LAVATORY-LOVESTORY

Sometime midway through the Oscar broadcast on Sunday, Feb. 22—after the Bollywood dance number but before your brother-in-law spills his beer in the Chex mix—the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will trot out a duo of mid-level stars to announce the awards for Best Short Films. This is, traditionally, your cue to get up and go to the bathroom. But if you take my advice you’ll keep walking—all the way to the Hollywood Theatre, where the nominated shorts are playing in twin programs. For all their brevity, the works on display carry as much invention and feeling as any feature-length movie from last year.

Only one of these films will be recognizable to mass audiences: Presto, a clever Pixar cartoon that showed before screenings of WALL-E last summer. As sprightly as this farce about a hapless magician and his carrot-craving rabbit may be, it’s also the thinnest entry in a packed Animation category. The French CGI thriller Oktapodi is pretty clearly inspired by Finding Nemo, but its extended chase scene, featuring an octopus rescuing his lady love from the calamari table, brilliantly incorporates terraced swimming pools as an escape route. Lavatory-Lovestory uses black-and-white line drawings to trace the wooing of a forlorn men’s room attendant, while This Way Up sends two cadaverous morticians on a journey to the lake of fire.

And then there’s the obvious standout in this category, La Maison en Petits Cubes. A hand-drawn, 12-minute fantasy by director Kunio Kato, it glides through an outpost of waterlogged towers, stacked upward by their tenants as ocean tides rise. On one of these island parapets sits a silent old man; when he drops his pipe during his latest brick-and-mortar project, he must descend through the stories of his life. It’s the most affecting symbol of the sediment of memory that I can recall seeing.

There’s always a turd in the punchbowl, and this year it floats in the Live Action program, and is (of course) Holocaust-flavored. Spielzeugland (Toyland) tackles the suddenly popular dilemma, “But what do we tell the kids about the concentration camps?”—a question to which there exists no satisfactory answer. It does not help matters to rip a page from Life is Beautiful and tell the towhead his pals are off to Toyland, a delightful place where the teddy bears are simply enormous. That the story has a reasonably happy ending only compounds the movie’s lies.

The remaining entries are far better. On the Line features a security guard whose budding romance is dashed by hesitancy and cowardice in a dizzying subway encounter. The Pig uses rude humor (it opens with a variation on the old Newlywed Game joke: “I’m here to have surgery.” “Where?” “In the butt”) to defuse the battle of Danish cartoonists with devout Muslims. And New Boy juxtaposes an African youngster’s village schooling with his education as a refugee in Ireland, where his classmates nickname him “Live Aid.” No sentimentality about children here—they’re cruel, instinctively racist little buggers.

New Boy uses a flashback structure, as does Spielzeugland—and the most daring entry in either category, a French auto-eulogy called Manon on the Asphalt. Directors Elizabeth Marre and Olivier Pont have constructed a narrative that leaps forward from a fatal bicycle accident to the grieving of a young woman’s loved ones, and then dashes back in time again to revisit the final times she did ordinary things: made love, got caught in the rain and, yes, went to the movies. As this list suggests, Manon isn’t afraid to reach for big emotions in small experiences; in less assured hands, this sort of thing could be embarrassing. Instead, scored to an acoustic cover of Bob Dylan’s “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” it’s softly wrenching. It, like La Maison en Petits Cubes, is a reminder that life is far too short.