Oscar-nominated animated shorts draw on a wide variety of themes, many involving kids

This year’s Oscar-nominated animated shorts archer compact tales astir archetypal kisses, sweets and an old-fashioned children’s TV show, on with much big topics specified arsenic PTSD and hairsbreadth transplants.

‘Beautiful Men’

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Nicolas Keppens’ “Beautiful Men” uses deadpan wit to poke astatine a susceptible broadside of masculinity: hairsbreadth loss.

Keppens went to Istanbul for enactment and recovered himself astatine a edifice meal successful the beingness of men successful Turkey to get hairsbreadth transplants. “It was a country afloat of bald men,” helium recalls, and portion you mightiness expect boisterous behavior, “it was wholly silent. It was tender and touching, seeing this representation we don’t usually get of manhood.”

He says that the reactions to the movie person been reasonably gender-specific, with men sighing, “Yeah, it’s not casual losing your hair,” and women “seeing much of the drama due to the fact that they spot their hubby oregon fellow oregon immoderate successful it. If immoderate others spot much of the tenderness successful it, that’s besides a bully thing.”

‘In the Shadow of the Cypress’

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“In the Shadow of the Cypress” tells the communicative of a traumatized oversea skipper with PTSD and his daughter, whose lives alteration erstwhile they observe a beached whale.

Written and directed by Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani, the deceptively simple-looking, wordless movie is profoundly metaphorical: It springs from Molayemi’s prickly narration with his begetter and Sohani’s father’s superior wounded during subject training.

“We researched a batch astir Iranian veterans suffering PTSD, their families, their relationships, and it had a batch of interaction connected our scenario,” Sohani says.

Among the challenges the Iranian filmmakers faced: U.S. sanctions. “Sanctions and the consequent economical situation caused a batch of problems; our currency is shrinking each day,” Molayemi says. Equipment and basal surviving costs kept rising, and successful the end, the movie took six years to complete.

‘Magic Candies’

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In the Japanese abbreviated “Magic Candies” (inspired by a Korean kids’ book), an isolated young lad buys intriguingly colored hard candies that springiness him the quality to pass with a idiosyncratic — oregon carnal oregon entity — opening up his world.

“More than you think, actually, radical astir you are reasoning astir you and caring astir you,” says shaper Takashi Washio done an interpreter. “When you announcement that, it’s different.”

Director Daisuke Nishio’s gorgeous visuals whitethorn fool viewers into reasoning it’s stop-motion, but it’s really meticulously designed and rendered 3D CGI. “We decided if we conscionable created it by stop-motion, it wouldn’t spell beyond the archetypal storybook,” Washio says. “I emotion each spot of this film, due to the fact that if you look into each country and cut, determination is simply a existent volition down it.”

‘Wander to Wonder’

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The astir objectively insane nominee has to beryllium writer-director Nina Gantz’s “Wander to Wonder,” a cockeyed, absurd look astatine the antithetic denizens of an old-fashioned kids’ TV show, who person to header with a real-life disaster. Funny and touching, an Easter egg-loaded transverse betwixt Ray Harryhausen and Charlie Kaufman, it manages to make interest for their plight, their Shakespearean recitations and their gherkins. That whitethorn beryllium due to the fact that Gantz was besides dealing with a precise superior concern successful her ain life.

“I went done this acquisition of grief myself,” she said of the film’s evolution. “With absurd humor, I could archer this communicative with a small spot of lightness.”

The gherkins “symbolized for maine the past happening you person successful your cupboards erstwhile you tally retired of everything. It starts from the past gherkin jar, and from determination it each goes south.”

‘Yuck!’

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No substance the result connected Oscar night, the contention for cutest animated abbreviated has been settled: It’s French writer-director Loïc Espuche’s chronicle of a kid’s archetypal kiss, “Yuck!”

Children astatine a household campsite spy grown-ups and teens kissing, exclaiming their fearfulness (as Espuche noted kids doing astatine a screening of 1 of his shorts that featured a kiss, filling him with delight). But erstwhile 1 lad starts to person stirrings toward 1 of his friends similar those they’d watched, his lips crook a glittery blistery pinkish for each to see. “Red is much teen emotion oregon big passion,” says Espuche. “There is thing much naive successful the pinkish with the glittery effect. When I was a kid, I ate candies that sparkled connected my tongue. I wanted to re-create this sensation.

The kids are truthful disgusted by radical kissing, “but astatine the aforesaid time, they can’t halt talking astir it.”