Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Best Animated Shorts - 2010

It's that time of the year again, when the excitement of the Baseball Hall of Fame vote has died down (Yey for Bert Blyleven!) and the Oscars are the only thing to tide me over until baseball season begins again. And like the past four years, the one category that I am following closely is that of Best Animated Short. In case this is your first time reading this, the Best Animated Short category was one that had fallen to the wayside for me until 2006, when I came to the realization that not only are they short and fun to watch (something I've known since I was a kid when I watched dozens of Oscar-nominated shorts without knowing it), but they are also incredibly easy to find! Since then, Best Animated Short has superceded Best Picture as my favorite category. Case in point: even though I didn't start watching Best Animated Short nominees until 2006, 8 years after I started trying to watch Best Picture nominees, I've still seen more of the Best Animated Short nominees, 301 (out of 327, 92%) to 231 (out of 485, 47%).

I've also done something with Best Animated Short I've never done for Best Picture: watch all of the nominees before the night of the actual ceremony. I've done this every year since 2007, when I went to the showing for Best Animated Short nominees in Washington DC. A year later, I watched all of the shorts without going to the showing, and wrote up a review for each of the nominees. Last year, I found the shortlist of ten a month before the nominations were announced, and I watched six of them before the nominees were announced, and saw all five nominees on the day of the nomination. This year, I tried to get a leg up by finding the longlist back in November. I had seen eight on the shortlist by the announcement, but even then there was one of the nominees that I hadn't seen. My sister and I tried to find the final short on video sites and bit torrents, but to no avail. In the end we sucked it up and bought the DVD, under the pretense of being a late birthday present. The DVD arrived two weeks ago, so it's been two weeks since I watched all the short, but I just hadn't had time to write the review. Now that it's three days before the Oscars, hopefully it is not too late. I apologize in advance if this will be largely incomprehensible, but that's what you get when you write four days before a major exam.