10 Animated Shorts Make the 2014 Oscar Shortlist
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced this afternoon the list of 10 animated shorts which will advance in the voting process for this year’s Academy Awards. The shortlist was selected from fifty-eight shorts that had originally qualified in the category.
Former Oscar winners Torill Kove, William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg, and two-time Oscar nominee Bill Plympton, all made the shortlist. Disney also made the shortlist again with Patrick Osborne’s Feast and Disney-legend-turned-Google-director Glen Keane earned a place on the list for his directorial debut Duet.
It’s a super-competitive year with lots of innovative work on display. Two of the strongest contenders on the list are from student filmmakers—Daisy Jacobs’s The Bigger Picture and Réka Bucsi’s Symphony No. 42 (Bucsi just picked up two more awards last weekend at the Primanima festival). The other indie shorts on the list—Coda, The Dam Keeper and A Single Life—are solid Oscar-worthy efforts as well.
The once-dominant Pixar was snubbed for the second year in a row; last year the Academy ignored The Blue Umbrella, this year Lava, which we can confirm was indeed qualified. The last Pixar short to be nominated was La Luna in 2011. (Disclosure: I wrote The Art of Pixar Short Films.)
(For the record, eight of the ten shortlisted films had previously been identified on Cartoon Brew’s list of contenders, which we had compiled without any input from the Academy.)
The 10 shortlisted films are below in alphabetical order. Congratulations to all!
The Bigger Picture
Daisy Jacobs, director, and Christopher Hees, producer
National Film and Television School
Coda
Alan Holly, director
And Maps And Plans
The Dam Keeper
Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi, directors
Tonko House
Duet
Glen Keane, director
Glen Keane Productions & ATAP
Feast
Patrick Osborne, director, and Kristina Reed, producer
Walt Disney Animation Studios
Footprints
Bill Plympton, director
Bill Plympton Studio
Me and My Moulton
Torill Kove, director
Mikrofilm in co-production with the National Film Board of Canada
The Numberlys
William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg, directors
Moonbot Studios
A Single Life
Joris Oprins, director
Job, Joris & Marieke
Symphony No. 42
Réka Bucsi, director
Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest
The shortlist was selected by the Academy’s short films and feature animation branch reviewing committee, which viewed the entries last month at screenings in Los Angeles and New York.
Now, short film and feature animation branch members will select three to five nominees from the 10 titles on this shortlist. The branch screenings to determine the nominees will be held in Los Angeles, New York, London, and San Francisco in December.
The nominations will be announced on January 15, 2015.
