Why are shorts so superior to feature nominees?
Among the sequelae of creating a short film that makes it to the Oscars comes the inevitable
rush to "develop" the successful short into a feature film. But why? You didn't see publishers
rushing around begging Chekhov and Joyce and Katherine Mansfield to "develop" their fiction into longer pieces. Can you imagine a best-selling novel based on "Everything That Rises Must Converge?" The unending drear of a 500-page "Bartleby the Scrivener?" There's
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something inherently poignant about the doomed enterprise of trying to tell a story in a single sitting; its very compression conveys a tragic undercurrent of time's wingéd chariot hurrying near.
Take the strange little 27-minute creature that opens the animated
segment of CCA's compilation reel:
The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello
. It's tricky to describe this short, but think Arthur Conan Doyle via Tim Burton, Darwin meets Edward Gorey. Its title character, an "aerial navigator," fears he has ended his career by making a fatal miscalculation on his last voyage, but is ordered on a special mission to the outer reaches of "uncharted air," piloting a mad scientist who seeks a cure for the plague ravaging their home city of Gothia. The realization of Jasper's world is so immediately, viscerally convincing that we don't even question why it is that creaking dirigibles sail through murky cloudscapes seeking new biological specimens. With it play four other animated shorts, including the disturbing dysfunctional-family parable
The Moon and the Son
, an imagined conversation between the filmmaker and his deceased Mafia-connected father; and the fiendishly suspenseful 9, whose hero, a tiny Gumby-featured rag doll, must make his way in a hostile post-apocalyptic landscape.
The live-action shorts are every bit as spellbinding. In
Our Time Is Up
, Kevin Pollak plays a psychologist who
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abruptly abandons his usual "talking cure" for a more drastic approach: insulting bluntness ("no matter how many women you date, your penis will never get bigger!"), and experiences surprising results. The other nominees, from Iceland, the UK, Germany and Ireland, each unpack the morsel of human relationship at their hearts with compact and all the more eloquent techniques. Instead of holding off for "full-length" versions of these shorts (implying their present length isn't adequate), big-run theaters should find a way to incorporate showing these alongside features. For that matter, perhaps an untold number of cardboard-and-sawdust studio vehicles would be immeasurably improved merely by being shortened to 25 minutes or fewer. In the meantime, you won't regret watching 10 tiny masterpieces all in a row.
