The Curse of Pixar and This Year's Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts

Through Thursday, The Varsity Theater in the U-District is screening the five Oscar-nominated animated shorts, along with three of the "highly commended" that didn't quite make the cut (tickets $10). It's a fun enough evening of short animated films, but overall it leaves you with the depressing sense that Pixar--with its now 15-year-old game changing computer animation--has sucked all the joy, individuality, and creativity out of animation around the world.

Of the five nominees, four are computer animated--the stop-motion Wallace & Gromit caper A Matter of Loaf and Death is the only hold-out. And of the three commended films, two are computer animated. That's six of eight, and not so surprisingly, with the exception of one, they all look the same.

When Pixar launched itself into the mainstream with Toy Story in 1995, they became critical darlings on the strength of their groundbreaking technology coupled with almost quaint attachment to story and character that was a couple cuts above most mainstream fare. Aesthetically, they stood out (and continued to for some time) by essentially refusing to buy into their own hype: John Lasseter and his cohorts were aware that despite the robustness of their technology, particularly when it came to representing the inanimate world, they were still light-years away from photographic verisimilitude. Instead they settled on a charming, usually whimsical caricature of people and animals (and various anthropomorphic objects) that existed comfortably between more traditional animation and the numerous failed attempts to compete with live action (see, most recently, the motion-capture Beowulf).

But that was fifteen years ago. Today, the technology Pixar helped pioneer has gone global, and the result has been--if these shorts are anything to judge by--a complete watering down of the visual element of animation. In other words, the rise of technology has shifted most of the focus from the aesthetic (they all visually look the same now) to a far narrower vocabulary of caricature: how funky can we make this person's hair? (All of them obsess over hair.) What sort of texturing can we layer on to be unique? (The Polish film The Kinematograph was so baroque in this aspect that the characters' skin looked like wood grain).

Pixar themselves appear to have gotten locked into a certain mode, too. Their commended short Partly Cloudy is so treacly it's tart. It's about an outsider who's not like the rest, and who thinks his only friend is abandoning him, which makes him feel bad. But oh, true friends come back! Are the specifics even important?

So of the nominees, you have an old woman whose peaceful parting from this world is arrested by a cocksure ER doctor (The Lady and the Reaper, Spain), a selfish businessman who scoffs at the homeless but who's too proud to admit fault when he loses his wallet (French Roast, France), and Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty (Ireland), a slightly diabolic short about a grandma who takes out her anger at aging on her grandchildren by scaring the shit of them with seemingly sweet fairy tales.

This last one of the three most clearly demonstrated the aesthetic limitations of computer animation, because the fairy tale segments rejected three-dimensional modeling for a style that's closer to an animated version of Eric Carle than Pixar, and it looks so much better that you almost want to give them credit for the contrast.

Of all the animated shorts, the only one which really seemed to grasp the aesthetic possibilities of the medium was Logorama, a French short set in a Los Angeles comprised exclusively of corporate slogans and iconography. The city is populated by faceless AOL walking men, wandering through a cityscape of corporate logo towers. Goodyear tire cops fight a brutal gunfight with a shit-talking, submachine wielding Ronald McDonald, while the Esso girl saves an innocent Big Boy caught in the crossfire.

Aesthetically, Logorama is definitely the most imaginative of the films, though it's a bit like Natural Born Killers in that its borrowing never adds up to much besides self-indulgence. Which leaves me feeling that in terms of the nominees, the one that deserves to win is Wallace & Gromit, by default. But in the end, we're all being robbed: the Canadian hand-animated short Runaway only got commended, but in comparison to the rest, it's visually imaginative, charming, funny, and a little tragic in its cross-class romance.