprised almost exclusively of logos. In essence, it is a world where every aspect of our life is branded and nothing is what it seems. The logos are placed randomly at times, other times with hilarious precision.
The film's vocal work is solid across the board including a brief vocal cameo by acclaimed director David Fincher. While it's hard not to expect Nick Park's A Matter of Loaf and Death to take home the Oscar award in 2010, rest assured that Logorama is the best animated short from the past year.
“Day & Night,” from the 2011 Oscar-nominated short films. Credit Shorts International In addition to the 10 candidates for best picture and the smattering of contenders in other major categories, there are 15 movies whose titles will be mentioned at the Oscars on Feb. 27 that very few nonvoters are likely to have heard of. These are the nominees for best short film, which are divided into three groups: animated, live action and documentary.
In the past, opportunities to see the shorts were scarce, but lately they have been showing up in theaters and also on iTunes and cable. Their wider availability makes sense in an era that might well turn out to be a golden age of short-form moviemaking. The newer platforms favor brevity, and there is plenty of room for real cinema amid the comedy sketches and cute-baby shenanigans that go viral in office cubicles across the land. Short films are often the work of younger filmmakers and sometimes contain the seeds of larger projects. But however modest its means or small its scale, a 10- or 15-minute movie requires as much craft and discipline as a feature. A short story can display infelicities of prose less forgivingly than a novel, and there is less room for error in a handful of shots and scenes.
And a lot of room for artistry, as is particularly evident in the animated selections. Animation today is a protean art, encompassing older, hand-drawn and stop-motion techniques; newer digital methods; and, quite frequently, hybrids of the cutting-edge and the tried-and-true. Equally delightful is Bastien Dubois’s a tour of that island nation that is like a documentary composed in watercolors, full of music, detail and a traveler’s sense of adventure. Its spirit is so easygoing that its visual complexity and emotional nuances may take awhile to register, but Mr.
Dubois’s ability to transcend both the dryness of the ethnographic study and the glibness of video tourism is as impressive as his compositional skill. The freshness of those two shorts makes others feel a bit studied and stale by comparison. From Britain, is a fairly conventional children’s story (based on a popular picture book) voiced by enough important British actors to fill up a “” movie. “The Lost Thing,” from Australia, has an intriguing steam-punk aesthetic wrapped around a melancholy allegory of consumerism and urban anomie. Robynn Murray in the documentary “Poster Girl.” Credit Shorts International Consumerism is also the target of Geefwee Boedoe’s “Let’s Pollute,” which uses the simple drawings and peppy didacticism of ’60s and ’70s vintage educational films to instruct youngsters in the ways of waste.
Its satirical intentions are similar to those of “Logorama,” last year’s winner in this category, but “Let’s Pollute” never moves beyond simple sarcasm, which amplifies its message but hardly sharpens it. The documentary program is almost entirely devoted to well-intentioned presentations of bad news about the world. And three of the five films, while telling interesting and important stories about the effects of, the fight against terrorism within the Muslim world and a school for refugees in Tel Aviv, also show some of the limitations of the form. All three — “Sun Come Up,” “Killing in the Name” and “Strangers No More” — rely on the talking-head and b-roll techniques that would fit comfortably on television, and as a result they tell a lot more than they show. It may seem insensitive to point this out, given the filmmakers’ high-minded motives, but the lack of cinematic imagination narrows both the emotional and intellectual scope of the movies themselves, leaving the viewer feeling vaguely sad, vaguely hopeful and only partly illuminated. Advertisement The same can be said for “Wish 143,” another British entry that rather too facilely mixes adolescent longing, terminal illness and absurdist comedy.
“God of Love,” an annoying fable directed by and starring Luke Matheny, also looks nice, with a silvery black-and-white retro sheen that makes its slack-jawed emo romanticism slightly more palatable than it might have been in color. The best of the five, by far, is the Belgian director Ivan Goldschmidt’s set in Burundi during that country’s 1994 civil war and evoking the simultaneous in neighboring Rwanda.
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Improbably lively and shot in a richly colored, emphatic style, it is scary, horrifying and humane, and impressively sure of itself. Its proportions — big theme, simple situation, clear and subtle narrative — feel exactly right. You would not want it longer, but you also do not want to miss it.
THE OSCAR NOMINATED SHORT FILMS 2011 Opens on Friday nationwide. Three programs of short films.