2026 Oscar Shorts - Animated and Documentary

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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The Oscar animated short category is a time-honored group with the unique ability to transcend the bounds of conventional time and space with humor and verve. Each artist has been dependable in giving imagination free reign, unconcerned by the limits of reality and our earthly restrictions.

While this year’s selection lies a bit more on the mainstream and formulaic side than in the past years, eccentricity and freedom of expression are still in evidence.

First from Israel and Cyprus, “THE THREE SISTERS” ( director Konstantin Bronzit) highlight three sisters on an island illustrating their attachment (romantic and otherwise) to a macho, rotund sailor with a very limited vocabulary. With vivid and distinctive animation reminiscent of Brunhoff family incarnations of Babar the Elephant, the film is quirky and madcap, but it runs a little long with three distracted maidens endlessly running to and fro. If you can picture Popeye the Sailor on a Greek isle, you’ll know what to expect although whenever you hear the silent sailor exclaim “Heh!” you will choke on your popcorn.

“FOREVERGREEN” from the USA (directed by Nathan Engelhardt and Jeremy Spears) tells the affectionate tale of a young bear’s bond with a heroic and tall pine tree, offering its nourishing pinecones. While it is too humanly anthropomorphic and Disneyesque (complete with googly eyes and smiley faces) it does possess a kernel of ecological mindfulness and the stop-motion graphic quality is first rate. It is true that the plot is sticky sweet with too much sap, but the brief film underscores a great spirit, the symbiosis of friendship and the resilience of Nature.

Circumstances are more existential in directors Chris Lavis’s and Maciek Szczerbowski’s “THE GIRL WHO CRIED PEARLS” from Canada. An octogenarian tells the story of being a voyeur watching an abusive family and being haunted young Cinderella-like girl while he himself dealt with extreme poverty as a young boy. While somber and sobering with grim and severe animation from papier-mâché figures, this film has elements of O Henry.

Next from France is “BUTTERFLY” the best film in the selection, from directors Florence Miailhe and Ron Dyens. This film relates the true story of olympic swimmer Alfred Nakache and his survival during the Nazi regime. Brilliant and eye-popping with dazzling prismatic colors and textures that masterfully echo the Fauvist Paul Gauguin, this film is nothing short of a visual poem. Circuses of joy sway in serpentine smiles only to fragment into iron bars of repression, unleashing the black crow Death’s head of danger that is the Gestapo. Love, Joy, Sex and Death are all represented here in a David Hockney and Red Grooms rainbow of Life.

As a painterly parade and a lyrical color wheel of emotion, the film deserves to be considered a standalone classic.

In contrast, from John Kelly and the green terrain of Ireland, the gloomy and gray “RETIREMENT PLAN” relates the hopes and dreams of a milquetoast Everyman retiree. While it is certain to be universal and relatable, its staccato litany is profoundly melancholy. The cataloging of the man’s ambitions (voiced by Domnall Gleeson) answering emails, reading books, exercising, traveling, being mindful and sleeping more productively becomes curiously uninteresting.

One needs more Gary Larson’s The Far Side and a little less Scott Adams’s Dilbert.

As an added extra, there is ÉIRU from director Giovanna Ferrari. In the mode of Pixar’s “Brave” this film is a solid fable showcasing the very real reality of the superior female in the face of Viking-like machismo. If you can excuse the menacing monster like expressions that look fixed and angry regardless of character type, Eiru is a hero story that blends with nature to bring some predictable harmony upon the testy testosterone-filled tribe.

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The documentary short category is invariably emotional, visceral, punchy, and often unrelenting. All of those qualities are very in force this year to an emphatic degree.
From Hilla Madalia “Children No More: Were and Are Gone” chronicles the Gaza protests of 2025 where residents of The Gaza Strip hold up vivid portraits of Palestinian children killed by the war. Israeli citizens walk by plainly enraged, hurling violent and hateful epithets at the protesters.

As part of resistance, the bearers of the portraits stand in silence. The faces of the children no longer living are enough. Shocking and implosive it is to see such a tableau of anger and horror at young innocence. This and others make for an especially difficult group.

“All the Empty Rooms” by Joshua Seftel, documents CBS Newsman Steve Hartman’s process in recording the childhood bedrooms of victims in school shootings. This is a striking and haunting film in which the spirit of Gracie Muehlberger looms large (as she should) along with the other kids in this painful yet affectionate remembrance. Steve Hartman had been hired to pay tribute to the victims of shootings, but there were horribly so many that he realized that he was growing immune to the shock.

Hartman decided to document victim’s bedrooms so that the children are not forgotten. Like an FBI agent or detective, Hartman is driven to make the most of the slightest traces and does not back down.

Since 1997, school shootings have increased from 17 shootings annually to 132 per year.

A standout in the selection, “Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud” by Brent and Craig Renaud” relates the spirit of Brent Renaud, a relentless and restless photojournalist as he fearlessly travels to get the story: He goes to Honduras to document young teen fear, he goes to Iraq and Afghanistan. Brent describes being completely calm in a warzone, only to be gripped by terror at a Brooklyn cocktail party. Brent had autism in his life which he suggests allows him to capture unique moments of crisis, merging with his cameraman and machine. In 2022, Brent was killed in Ukraine, shot in the head during documentation. Brent with his pointed camera is a shuttering angel, floating thru the tightest of smoldering nooks to reveal the truth. This is sorrowful and hard-hitting as Brent is shown in casket, but it is also a masterpiece.

In what one wishes were fiction but unfortunately is not, “The Devil Is Busy” records a day in the life of a security head in a women’s clinic, Tracii. Self-possessed and resolute, Tracii checks every room and then begins prayer. She worries about being ambushed or killed. Angry Evangelicals protest with vitriol each day. At times she is verbally harassed with palpable hate.

Abortions are done at the clinic.

Tracii fears each day may be her last.

Directed by Geeta Gandbhir and Christalyn Hampton, this film is as tense and anxious as any thriller. Existential dread hangs in the air along with an uncomfortable flight of “what-ifs” as to the future.

Finally breaking the trend of severity is “Perfectly a Strangeness.” The film by Alison McAlpine follows three wandering donkeys as they encounter an astronomical observatory. The donkeys look on with an opaque neutral passivity as the whirring of lenses and satellites buzz on without stopping.

For their part, the donkeys’ ears move and tremble like hirsute antennae. After a slight pause, their own eyes mimicking the observatory sky globes, the donkeys walk on without so much as a comment, majestic and mystical. The spare film makes a welcome surreal respite from this collection.

Sadly this year makes tissues a necessity, but each film is nearly perfect in its searing veracity.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com