Photo: Searchlight Pictures
Every year ahead of the Oscars, all of the animated and live action shorts get bundled together and screened in theaters so people have a chance to check them out. I always go see the animated ones, and they’re always a lovely, strange, beautiful, and very mixed bag.
This year’s had some obvious standouts: Hair Love, which won, really deserves to be a feature; and Kitbull, by Pixar, was heartbreaking and had the best animated cat I’ve ever seen. The other three had some lovely animation — Daughter was my least favorite of the package, and even that one I admired for the way it brought a natural, shaky camera movement to stop-motion animation, which is something I’ve never seen before.
The company that packs all the shorts together always…