Maestro

A simple and direct to the point animation by the same team that previously brought the celebrated short "Garden Party", which was nominated to an Academy award.

Its most impressive aspect was the incredible photorealistic CGI.

As a youtube commenter said, this looks like a teaser trailer for a very cool film, but I wonder if this premise could work as a feature length movie without resulting into something gimmicky, akin to the awful movie "Happy Feet" (Which had very impressive visuals for its time, but it had a dreadful, cliched and frankly dumb story)

Sometimes its better to keep things short, but sweet, like this short does.

A squirrel as conductor. A not usual opera concerto. The night. And seductive - eccentic job. Short - a changeling short movie , about art and nature and imagination and, sure, not the last, good use of humor.

Remember a couple of years when Florian Bibikian and company produced GARDEN PARTY? That was nominated for a Best Animated Short Oscar, causing me to speculate that this Oscar was becoming a purely technical award, since the point of the short was to show how realistic the frogs were in the movie, and seemingly nothing else.

It didn't win, and this one wasn't even nominated, despite its charming and funny nature. A squirrel gathers wild animals - including frogs, of course - and conducts them in a brief piece of orchestral music. Yes, this sort of thing has been done many times in animation, including the Mickey Mouse short THE BAND CONCERT, but surely using the techniques to do something should be worth a nomination.

These days, animation technology is advancing like a rocket. Maestro is an animated short film from 2019, and I'm watching it in 2025-an era when AI has taken off and anyone can generate stunning animated clips just by typing a prompt. And yet, Maestro's visual quality still holds up beautifully.

Especially at the beginning, the squirrel looks almost hyper-realistic-so lifelike that it could easily be mistaken for a real animal. That said, I don't think this short has much of a narrative purpose beyond showcasing just how impressive the animation is. It's essentially a choir of animals singing opera, and that's about it.

Still, maybe I'll revisit it in another five or six years to see if the visuals continue to hold up against the standards of the future.