Pearl

The Academy Award-nominated "Pearl" features a father and daughter chasing their dreams. It's not a masterpiece, but enjoyable nonetheless. I like seeing these animated shorts and hope that more of them become available in the near future.

This short film played for me like a long television commercial for some car. The entire film was set within this one car and in it you see a man and his daughter age over two decades. It's extremely sentimental and clearly is the type thing that is meant to tug at your heart. But there is a certain familiarity about sort of theme and the animation quality was severely lacking. The filmmakers chose to use cel shading (a popular style a decade or more ago in many video games) but it's not even good cel shading. The overall effort looks like a nice student film and again I was left wondering how the short was nominated for such an important award. There's absolutely nothing to dislike about the film but nothing to inspire or transcendent about it either.

Of all the nominees this year, most are a rather sad lot. I predict "Piper" will take home the Oscar and if it doesn't, I will try to update my review.

A series of scenes in a car and a pop song make up this film. I did enjoy the faces of the girls. But, for me, it never went anywhere. I agree that it needed editing to make a point clear.

I just saw PEARL in the Oscar-Nominated Animated Short show and I thought this story of a girl who goes through teen-aged rebellion against her loving dad was a pleasantly put together short cartoon set to a song. The insistence of setting every shot around a hatchback car may strike the viewer as a bit odd, as if the late Abbas Kiarostami had taken up cartooning. That, however, is why it will likely win the Academy Award.

Although I saw it in flat-screen, and thought it good, the Academy voters won't see it that way. Instead, they will have seen it wearing headsets that make it an immersive 3-D experience from the front right seat of that hatchback and found it possibly the first such movie to use the techniques effectively. That may well win it the Oscar, and if so, it will deserve it....but it will remain a mystery to those who didn't see it that way.

Maybe if I see this in it's original format, I would get it. Like this it was strange, pointless and nothing special at all.