Review: This year's Oscar-nominated animated and live-action shorts are 10 solid stories, with a couple of standouts
This year’s Academy Award nominees in the animated short and live-action short categories are uniformly good, and in some cases great. It’s a relief to say there’s not a clunker in the bunch.
The distributor of this year’s program, Roadside Attractions, solicited director Taika Waititi (whose “Two Cars, One Night” was nominated in the live-action short category back in 2005) to curate the programs. Waititi’s contribution seems to be in choosing the best order for each group of five — making sure audiences leave smiling by seeing something funny at the end.’
The animated program starts with “The Three Sisters,” by Russian-born director Konstantin Bronzit, a humorous and wordless tale of three lonely sisters who rent a room to a crusty sea captain. That’s followed by the more whimsical “Forevergreen,” in which directors Nathaniel Engelhardt and Jeremy Spears depict the loving relationship between a pine tree and an orphaned bear cub. Then comes the Canadian stop-motion entry “The Girl Who Cried Pearls,” directed by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, a beautifully rendered fable of love and greed set in Montreal of about a century ago.
Then comes the best of the animated crop, French director Florence Miailhe’s “Papillon (Butterfly).” It’s based on the real life of Alfred Nakache, an Algerian-born swimmer who competed for France in the 1930s, including at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin — where, as a Jew, he helped the French swimming team beat out the Germans. In a swirl of images resembling oil paintings, Miailhe shows Nakache swimming through memories of marriage, antisemitism and Auschwitz.
The fifth nominee, director John Kelly’s “Retirement Plan,” is a sweet discourse on the dreams of a man (voiced by Domhnall Gleeson) making plans for his years after retiring. (Since the five nominees add up to about 65 minutes of screen time, the distributors add a sixth short, “Eiru,” a bit of Irish folklore by director Giovanna Ferrari and the folks at Cartoon Saloon, the production company behind “Wolfwalkers” and “Song of the Sea.”)
The live-action slate begins with director Sam A. Davis’ “The Singers,” a melancholy short that depicts a group of barflies trying to win a bet by displaying the best singing voice. That’s followed by a sweet British story, Lee Knight’s “A Friend of Dorothy,” where a teen (Alistair Nwachukwu) befriends an elderly woman (the great Miriam Margolyes) with a love of theater.
Then come the two shorts that, if I had to guess, will duke it out for the Oscar. The first, writer-director Meyer Levinson-Blount’s “Butcher’s Stain,” is a chilling study of intolerance, where a Palestinian butcher working in a Tel Aviv market tries to fight an accusation of tearing down hostage posters in the break room. The second, “Two People Exchanging Saliva,” written and directed by Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh, is a formally composed story of a forbidden love between a rich woman (Zar Amir, from “Holy Spider”) and a shop clerk (Luàna Bajrami), set in a metaphor-rich world where kissing is outlawed and slaps across the face are currency.
The last of the five is the funniest and wittiest. “Jane Austen’s Period Drama” is a satire that imagines an Austen-esque woman (Julia Aks, who co-wrote and co-directed with Steve Pinder) explaining her menstrual cycle to a clueless suitor (Ta’imua). Even the characters’ names induce some solid laughs.
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Oscar-nominated animated short films 2026
★★★1/2
Oscar-nominated live-action short films 2026
★★★1/2
Both programs open Friday, February 27, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). The compilations are unrated, but probably PG-13 for references to violence, sexual material and language. The animated program is 83 minutes, and includes a short in French with subtitles; the live-action program is 115 minutes, and features one short in Hebrew and Arabic, and one in French, both with subtitles.