Horst in Translation ([email protected]) "Pearl" is a 20016 animated short film that runs for six minutes only. The director is Patrick Osborne, already an Oscar winner for "Feast" and he scored another nomination with his most recent work here. I am not really impressed though. I think the music was decent, maybe also because it very much reminded me of Keane's "Somewhere Only We Know". The first half had a nicely atmospheric touch on it and it felt like a decent father-daughter tale and you wanted to be with them. Or not, do you would not destroy their intimate connection. But when the film in the second half turns into basically the daughter and her friends and how they climb the charts, then it was ultimately very forgettable. The inclusions of the dad in the second half felt pretty forced and same can be said about the coming-of-age story there and the arguments. This also made it pretty difficult to look past the really mediocre animation and it baffles me this won several Annie Awards. It is one of the two weaker Oscar nominees from that year, maybe even the weakest and it was not deserving of any of the awards recognition it received. Quite a shame. I hope Osborne steps things up again with his next work.

Michael_Elliott Pearl (2016) **** (out of 4) Extremely touching animated short about a father and his young daughter who travel around in their hatchback making memories. This six-minute short shows off various portions of their lives inside this car.PEARL was one of five films that were nominated for Best Animated Short and it's an extremely impressive one to say the least. The film is basically told through visuals and a song that gets played throughout all of it. I must say that the animation itself was quite great but that's to be expected from just about any animated piece these days. Where this film really took off was on the sheer pleasure of watching the dad and daughter grow older, go through various things and all of it set around this car. I found the film to be incredibly entertaining throughout its six-minute running time and it was also very touching and thoughtful.

MartinHafer 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.

boblipton 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.