Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

Yesterday, the Producer’s Guild of America named these films as the nominees for their Producer’s Guild Award as Best Produced Animated Feature:
CARS, FLUSHED AWAY, HAPPY FEET, ICE AGE: THE MELTDOWN, MONSTER HOUSE.

Nominees for Best Produced Films include:
BABEL, THE DEPARTED, DREAMGIRLS, LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, THE QUEEN.

There’s a good chance that these will be the Oscar nominees for Best Animated Feature and Best Film of the year, respectively.

Today, in New York, we have the short list screening of Live Action shorts to select the nominees for this category. This is one of my favorite events of the year. Generally, I find a lot of the Live Action shorts more creative than the animated shorts, and this screening always gets me excited.

There is no screening in New York of the shortlisted animated shorts. We saw all the original qualified entries and helped pick the list of those on the current list. To allow us to do that, the Academy made a deal, so that they wouldn’t send the films a second time to NY, wherein only those at the original screening are eligible to vote for the nominees.

It’s not ideal, and I wish they would spend the money to give us a second look. But such is the way it is.

As reported on Cartoon Brew, the shortlisted animated short films are:

The Danish Poet by Torill Kove (NFB)
Everything Will Be OK by Don Hertzfeldt
Family Ties: Dreams & Desires by Joanna Quinn
Guide Dog by Bill Plympton
Lifted by Gary Rydstrom (Pixar)
Little Match Girl by Roger Allers (Disney)
Maestro directed by Géza M Toth
No Time for Nuts directed by Chris Renaud & Mike Thurmeier (Blue Sky)
Tragic Story with Happy Ending by Regina Pessoa
One Rat Short by Alex Weil

Congrats to Bill Plympton, Chris Renaud & Mike Thurmeier the New Yorkers on the list.

For those of you who live in New York and want to know about a trio of great live action shorts look to the Film Forum up till Tuesday, January 9th.

Ellen Bruno is an Independent filmmaker living in San Francisco who makes extraordinarily powerful and difficult films.

The subjects are difficult but the films have a poetry and a wisdom beyond the screen. SACRIFICE examines the selling of Burmese girls (some as young as 12) into prostitution in Thailand; LEPER travels to Nepal to meet a society of lepers in a remote village; SKY BURIAL records a Tibetan monastery ritual in which corpses are consumed by huge vultures, allowing spirits of the deceased merge with the sky.

There’s an on-line interview with Ellen here.

I met Ellen years ago at the Heartland Film Festival where SACRIFICE was being presented, and I spent the rest of the festival’s week with her after seeing how great a film she’d made. One always hopes a bit of the brilliance will rub off.

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