This year’s selection of Oscar-nominated animated shorts range from the typically witty Pixar entry, Day & Night (written and directed by Teddy Newton) to Geefwee Boedoe’s environmentalist Let’s Pollute. Where the former looks back to a Looney Tunes style, with the titular characters coming to appreciate each other’s seemingly separate spheres of influence, the latter offers a comic look at our “legacy” of pollution, with an old-style announcer celebrating planned obsolescence and corporations’ production of “crap you want to buy” as well as “tons and tons of toxic waste.” Jakob Schuh and Max Lange’s The Gruffalo features celebrity voices (Helena Bonham Carter, John Hurt) to tell the story of a mouse who invents a monster to scare off hungry forest creatures when the gruffalo actually appears, the mouse’s next story demonstrates the power of imagination. The Lost Thing is more plainly poignant, as a young man finds an uncategorizable “thing,” composed of green tentacles and red industrial metal. As he helps it to find a place to fit in, the process leads the man to reflect on his own changing interests, the loss of his childhood appreciation of randomness, even as he hangs on to a certain sentimentality. The most unusual and effective of the group is a French film, Madagascar: A Journey Diary, directed by Bastien Dubois. Using multiple and exceedingly charming 2-D animation techniques — and literally turning pages — it offers a tourist’s view of the island off Africa’s southeastern coast, brief glimpses of daily activities and long-standing traditions, soccer matches and beach adventures. —Cindy Fuchs

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Rating:	No Rating
Release Date:	February 11, 2011 (Limited)
Genre:	Program, Animation