At the AMPAS Shorts! screening at the Lighthouse International Theater in Manhattan this weekend, the Academy presented all 5 Oscar-nominated animated shorts following an introduction from official Oscar biographer and Turner Classic Movies guy Robert Osborne. The field is strong, with Pixar’s Presto being the only big-studio entry, although hardly the only one in CGI. The other four come from across the globe, spanning the UK to Japan and stopping in France and Russia on the way.

Some fun facts about this year’s crop: they all add up to a total of 38 minutes (just over the length of one of the live-action nominees), they haven’t a single word of dialogue among them, and, according to Osbourne, if the two-and-a-half-minute Oktapodi wins, it will be the shortest film ever to win an Oscar.

Even with the relative strength of this season’s entries, there is one clear standout. La Maison en Petits Cubes, despite its deceptively Gallic name, is a Japanese production from director Kunio Kato’s. In a sparse style somewhere between The Triplets of Belleville and the hand-drawn work of Bill Plympton, the short fashions a beautifully simple metaphor for memory and the pains of old age in the tale of a world in which rising floodwaters force inhabitants to continually build new vertical additions to their homes and a lonely man who purchases a scuba suit to revisit his architectural past. Visually warm and genuinely moving, it’s a touching counterpoint to the comic hyperkineticism of some of the other nominees and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for it come this Sunday.

Here’s a clip from La Maison en Petits Cubes: