Tochter

This was in a block that my film was in at the New Jersey International Film Festival. I had just been talking about having been in blocks with other animated films that were technically much better than mine, but had nothing deep to say. This blew me away for being a real exception to that. At times the shots looked like handheld live action (which was freaking me out for a stop motion film) and the emotional resonance was there and hit all the right notes. What a beautiful portrait of the father-daughter relationship and the echo of loss. What lovely, lovely work, and I'm so happy to have seen it projected!

The relationship between a man and his daughter begins to fray in this silent animated short subject.

This one deserves a nomination for best animated short subject, because of the way it uses its animation techniques to tell the story. This looks like stop-motion of mishappen ceramic figures which have been sloppily, or perhaps impressionistically painted, which gives each of the two characters a distorted appearance to match the other's perception. As I write that, it seems pretty high-brow to someone like me, for whom stop-motion is about animating skeletons or raisins. Yet it works.

All the little hurts and slights of life build throughout our relationships. Beautifully animated with what I assume is paper mache. Silence is the real killer here.

The weakest entry in this year's Oscar race. The style of animation and lack of dialogue had me irritated and confused.

A beautiful story of love and loss transpiring as it must have in the mind of a mourner, for it connected to me on a personal level without expressing a single word. I was skeptical at first, but this film quickly enveloped me in a feeling and a perspective that affected me deeply. I will be keeping an eye on this Daria Kascheeva.