Salute Your Shorts: 2011 Oscar-nominated Animated Films

Most years the animated shorts category is both the audience’s preference and the only one of the categories that seems to really bring in great films. It’s hard to explain this disparity, except perhaps that because so many animated shorts are comedies they tend to lack the pretension of live-action and documentary shorts. They’re also frequently more stylistically ambitious than the other categories, which are frequently more conservative examples of their genres. I wouldn’t call the nominees examples of avant-garde cinema by any means, but they’re definitely a lot closer than what you’ll see pretty much anywhere else at the...  read more