The 2024 Oscar Nominees for Best Animated Short, Ranked from Worst to Best

Although all of this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Picture can be found on streaming services or for premium rental, some of the nominees for a smaller category are keeping it real with the theatrical experience. The easiest way to catch all five nominees for Best Animated Short is to visit a movie theater playing the Oscar-Nominated Shorts program, which collects the five nominees, plus two more that the programmers consider de facto honorable-mention submissions. Though in the past, some of the shorts have been available online during Oscar season, at the moment only one of these five is easily accessible (and this year, none are a Pixar or Disney short that you might have seen in front of a big feature release). That said, the shorts will likely be made available a la carte online once the theatrical run of these programs finishes up; their distributor is called Shorts TV, after all. If you’re inclined to wait and see rather than watch all five in theaters, or just want some advice for your Oscar pool, here’s the rundown on all five nominees for Best Animated Short, ranked from worst to best.

1. War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko

   The most shameless and insipid of this year’s below-average crop is also, I’d wager, the most likely to take home the award. Essentially parlaying a song licensing credit into a seal of approval for a short almost entirely unrelated to the actual music of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, this sappy picture turns to World War I (which has become the “safe” big-war subject in recent years, displacing World War II) for its story of two men playing chess across enemy lines, communicating moves via carrier pigeon. Will they be forced to face each other in the course of brutal trench warfare? Will a Lennon/Ono Christmas song released in hope about the Vietnam War in 1971 inform what happens, and swell at a literal-minded moment? You can probably guess – and if you can’t, you’ll know in your bones within the first 30 seconds of this absolute claptrap, cowritten by the couple’s son Sean, who really should know better.

2. Letter To A Pig

   That’s not to say that World War II has been forgotten entirely. In “Letter to a Pig,” a Holocaust survivor speaks to a classroom full of antsy kids about the pig that helped save his life, and one of the young students then slips into a dreamscape inspired by (though not correlating directly to) his story. The animation is sometimes striking, but there are fussy details – the use of either live-action or photorealistic elements, or possibly both, to depict parts of the old man’s face; the animal-like noses drawn on the human characters – that flag this as one of those Animator’s Movies more interested in technique than character, story, or mood. The degree to which director Tal Kantor avoids easy and obvious metaphors is admirable, but it also makes this 17-minute short not unlike the experience of having a stranger explain their dream to you in painstaking, wandering detail.

3. Our Uniform

   Even more of an animator’s indulgence but far less of a slog than Letter to a Pig, this is essentially a quick series of memory fragments about a young woman’s experiences with school uniforms while growing up in Iran. The highlight here is the animation itself, where images are painted onto various clothing fabrics, folded and wrinkled with great invention, lending them striking texture. Director Yegane Moghaddam marshals these resources cleverly, and the movie doesn’t overstay its welcome. But it still doesn’t amount to much more than brief musings on a topic others have explored in greater detail.

4. Pachyderme

   The most directly upsetting of the five shorts is also the quietest, about a French preteen girl’s visits to her grandparents’ home, where she is abused by her grandfather. The transgressions are heavily implied, rather than stated or shown, as director Stéphanie Clément uses a lush fairy-tale style to abstract the menacing trauma at the center of the story. This unsettling watch is one of the few nominees where the form and content complement each other, rather than having one run roughshod over the other.

6. Ninety-Five Senses

   Wes Anderson (who directed the terrific live-action short The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar) isn’t the only offbeat auteur known for feature films who might quietly win a short-form Oscar this year. Jared Hess, who some accused of knocking off Anderson’s work through his films Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, remains on his predecessor’s tail with this animated short co-directed with his wife Jersusha. Hess has a full animated feature aimed at a family audience due from Netflix later this year; “Ninety-Five Senses,” though, is a bit more adult, as a man whose particular life circumstances are revealed well into his first-person story recounts memories based on the five major senses (which are then interpreted in five different animation styles). Through the movie’s shifting styles and gradual revelation of its true subject, “Ninety-Five Senses” addresses a void in some of the Hess duo’s lesser work: The sense that genuine human feeling is kept at a quasi-satirical deadpan remove that favors outlandish looks and behaviors. They struck a perfect balance in Napoleon Dynamite, a living comic strip with a detectable sweetness underneath, and have often struggled in the 20 years since. “Senses” is arguably the best thing they’ve made since; it has the trimmings of a colorful tall tale that initially obscures its melancholic core. In another surprise twist, it’s easily the best short of this year’s nominees. It’s also the only one currently available for streaming free online, so you can watch just one and feel relatively caught up!

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.