Oscars month has arrived, and there are just two days before voting ends on Thursday ahead of the 98th Academy Awards on 15 March. One area where voters have it difficult is in animation, which delivered a particularly strong year.
The best Animated Feature Oscar looks like a race between two giants: KPop Demon Hunters and Zootopia 2, although there could be a surprise win for Arco, Elio or Little Amelie. But there's really tough competition in the Best Animated Short category, with five very distinct pieces of animation making it hard to pick a frontrunner as they're all so strong.
Butterfly
Florence Miailhe's Papillon (or Butterfly) tells the life story of French swimmer Alfred Nakache in 15 minutes of beautiful, poetic animation. The film's painterly style explores themes of freedom and transformation as it takes us from the Olympic Games to the horrors of Auschwitz (you can watch the whole film above).
Florence animates directly under the camera. In our interview, she told us that she varied her technique to adapt to make water a character in itself. The water was animated either on glass to achieve transparency and fluidity, or directly on canvas to benefit from colour blending. Florence and her animators gradually transform the paint, letting movement emerge progressively.
Each 'water' has its own personality and requires a different approach: the clear, luminous waters of childhood in rivers and waterfalls; the murky, the dark muddy waters of the camps, and the more sensual sea and pools in the love scenes.
Forevergreen
The silent short Forevergreen is the work of Disney animators Nathan Engelhardt and Jeremy Spears along with over 200 volunteers, created over nearly six years as an after-hours collaboration. It tells the story of an orphaned bear cub and the tree that becomes his guide in an allegory about love, forgiveness and redemption.
There's a thematic link to another Disney animator's recent passion project, Aaron Blaise's Snow Bear. But technically Forevergreen is a very different bear. The animation is all digital, but the directors developed their own pipeline combining Maya, Python and dynamic wobble textures to make it look like stop motion created with handcrafted wooden models.
Their system preserves the wood's natural imperfections, making the CGI characters look like tactile wooden characters in every frame. The result is a technical feat, but also a deeply human film. Many people have commented on YouTube that they were moved to tears.
In the video below, Nathan and Jeremy talk about how they created the impression of a wooden world, including a field trip to Yellowstone to seek references.
Retirement Plan
John Kelly’s Retirement Plan is a funny but poignant character-driven story that follows Ray, a middle-aged man who's dissatisfied with life and fantasizes about the beauty and joy he'll find when he can finally stop work.
The seven-minute film was made using Moho, which tops our guide to the best animation software. In the making of videos above, John shares how he scouted for location inspiration in his home town of Dublin and how he acted out each scene himself to provide references for the minimalist 2D animation style.
US readers can watch the film on YouTube below.
The Girl Who Cried Pearls
The Girl Who Cried Pearls is a stop-motion animated short set in early 20th-century Montreal. A poor boy falls in love with a girl whose deep sorrow causes her to weep pearls, which the boy sells these pearls to a greedy pawnbroker, forcing him to choose between love and fortune.
The movie was directed by Montreal-based duo Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowsk. In the interview above, they discuss how they created the highly detailed, handcrafted stop-motion, with puppets and sets built from recycled materials, including even mud from the streets of Montreal.
Inspired by the way children play with dolls, a key artistic choice was to use puppets with static faces, which means the emotion is all conveyed through movement, particularly their hands.
The Three Sisters
With its minimalist, geometric 2D animation style, The Three Sisters is a "comedy of manners" that uses visual storytelling and rhythm to create humour with a charming simplicity.
It's the work of three-time Oscar nominee Konstantin Bronzit (Lavatory - Lovestory and We Can't Live Without Cosmos), who initially presented it under the pseudonym 'Timur Kognov'.
Konstantin has revealed that the opening scene (below) is his favourite. "Your film should not just start with the first scene or the first movement of your characters. It should start, so to speak, with the first letter, as it happens in books," he told Cartoon Brew.
He told Directors Notes: "In every scene – short ones, long ones, any scene at all – every character should prepare and make a main gesture that articulates their attitude towards what is happening and uncovers or underscores the scene’s meaning to the viewer."
KPop Demon Hunters
OK, we can't talk about Oscars animation nominations and not mention the favourite for Best Animated Feature. KPop Demon Hunters has been a surprise hit for Netflix, and it's become a cultural phenomenon in the process.
It's already scooped a haul of awards including at the Concept Art Awards and the VES Awards for visual effects.
In the video above, Senior CG Supervisor Pablo Holcer and Comp Supervisor Jiwoon Kim reveal how they used Katana and Nuke to shape the visual language of the film, particularly the dramatic light shows for the concert scenes, which included use of Nuke’s Particle System to create the stadium lightstick animations.
Zootopia 2
Zootopia 2 has become Disney’s biggest animated movie of all time. The video above includes behind-the-scenes footage and interviews revealing the vast amount of work that went into it.
Disney's team used Autodesk Maya to model out the assets and to build the sets, including large environments where every object has to be created. Among the most challenging sequences was the Marsh Market environment., which recently won recognition at the VES Awards.
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