It's almost time for the 2017 Academy Awards, which means it's time for you and your friends to gather for your Oscars party, make any last-second changes to your Oscars pool, and get ready to celebrate/lament the winners on Hollywood's biggest night. While most of the focus will be on the Big Five--Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay--there are a lot of people with tremendous talent behind the scenes of this and every year's best films.

And yet, while live-action projects certainly get their fair share of the spotlight, most of the attention for animated fare comes in one category: Best Animated Feature Film. That's all well and good, and most deserving, but there's also a category for a medium that encourages experimentation and exploration of more taboo themes, and offers a more flexible range of art styles than feature films can normally afford: animated short films.

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Past Oscar-winners for Animated Shorts include last year’s Bear Story, which was inspired by director Gabriel Osorio Vargas’ grandfather, who was imprisoned and exiled following Chile’s coup d’état. Of course, there's also relatively lighter fare like Disney’s Feast and Paperman, and the odd-yet-endearing Mr Hublot and The Lost Thing. This year's crop, like those in years passed, offers a variety of influences, art styles, technological achievements, and even maturity levels, but there are also some similarities. Borrowed TimePearlPear Cider and Cigarettes, and Blind Vaysha all deal with the theme of Time in their own unique ways, while Pixar's short Piper is happy focusing on a chronological snapshot (while being as cute as possible in the process). Each of these films deserves to be in the Oscar conversation, but in order to ferret out a potential winner from the nominees, we took a closer look at all five contenders.

Blind Vaysha

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Image via National Film Board of Canada

Bulgaria-born animator Theodore Ushev has been in the business of art and design for more than 20 years. Working with the National Film Board of Canada since 2003, his latest short film Blind Vaysha is his first Academy Awards nomination. And, if this short is any indication, the accolades are long overdue.

Based on a story by George GospodinovBlind Vaysha centers on its title character, a young girl born with the curious curse of one eye that only sees the past while the other sees only the future. In other words, Vaysha never sees what is happening in the present and is thus technically blind. Part traditional fairy tale, part modern marvel of animation, Blind Vaysha is also a condemnation of our tendency to dwell on the past or think about the future without living in the present. And like some of the more gnarly fairy tales, this one doesn't exactly have a happy ending.

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Image via National Film Board of Canada

The most striking thing about Blind Vaysha is its distinct animation style, one inspired by a medieval drawing. The tablet-animated short comes to life in a “linocut” style, which is a similar process to woodcut, but uses linoleum as a patterned template instead of wood. Ushev never used the “undo” function in his animation program to fix a mistake, essentially making any of his shaping or "carving out" permanent. An incredible amount of work went into the production of Blind Vaysha, totaling between 12,000 to 13,000 drawings over six months.

It's a bleak but poignant piece of art that asks, “Do we look at the world with the eyes of Vaysha, the Blind?” If the Academy voters find themselves feeling introspective, it might just be rewarded.

Other awards:

Best Animated Short Film – Chicago International Film Festival

Piper

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Image via Pixar

Easily the cutest of the entries, Piper has the most power behind it thanks to Disney and Pixar. It's also the most photorealistic of the animated features and, honestly, the only one with real moments of humor. That latter aspect is not to be discounted since voters might just feel pulled toward the innocence and fun in Piper that the other entries are lacking.

In Piper, writer-director Alan Barillaro's contribution, a young sandpiper needs to learn how to feed itself at its mother's encouragement, but the threatening, relentless ocean waves make this a tough task. But when the little bird learns how to see the world differently thanks to her crab friend, she's soon able to provide for herself, her friends and family in an unexpected way.

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Image via Pixar

If the Academy wants to reward bright, joyous, and stunningly gorgeous story and animation, Piper will win. That's not to downplay Barillaro's experience; he's been with Pixar for nearly 20 years at this point. And, like any of Pixar's projects, there are some shades of meaning behind the colorful palette displayed on screen: Piper overcomes her fear and shyness to find a new, unique approach to something that her fellow feathered friends and family have been doing for generations. These types of trailblazing characters are needed now more than ever, though Piper is still the safest choice of the bunch this year.

Other awards:

Annie Awards - Best Animated Short Subject

Pearl

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Image via Passion Pictures

Making a play for the cute factor is Pearl, an animated short from director Patrick Osborne (Paperman, Feast, Big Hero 6). Osborne brings solid animation experience along with a previous Oscar win for Feast, so this little gem of a short film makes a strong showing based on that alone. However, it's also the first animated short with a virtual reality component to be nominated for an Oscar. The "viewer experience" story came out of Google’s Spotlight Stories project which allows audiences to view the story in 360 degrees.

The story of Pearl is narrated mostly by music and an old tape recording found in the back of a beat-up hatchback by a young woman. All the action takes place in and around the car as a father and his young daughter go on an extended road trip (it's their way of life, really) all while working on their musical skills. Life's lessons, the hard and the heartbreaking, are on display in this short film, which clips right along almost too quickly to really take in everything that's happening. But while Pearl dips a toe into some uncomfortable family drama, everything is hunky-dory in the end.

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This vibrant, hopeful, and relatively true-to-life tale encapsulates quite a bit of storytelling in a very short period of time, and Pearl accomplishes this through both its novel viewer-experience approach and though its ever-present musical element. Where Piper is all unbridled joy and Blind Vaysha is all life lessons and moral stands, Pearl manages to incorporate the best of both worlds in a meaningful way. Plus, it comes pre-loaded with a novel technical achievement and a good stock of awards hardware, something the voters might just take into consideration.

Other awards:

  • Annie Awards: Outstanding Achievement (Directing), Outstanding Achievement (Music), Outstanding Achievement Production Design
  • Accolade Competition – Award of Excellence Special Mention (Animation)
  • ITSA Film Festival – Festival Prize (Outstanding Animation)
  • Traverse City Film Festival – Founders Prize (Best Narrative Short – Special Mention)

Pear Cider and Cigarettes

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Image via Passion Pictures Animation

Roughly five times as long as any of the other animated shorts on this list, Pear Cider and Cigarettes is by far the most mature and adult of the nominees. If the Academy voters are feeling saucy, they might throw some love to writer-director Robert Valley's mind-trip of a film. It's as if Hunter S. Thompson wrote an adaptation of "A Separate Peace" and then animated it in the spirit of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' style, and yet it's all based on a true story.

Narrated by Rob, Pear Cider and Cigarettes tells the story of his friend, Techno Stypes, a hard-living sort who is destined to die young. Viewers follow Rob's travels to and from China with the aim of getting Techno to stop drinking and come home to Vancouver for a liver transplant, a task that's easier said than done. That central conceit is nestled within the thorny, drug-addled miasma of Stypes' life, one that began with such promise but becomes corrupted before long.

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The short acts as a biographical homage to Valley's real-life friend of 25 years; equally, it's an absolute showcase of Valley's talents as an animator; he's known for work on Aeon FluxTRON: Uprising, and the "Gorillaz" music videos, to name but a few. As soon as you see his extreme, angular characters shuffle across the screen, you know that Valley is behind their creation.

The animated adaptation of Valley's own graphic novels (which he used Photoshop to create, just as he did for the finished film itself, which is quite unusual) also comes to life thanks to extensive music rights he purchased through a successful Kickstarter campaign. Tracks from "Pink Floyd", "Black Sabbath", "The Dandy Warhols", "Wilco", "Leftfield" and more factor into the story in a big way. Do I expect Academy voters to connect with this story of a ne'er-do-well with a rebellious streak? Not necessarily. But if they want to buck trends, a vote for Pear Cider and Cigarettes would certainly do the trick.

Other awards:

Annie Awards - Best Animated Special Production

Borrowed Time

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Image via Quorum Films

Our final Oscar nominee is the one that punched me in the gut most viscerally. If Borrowed Time strikes the voters in the same way, this dark, Western-themed short from directors Andrew Coats and Lou Hamou-Lhadj might just walk away a winner. It comes loaded down with previous award wins and five years of development from Pixar's co-op program, which allows their animators to create independent projects using the company's resources. 

The incredibly rich, realistic, and detailed short has no dialogue and uses musical cues quite sparingly. Like almost all of the other nominees, Borrowed Time plays with the concept of time, focusing on the past and the present; this aspect is as essential to the plot as it was in Blind Vaysha. However, the emotional beats and core elements of Borrowed Time hit home arguably better than those found in the other nominees because they come out of left field. You think you know what's going to happen and then BANG, something catches you off guard. That's half the fun (and half the torment) of watching this short for the first time.

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Borrowed Time follows a lawman in the Wild West through two different tracks in time: one as a young man riding shotgun alongside his father, and another in which he's an aging sheriff dealing with the difficulties of his past. Whereas plot points for the other short films mentioned above wouldn't necessarily change your enjoyment of watching them, it's better to go into Borrowed Time cold, so I'll leave it there.

Can Borrowed Time win? Well, if the Academy appreciates the short's beauty, brutality, and bleak storytelling (with a more hopeful ending than you might expect), then this is certainly a strong contender. It's got enough technical achievement and emotional resonance to draw votes while also giving audiences enough of a feel-good conclusion to let them walk away happy. But will that be enough to eke out a win?

Other awards:

  • Best in Show – SIGGRAPH
  • Best Animated Short – St. Louis International Film Festival, Brooklyn Film Festival
  • Best Cinematography – Fastnet Short Film Festival
  • First Place: Animation – USA Film Festival
  • Best Animated Short – Woods Hole Film Festival (Audience Award, Jury Prize), Nashville Film Festival

Do you have a favorite? Be sure to let us know in the comments!