Jan. 29--I have no idea which of this year's five nominated animated short films will win an Academy Award on Feb. 22. But if I ran the zoo, the prize would go to "Me and My Moulton," 14 minutes of sheer pleasure from writer-director Torill Kove. The "Oscar-Nominated Short Films: Animation" program is part of a presentation opening this week at Landmark's Century Centre Cinema.
Born in Norway and a longtime Montreal resident, Kove previously has been nominated twice and won once. Her latest, a witty and reflective tale of a girl, her family and her longing for a bike, reminds the viewer how much can be accomplished in a brief running time.
Even better, Kove's way of framing and timing visual jokes is exquisite. "Me and My Moulton" tells a story of three sisters (the tale's focused on the middle one) in 1965 Norway, a time and place remembered by Kove as a bright, open-air universe, though not without its difficulties. "My parents," the girl tells us in voice-over, "are modernist architects and that causes problems." The correlating running gag, that of the girls continually falling off stylish but tricky three-legged chairs, never becomes pushy. Kove works with a wonderful sense of spatial perspective.
Its title taken from the British bicycle that enters the girls' lives, "Me and My Moulton" is a fond, plaintive look back at childhood. Two other nominated shorts, the six-minute "Feast" (lately accompanying Disney's "Big Hero 6" on the big screen) and the tiny, two-minute "A Single Life," deal with great swaths of time in eye blinks and quick leaps ahead. The seven-minute "Bigger Picture" concerns two brothers and their ailing mum. It too is preoccupied with time, and how much we may have left.
While I loved "Me and My Moulton," the best of the five, it's pretty clear many Oscar voters may favor the ruthless pathos and painterly beauty of "The Dam Keeper," an 18-minute lesson in tolerance set in an "Animal Farm"-like world. We are sometime in the future, in a village threatened by poison gas. A lonely pig is bullied at school but is crucial to the town's survival. He is the dam keeper of the title, and the dam's windmill keeps the threat at bay. The short comes from Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi, who share many art direction credits on great commercial animation ("Ratatouille") and un-great ("Ice Age"). "The Dam Keeper" puts audiences through the emotional wringer.
"Me and My Moulton" -- 3 1/2 stars
No MPAA rating.
Running time: 1:24
Opens: Friday at Landmark's Century Centre Cinema
mjphillips@tribpub.com
Twitter @phillipstribune
