The Academy Award Nominated Animated Shorts (and the live-action shorts) are getting a limited theatrical run, if you didn't know, and I caught the cartoons the other night, in my usual preference of dreamscapes over reality. The audience for this stuff is pretty small, I guess, and this isn't a category that gets much attention, but then again, if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you might like.

There are five nominated shorts, ranging from cute to soul-shatteringly profound. Nothing from Pixar this year (Lifted, the short that ran with Ratatouille, was submitted to last year's awards).

The strongest contender? 'Madame Tutli-Putli'. Stunning. Amazing. This seventeen minute stop-motion short is five years in the making, and boy howdy does it show. I think you sort of have to have attempted animation to really understand how impossible it is, to appreciate the fact that there are 25,000 or so individual frames, each with carefully planned minutiae and beautiful art direction throughout. (I totally counted how many frames there were while I was watching). I won't get into the details of the story, and there's not a whole lot of story in a linear narrative sense, but Madame Tutli-Putli goes on a trippy train ride, it doesn't go so well, and we all are very moved. It's like, metaphysical.

The next strongest would be either 'Peter and the Wolf', or maybe 'Moya Lyubov' (My Love). Peter and the Wolf is another stop-motion short. It's also a stunner, but it's more narratively traditional and cute, while maintaining a sense of aesthetic purposiveness by omitting dialogue and utilizing Prokofiev's composition.

'Moya Lyubov' is an oil-paint-on-glass animation inspired by the Turgenev novella 'First Love'. Touching and romantically executed, it's a story of a teenage boy in love. This particular animation technique is great for the loose and lush imagery of a boy's daydreams. The filmmaker's devotion to his work just oozes. Oozes in the paint. On glass.

'I Met the Walrus', and 'Même les Pigeons vont au Paradis' (Even Pigeons Go To Heaven) are nice, but I don't think they're in the same league as the others. You'll forget them quickly.

Read about them in the NYT.