This origin story of the Loch Ness monster is a sweet ode to Disney’s Silly Symphonies shorts of the 1940s and ‘50s. Narrated by Billy Connolly, the tale follows Nessie as she is forced out of her cozy pond by a loud mini-golf course developer named MacFroogle. She heads out with her best friend, the rubber duck MacQuack, to find a new home, but it’s not that easy. The whole incident makes her just want to cry, but she’s Scottish and she is supposed to keep a stiff upper lip.

Directors/writers Stevie Wermers and Kevin Deters (HOW TO HOOK UP YOUR HOME THEATER) bring sensitivity to this story. It’s a thin plot but it carries emotional weight. The appealing design of Nessie and her world (loved the plaid mountains), Connolly’s pitch perfect voice over for both the touching and brave face moments and solid character animation attribute to this success.

The hand drawn short seems fitting to play before WINNIE THE POOH, another throwback to a different age of Disney animation. The poetic narration gives it a timeless appeal as well. Wermers originally conceived of the character when she was in college and has finally brought the story of a sensitive monster to the screen. Her love for the subject certainly shines through.

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Sensual is not a word often thought of when one thinks of a Disney animated film. But this Disney short flows with it. But this isn’t just any Disney short, it originated as a collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. A seemingly unlikely pair of artists to work together. Disney wanted to experiment with the animation form and Dali saw animation as a perfect way to explore surrealism on film. The project started in the 1940s with Dali drawing dozens of images, but the film never came to be. Following the production of FANTASIA/2000, Roy E. Disney championed its completion using original storyboards and journals.

Like a Dali painting, the film is a dance through an absurd dreamscape. The film begins with a beautiful naked woman walking across the desert. Naked woman in a Disney film?! Gasp! Trust me, the real naughty bits are unseen. The images are driven by an original 1940s recording from Mexican composer Armando Dominguez and singer Dora Luz, which gives the blend of 2D and CG animation another level of surrealism. The animation style does so as well. The strobe-like movement of the woman is like watching flashes from a dream.

While there is a loose story of Chronos’ doomed love affair with a mortal woman, the film is best described in its visuals. Classic Dali imagery abounds where shapes and figures make up larger pictures. A dancer’s body makes up the face of a bearded statue and then the mouth and space between stretched faces. That dancer’s head turns into a dried dandelion. Homage to UN CHIEN ANDALOU is paid with ants crawling from a hole in a hand. Those ants turn into men on bicycles with bread on their heads.

This experimental film will bring different meaning to each viewer like interpreting a dream or a painting. As it was referred to in FANTASIA/2000 as a FANTASIA sequel idea that never came to be, the film has “baseball as a metaphor for life” in there too.

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This endlessly clever short is one of the best produced by Pixar. Teddy Newton’s film features two 2D characters with a CG world alive in their bodies. One represents day and the other night. When Night sees the beautiful women sunbathing by the pool inside Day, a howl of jealousy bellows from him. He tries to take what day has, but every attempt shows that things that go on in the light are not the same in the dark.

For the most part, the short takes its setup and runs with it. The gags fly by at a clip. Just to get a taste, the short starts with a rooster crowing and Day waking. After a series of perfectly paced gags about his morning routine, the sequence ends with a stream appearing in a relieving place on Day’s body. What starts as an adversarial relationship between Day and Night turns toward the end as Night realizes that Day doesn’t have everything. The short ends up being a classic great short in the way it gets into its premise quick, keeps the pace fast and ends with a note of poignancy. At six minutes, it is driven by action, but the action reveals the personalities of the characters and even allows for growth.

On a technical note, the use of stereoscopic 3-D to create physical depth within the worlds inside the characters’ bodies is ingenious. For once, 3-D was actually used for a story purpose.

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Character. Character. Character. Every film needs engaging characters and the title character of this Oscar-nominated animated short is unforgettable. Granny O’Grimm comes to read her granddaughter a bedtime story. It’s “Sleeping Beauty.” But Granny knows a version of the tale that few others know. The beautiful fairies have left the elderly fairy off the guest list to Sleeping Beauty’s christening and the elder fairy is furious… much like Granny.

Granny’s overdramatic telling of the story had me laughing out loud on several viewings. With her Bride of Frankenstein hair and thick glasses, she appears all the more intimidating to her frightened grandchild, who cowers under the covers. The dark irony that boils under the surface of the entire film is wonderful. Director Nicky Phelan, working with writer Kathleen O’Rourke’s pitch perfect dialog, brings out so much character in Granny and the child. The real-life personal resentments that Granny infuses into the story are marvelously handled.

Stylistically, the film uses cartoonish CG for the “real world” and 2D animation for the fairy tale. I loved some of the visual gags thrown in from how the fairies look compared to the elderly fairy to what the fairies like to use their magic for. The exaggeration is exactly what animation can pull off so well and Phelan and company use it to great affect.

Of all the 2010 Oscar-nominated shorts, this one is my favorite. While I might not want Granny reading to my daughter, she can tell me a fairy tale anytime.

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The title of this Oscar-nominated animated short could be THE LADY, THE REAPER & THE DOCTOR, or THE REAPER VS. THE DOCTOR. An old lady lies down to sleep. In the night, her spirit rises from her body and she meets the grim reaper who promises to reunite her with her beloved husband. Then all of a sudden she is yanked back to life via the efforts of a cocky doctor and his buxom nurses.

Javier Recio Garcia’s dark comedy pits the reaper and the doctor against each other for the life of the lady. At a break-neck pace, the film throws gags at the audience that felt like LOONEY TUNES meets SCOOBY-DOO turned up to 11. The film has great timing in how it quickly sets up its gags and delivers laughs. But the fast-paced second half works all the better because Garcia takes time to set up the scenario in the first place. He handles a tone shift perfectly, resulting in more sustained humor for everything that follows.

This is one of the best shorts nominated for the 2010 Oscars. The clever plot sets up a nice battle of wills that ends with the right dark laugh that the entire film warrants. It has a way of turning “happy ending” upside down.

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All five Wallace & Gromit films have been nominated for Oscars. Director Nick Park has won for three of them. A GRAND DAY OUT lost to CREATURE COMFORTS, directed by Park. His track record has been outstanding. A MATTER OF LOAF AND DEATH takes the thriller plot that has become a standard of the series since THE WRONG TROUSERS.

Wallace (Peter Sallis) and his devoted dog Gromit start a bakery, of course, using one of Wallace’s Rube Goldberg contraptions to bake bread. Wallace was inspired by his crush on the Bake O Lite Bread spokeswoman Piella (Sally Lindsay). When they meet, Wallace is smitten and so is Gromit with Piella’s poodle Fluffles. But it’s a bad time to get into the bakery business. It’s not the recession, but a serial killer that’s knocking off doughboys around town.

Plotwise this isn’t the strongest of the series. The by-the-numbers plot rises though thanks to the heat of Wallace and Gromit. The comic duo bakes a great deal of wit into the standard receipt that even if all the ingredients don’t produce an original dish; the cooks have never failed to serve entertaining comfort food. Like any good series, some episodes are weaker than others, but it’s the characters that keep us coming back. Gromit is determined as ever to protect his clueless owner, but this time around he gets a chance at love. The sweet romance is the best part, because it’s about time that Gromit gets more than Wallace in the end.

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Fabrice Joubert’s SIGGRAPH-winning CG short is among the 2010 nominees for Best Animated Short Film. The story is simple — a snooty rich man realizes that after finishing his meal he has left his wallet at home. He begins ordering cappuccino after cappuccino, only raising his bill more. As he tries to figure out what to do, a homeless man comes in and out of the café, a little old lady sits down next to him and the police arrive looking for a bank robber.

Jourbet does a good job of pacing the film, building one moment upon the next until the ending is at the crazed pace. The film attempts to throw expectations of these characters on their ears. While this isn’t done in a subtle way, the juxtapositions are humorous and provide a nice element of irony. As for production values, the CG animation is crystal clear. I particularly loved the detail on the homeless man and his lion’s mane like beard. They also employ an interesting film trick of placing the lead character in front of a mirror, so when people exit the café in front of him, you see what is going on outside behind him. The simple composition adds to the growing tension of the chaos, because there are no edits to break the suspense. FRENCH ROAST isn’t gourmet brew, but it goes down like a good cup o’ joe.

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Francois Alaux, Herve de Crecy and Ludovic Houplain, known collectively as H5, are the creative force behind this interesting short, which was nominated for 2010 Oscar. In a world made completely out of corporate logos, Ronald McDonald goes on a violent crime spree through the streets of a city much like Los Angeles. Michelin Man Mike and Michelin Man Mitch are cops who set out to stop his bloody rampage.

That description highlights the potential of the premise. That’s why the resulting film is a bit disappointing. For all intents and purposes, the film takes a standard action/disaster flick plot with all the requisite adult humor and casts corporate icons as the characters. In the end, the film works as a satire of Hollywood films more than the corporatization of America, which the logos seem to suggest.

Ronald McDonald, Bob’s Big Boy, etc. cursing for 16 minutes gets tiresome real quick. The use of the logos works the best when they are woven in in ingenious or unexpected ways. For example a Parental Warning label is used brilliantly and you’ll never look at Mr. Clean the same again. But too often it’s just logo overload. They’re crammed in wherever they fit best without any comment. It’s like if Pixar’s CARS wasn’t about racing or driving, but about space exploration. Because the film ends up being a benign critique of Hollywood filmmaking, the film looses a great deal of its edge by not setting its satirical eye on the corporations whose logo star in the film. I don’t blame the filmmakers for not wanting to risk getting sued, but without a critique of corporate excess, the logos come off as simply a gimmick.

Of all the animated shorts nominated for the 2010 Oscar, this is the one that takes the most risk, both creatively and thematically. But in the end, I can’t recommend it outright because of the thematic confusion. It kept me wanting more. There was one moment where the film hinted at the film it could have been. Ronald McDonald is racing down the street and is thrown from his motorcycle after hitting the Weight Watchers logo. Now that’s the special sauce I wanted more of.

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It started as a concept album and then transformed into a stage play, which has become one of the most performed plays in the world. In 1985, the musical made its way to TV like classic PEANUTS adaptations via animation. At 49 minutes, the special is like a review of the stage version, giving fans a musical highlight reel to the world that Charles Schulz created.

The production begins with the title tune where the Peanuts gang gives their impression of good ole Charlie Brown (Brad Kesten, voice, Kevin Brando, singing). Next we get a song set to Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” where Lucy (Jessica Lee Smith) laments her love for pianist Schroeder (Jeremy Reinbolt). She says, “My Aunt Marion was right, never try to discuss marriage with a musician.” Charlie Brown gets wrapped up in many of his classic misfortunes involving kite flying, Valentine’s Day cards and losing baseball games.

For fans of the PEANUTS animated specials the most striking element of this edition is that Snoopy not only talks but sings. He sings about being a wild animal and for his supper. Many of the episodes are based on strips created by Schulz, as is most of the musical, but it just does seem right in animation. Robert Towers’ voice just doesn’t seem right for the black and white beagle. Plus the songs he is given are not the most memorable of the show.

One of the highlights is based directly on one of Schulz’s classic strips and shows the various characters dealing with a book report on PETER RABBIT in various ways. It’s smart and funny, especially how Charlie Brown tries to push off the assignment. The special ends with the most famous song in the show, “Happiness.” It captures the simple pleasures in life, as well as the simple pleasure of the PEANUTS.

Because of its short running time the animated production has little time for the connecting elements of the stage production. It’s mainly the songs just strung together. Some of the songs are better than others. The musical doesn’t tell a story so it’s not as engaging as the best of the animated specials. But for fans it’s like visiting old friends and reminiscing. Because many of the songs are based directly on Charles Schulz’s strips, it has a purity at times that is happiness.

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Pixar goes very cute with this short. It tells the story of how babies are made. Clouds create them don’t you know? And storks deliver the precious packages. But who makes the dangerous babies like crocodiles and porcupines? The dark cloud in the sky, whose demeanor doesn’t match his reputation. Unfortunately, the job is difficult on the stork assigned to fly his babies down to Earth.

Directed by Peter Sohn, an animator on RATATOUILLE and the model for Russell in UP, this short definitely runs on the sentimental side, but provides some dark humor to balance the palate out. The gags don’t fly like they did in PRESTO nor does it have the rich characterization of GERI’S GAME or FOR THE BIRDS, but many of the laughs are witty, using the scenario to its full extent. As one would expect from Pixar, there is great acting going on, especially from the dark cloud’s stork. In some ways, the results of the dangerous babies on the poor stork reminded me of the famed fowls in LOONEY TUNES shorts like Daffy Duck and Foghorn Leghorn. And of course, the imagery is gorgeous. The color palette has a watercolor feel, fitting the nursery rhyme tone very well.

It seems quite fitting that this short will play in front of UP. This fantasy celebrates the beginning of life, while UP the close.

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