Tonight at the 81st Academy Awards, La Maison en Petits Cubes (House of Small Cubes) picked up the award for Best animated short film. In his acceptance speech, director Kunio Kato thanked the usuals (producer, Academy) and then gave us a good laugh with his quip – “Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.” This shout out to the Styx song Mr. Roboto is a reference to the company, Robot Communications, who produced the short. Here’s a clip from the film:

Lineboil contributor Keith Staskiewicz got his wish – he went to the New York screening of the shorts, and was rooting for Kunio Kato’s film about a man, his submerged house and memories.

Congrats to all of the nominated films – it was great meeting you all during your visit to Hollywood.

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:

The nominations for the 81st Academy Awards have been announced, and today we’ll take a look at the 2 animation categories…

Animated Short Film

Five films were nominated, most notably Oktapodi – as it’s a student film. Few (if any) student-produced films have been nominated in this category. Pretty impressive. Here’s our five contenders.

Lavatory — Lovestory

A Russian film by director Konstantin Bronzit about a bathroom attendant searching frantically for her secret admirer in a love story that can’t be stalled. Here’s the 10-minute film in its entirety.

Oktapodi

A 2:30 minute graduation film by six students at Gobelins in France. Oktapodi follows two octopuses who help each other escape from the grasps of a stubborn restaurant cook. The directing team was comprised of Julien Bocabeille, François-Xavier Chanioux, Olivier Delabarre, Thierry Marchand, Quentin Marmier and Emud Mokhberi. Here’s the film in it’s entirety: