Bao nevertheless runs into trouble when its twist first appears (far too late and far too abruptly). The film should be lauded for its display on how the Chinese mother in the film expresses how much she cares for her dumpling child/actual child – through food and other smaller acts of love across time. This relationship between the mother and the dumpling child is actually an allegory for her inability to let her real-life child go – empty nest syndrome, if you will, playing alongside Toby Chu’s beautiful score. She takes care of the dumpling as if it was her child. Once he goes to work, one of the dumplings sprouts limbs and begins acting like a human. The film opens with a Chinese-Canadian woman cooking baozi dumplings for herself and her husband. For Bao, Shi – a Chinese-Canadian storyboard artist for Pixar – was influenced by her father’s artwork (he was an art professor) as well as two anime films in My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999) and Spirited Away (2001). Here now are the Oscar-nominated animated short films.Īrmed with an awards campaign war chest from Pixar and Disney, Domee Shi’s Bao is the prohibitive favorite on paper. This year, four of the five nominees are about child-parent relationships – from the beginning to the end of life showing parents who can be overbearing, bad influences, supportive. Once the domain of Walt Disney Animation Studios, Paramount, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) – is now one of the most democratic of all Academy Award categories, with so many smaller independent studios nominated in recent decades.
We begin with this year’s slate for Animated Short Film.
This is the first of hopefully three omnibus write-ups on this year’s Oscar-nominated short films. So continues a proud tradition on this blog. Best Animated Short Film Nominees for the 91st Academy Awards (2019, listed in order of appearance in the shorts package)