There is a homer favorite in this year’s Oscar animated shorts competition, “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore,” which was co-directed by Brandon Oldenburg, the co-founder of Deep Ellum-based Reel FX Creative Studios.
The movie is an elegy to life and books, beginning in a down-and-out New Orleans that is blown away by a hurricane. Morris Lessmore finds himself in the ruins, holding books whose words have been blown straight off the pages. In a magic twist, he is led by a mysterious apparition to a house of books where he cares for them like orphans, while working on his own memoirs. There is a Spielbergian appeal to Oldenburg and co-director William Joyce’s nostalgic fairy tale, which plays out against a tinkling piano soundtrack that smacks of the Jeunets’ Amelie while lilting and riffing nursery rhymes. But it is the animation that steals the show, the flurry of personified books, which include a loyal volume of Humpty Dumpty that mimes speech and emotion by flipping through pages like an flip book – a lovely, medium-conscious touch. And just when you think “The Fantastic Flying Books” is going to launch into excessively flighty and sentimental realms, Joyce and Oldenburg sound a somber tone that wraps the conclusion into a melancholic reflection on life, death, and the role of story in passing meaning and love through the generations.
Despite “Lessmore’s” lofty ruminations, my favorite films in the animated grouping are two strange little black comedies. “A Morning Stroll” (pictured at top) takes a simple, if off-beat incident – a man encountering a chicken walking down a city street – and imagines it in three time periods, 1959, 2009, and finally in 2059. Each sequence riffs on the visual technology of the day – the sound of a sputtering film projector, or the distracting buzz of an iPhone — and the short’s bizarre vision of post-apocalyptic futurism is satisfyingly off-the-wall, unexpected, and hilarious. “Dimanche/Sunday” is a drab little tale about a child in a blue collar, French Canadian family who is lost amidst mumbling, vulture-like adults. Death seems omnipresent: fish in the kitchen, road kill on the street, and a little dash of surrealism offers a chance encounter with a bear that not only lightens the mood, but completes “Dimanche” as a peculiarly poignant portrait of the world through innocent eyes.
A second Canadian film in the program is Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby’s painterly “Wild Life.” Set at the turn of the 20th century, it follows a posh young British man’s starry-eyed exploit into Western Canada where he hopes to live out his years as a cowboy. The story is told in part via letters the man writes home (which exaggerate his comfort) and “interviews” with the rough-and-tumble locals, who crack wry jabs at the Brit’s expense. “Wild Life” finds a controlling image in the comet, a mysterious, though ultimately harmless cosmic flare, careening through space and caught in an erratic, incomprehensible, and ultimately doomed gravitational pull.
And what’s an animation category these days without a Pixar offering? That’s “La Luna,” another cosmic-minded short that plays nicely in counterpoint to both “Dimanche” and “Lessmore.” A fable about growing up and a child’s relationship to his forefathers, the short’s strength comes not from its dazzling setting – a few janitors anchoring a little boat to the moon – but the little details, the efficiency with which first time writer/director Enrico Casarosa (a storyboard artist on Pixar standards like Up) opens his characters to us through brooms and hats.
