- The Dam Keeper
This year’s Oscar nominees for the Best Animated Short Film come to about 50 minutes in total, so the touring program of nominees (opening today at the Landmark Century Centre) features an additional four shorts that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences deems “highly commended.” I wasn’t overly impressed with any of the official nominees, nor was I especially disappointed by the others. The program is consistently, modestly enjoyable—which makes for a better overall time at the movies than a program with one or two standouts amid a field of junk. Some of the selections here cross the line from sweetness into preciousness, though I didn’t mind much, since none of those last longer than five minutes.
- Me and My Moulton
In any case, I had a good time watching Moulton and Bus. The first, a Scandinavian coproduction, is a sketchlike nostalgia piece about a preadolescent girl growing up in mid-60s Norway. Her socialist parents design modern architecture and maintain all sorts of unusual hobbies. They’re not bad parents, per se, but their eccentric behavior makes their daughter feel like an outcast. Moulton adopts a jovial approach to the subject of social anxiety (which makes for some pleasant ironies), culminating with the lesson that it’s OK to be different. Bus Story is also about overcoming disappointment. The heroine is a batty woman in rural Quebec whose lifelong dream is to drive a school bus. When she gets her wish, she finds that her boss is a short-tempered grouch and that her bus route is full of pitfalls. As in Moulton, the animation is on the simple side—the characters look like they were outlined in pencil, and the backgrounds are sparse. Yet both pieces feel personable as a result, as there are fewer obvious creative presences between storyteller and audience.
