Our Animating Motivations

🏆 Dispatches from Awards Season

• We kick this section off with my latest piece for Short of the Week, where I take you on a guided journey through what has caught my eye from the 113 qualified films in the animation category, informed by the buzz I’m hearing from experts and insiders.

• Do check out the accompanying Shortverse collection, which makes it fun and easy to filter and explore the contenders.

• To dive deeper, Cartoon Brew has a series of interviews with qualified filmmakers, which has been a valuable resource for me these past several weeks.

• Similarly, the Animation Showcase and its curated collections have helped me immensely in wrapping my head around this category. Access is for industry-only, but it’s worth a shot if you think you might qualify.

• The Emile Awards, Europe’s animation-specific honor, handed out its prizes. I Died in Irpin won recognition as the top short. The Annie Awards won’t arrive until after the Oscar shortlist, so this will be the last major indicator we’ll have until then.

• Skipping to documentary, The Critic’s Choice Documentary Awards took place earlier this month. A few weeks ago, I talked about Switchboard Magazine, and sure enough, one of their shorts, Saving Superman, took the shorts award. The label’s 4-film award slate is all online, now.

• Curious about Switchboard? Its founder, Celia Aniskovich, was recently interviewed on the prominent Substack, Pure Nonfiction.

• In documentary, The Critic’s Choice Awards are an upstart compred to the IDA Awards and the Cinema Eye Honors. The IDA just announced their nominees, and The Cinema Eye is set to vote to narrow their short list to official nominees at the end of the month.

• Finally, the European Film Awards, which award the “Prix Vimeo” to their top short of the year, announced five nominees earlier this month.

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Attention To

1. Surprise Chalamet Short Drops to Promote Marty Supreme - I just saw Marty Supreme last night, and it made me instantly want to rewatch this subtle, but hilarious spoof of the creative marketing process he and A24 dropped last week. Embedded above, if you’ve avoided it until now, go in fresh.

2. IDFA’s New Artistic Director Opens Festival with Shorts - The biggest documentary fest internationally kicked off last week in Amsterdam. The debut fest for incoming Artistic Director, Isabel Arrate Fernandez, the programmer intriguingly chose to open the event with a program of three short films, citing it as a way of “showcasing the creativity and artistic range of short documentary film.” Love it!

3. Winners of the UKMVAs Unveiled - When I first started curating for Vimeo Staff Picks, I needed to cultivate my taste in music videos despite lacking an applicable background. My boss, Jordan McGarry, was a Londoner who came out of the city’s music video scene, and intro’d me to the UKMVAs as an industry authority in contrast to the flashier MTV VMAs. I’ve made a point to watch the winners every year since, and you should too, starting with Vania Heymann and Gal Muggia’s video for A$AP Rocky’s Tailor Swif, which took home Video of the Year on the heels of winning a rare “black pencil” from D&AD.

4.  S/W Alum Debuts New “Playable” MV - While on talk of music videos, I found this branded one for Candy Crush to be quite fun. From twice-featured filmmaker, FX Goby, the video marries a new track from Thundercat to an interactive experience, allowing you to swipe matching colors in the video as if you were playing Candy Crush, changing how you experience it.

5. The Simpsons x Fortnite Short Film Collab - You know I like tracking how big media brands utilize short films, and with the new Fortnite season hitting Springfield, Disney and Epic mark the occasion with a series of four shorts premiering this month, viewable in-game, on Disney+, and YouTube. Two are out now, including the intro above, Apocalypse D’oh. Like many, I haven’t watched new Simpsons for 20 years, but I’ll give these a shot.

6. GLAS Finalizes Details of its Return - GLAS, the brainchild of former S/W programmer and Oscar-nominated producer, Jeanette Jeanenne, was America’s answer to the prestigious animation festivals of Europe, but with an eye to the younger, online generation as well. After several celebrated editions, the fest ran into trouble during COVID, but is now back,with a fresh edition in Los Angeles this December 6-7. Check out the fest trailer, Stephen Vuillemin’s gorgeous poster + signal film, the selections, and its schedule. Most importantly, pick up a pass!

7. YouTube Announces Autodubbing - The year of YouTube continues, with a series of interesting product announcements. YT on the TV is going to start looking more like Netflix, AI chat is being integrated into your channel, and the brand new player is slowly rolling out (I just got it last week). Most provocatively, though, is Autodubbing, an opt-out feature that will utilize AI to dub your videos into different languages. I don’t mind subtitles, but the data is clear that most viewers do. Would you have YT auto-dub your short film?

8. Hot Mother Gets Major Casting News - Congrats to alum, Lucy Knox, as Deadline reports that Toni Collette and Milly Alcock have jumped aboard her short-to-feature adaptation. We don’t cover pre-pro news that much, and a lot can still happen, but the team looks pretty solid, and is targeting an early 2026 shoot. Read what we thought of the short in 2022.

9. Two Anime Shorts Anthologies to Check Out - Here in the US, the phenomenal box office numbers achieved by the latest Demon Slayer and Chainsaw Man movies have really opened eyes. Capitalizing on the success of anime in America are two new short film anthologies worth checking out. Tatsuki Fujimoto 17-26 is a fascinating concept—diverse artists tackle stories that the popular Chainsaw Man creator drew between the ages of 17 to 26. It’s a novel approach to an anthology, though it strikes me as slightly weird for a contemporary artist!

   The second anthology is something I should have really covered in depth, but the third season of Star Wars: Visions is out on Disney+. After a second season that saw the series play wildly with tone (including an Aardman short!) the series returns to Japan to excellent effect. Included is the celebrated film BLACK, which played in competition at Annecy this year.

10. What to Watch this Weekend - A filmmaker we’ve consistently championed over the years, Charlie Shackleton, has his inventive and controversial meta-documentary, The Zodiac Killer Project, out in limited release this weekend. Read Charlie’s piece in Moviemaker Magazine to learn more about the film, but I saw it earlier this year and adored it. It absolutely shouldn’t work, but it totally does!

📅 This Week on Short of the Week