Taking a look at some recent notable shorts

     I was was able to catch up with a few notable short films over the past week currently experiencing a nice awards-receiving relevancy from one outlet or another. For those interested, all three are available to view online and last less then ten minutes in length. Two premiered at the just concluded 2013 Sundance Film Festival, while the third was shown in thousands of theaters across the country in front of the Fall 2012 blockbuster, Wreck-It Ralph; how to distribute short films continues to provide a unique struggle for filmmakers. Each with varying styles and degrees of scope, these three works use forms of animation, unique humor, and narrative freeness to provide a magic in limited time. Likely (although not exclusively) because of their brevity, the filmmakers capture a specific idea in an other worldly largeness.

      Winner of Best Short at Sundance, Jason Willis' pseudo-doc parody, Catnip: Egress to Oblivion?, plays like a grindhouse educational short brewed with the LSD movies of the 1960s. A cautionary tale about the dangerously habit-forming side effects of catnip, the film greets us with film scratches, washed out palates, trippy visuals, feline testimony, and faux expert talking heads galore. The humor emerges from the creativity (i.e., the newspaper headlines, the book titles, the glass-shattering image of a cat experiencing a bad trip) and, armed with a catchy title song, raises questions while offering up hilarious answers.

      While Tony Donoghue's Irish Folk Furniture won Best Animated Short at Sundance, it may not be, upon first viewing, what you'd expect. A stop motion, live action short in which film frames are excised to provide a kinetic visual experience, Donoghue's piece incorporates an oral history (interviews with Irish families reminiscing about their old furniture) with oral history principles, such as reciprocity (Donoghue recollects the old furniture, Extreme Makeover: Home Editions it, and gives it back for future generations to enjoy). There is a sense, provided by Donoghue quite literally at the outset, that a family's discarded furniture will always try to find its way home, carrying a weight of nostaglic importance across its shelves. This is a quiet and unassuming feel good movie.

Fresh off an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short, John Kahrs' Paperman (available here) proves that on-time public transportation often stifles potential relationships. A nonverbal love story set fifty years back, Paperman takes a Before Sunrise dilemma and observes the possibilities of fate and the ironies of timing in a cutesy, Disneyfied world complete with paper airplanes possessing a selfless agenda. It's hard not to get swept up in the simplicity of the work, and yet Kahrs makes it feel somewhat epic just the same. Hopelessly romantic, the film plays on our fears regarding our wrestling with "the one that got away." Now that the two lovers have found each other, I sincerely hope they can find something interesting to talk about.