Imdbidia The Dam Keeper is a beautiful hand-made oil-painted animated longish short film that touches on very sad themes: loneliness, bullying and social exclusion. It speaks of the importance of humour and creativity to overcome the harshness of life, and is a reminder that unfunded fears take us to places we should never go as they have not doors for those people who want to get near us to enter.The dam in the film is a not of water, if of dark clouds, pollution and darkness overall. A metaphor for the darkness that we all keep away every day, even though is there, around the corner. It is also about social darkness, because that is what most hurts the piggy, not the polluted air around; you can learn to control that, but to learn to deal with social exclusion and darkness is something that you learn the hard way if ever learned.The film is very charming, very emotional and touching, greatly enhanced by a fantastic music score, and the wonderful non-invasive narration by Lars Mikkelsen. The textures and colors of the film, and its painterly nature help to create a timeless piece of animation.To me, the main fault of the film is that we don't get to know why every single child in the school bullies the piggy and every adult ignores an orphan. It seems unrealistic and something that I want to believe rarely happens, especially if you are the person who keeps the community safe. It seems not to make sense, to me.Overall, a wonderful animated film.

Steve Pulaski The Dam Keeper is the richest, most plot-driven short of this year's animated batch of Oscar shorts. Captured in animation that resembles the illustrations of a storybook you grew up reading as a child, The Dam Keeper concerns a pig who controls the dam of his town. The dam's job is to block out the darkness from casting an ugly, dreary shadow onto the neighborhood, and the pig's now deceased father taught him the ways to fight off the darkness. At school, however, darkness hovers over the pig like a dark cloud, as he's bullied profusely, one day, befriending a fox who loves to sketch and shows him liberation through means of animation.It's as if the writing/directing of Robert Kondo and Daisuke Tsutsumi had past experiences with bullies as children and used animation as a tactic to set their mind free, making The Dam Keeper a short that could potentially bear a very heavy personal meaning. It also shows the way that while the physical darkness can be fought in this particular world that, like in the natural world, feelings of sadness and alienation unfortunately cannot, and through tender, affectionate writing and animation does The Dam Keeper helps us realize that, crafting a beautiful story and a wonderfully easy-on-the-eyes animation style.Directed by: Robert Kondo and Daisuke Tsutsumi.

nick.johnson This short tells the story of a pig who's responsible for "keeping the dam", a critically important job inherited from his father. We're shown that this involves winding a crank tied to a windmill on top of a dam overlooking a small town. This job must be performed at regular intervals or else the town will be consumed by...uh...water?...no, it's a dark cloud of...pollution?...What?!?I was very confused and distracted by why the windmill on top of the dam needed to be wound, then later in the film we do get to see what happens when the dam doesn't get "kept" properly....I thought we were seeing dark water over-topping the dam and flooding the town, but it is later described as "dark clouds". The animation was so rough and impressionistic, it wasn't at all clear what we were expected to be seeing.So...the windmill isn't a windmill but a giant fan, powered by a wound-up spring, which blows the pollution clouds away? Why is it on top of a dam? Since it's on the dam anyway, why isn't it powered by the water pressure that the dam is holding back? Also, if this job, whatever it is, is so important to the health of the whole town, why is it left in the hands of a grade-schooler?The titular part of the story made so little sense that it took away much of my interest in appreciating the other part of the story, about isolation, loneliness, and bullying that this youngster experiences at the hands of his school classmates. When a new kid, a fox, comes to town, a unlikely friendship develops. That story was interesting and touching, but it would have been more effective without any dam keeping.

MartinHafer The Dam Keeper is my choice for the best of the animated shorts and I think the quality difference between this and the rest of the films is pretty obvious. Like The Bigger Picture, this one has the look of a painting--which is quite unusual for an animated film. But the paintings are of a much higher quality and there is an amazing artistry that set this one apart---it just looks great. While the style isn't quite as lush as Petrov's style (but whose is?!), it is gorgeous and the filmmakers, Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi, used over 8000 paintings to make this short film. The story is very sentimental and sweet--and not in way that is cloying or over the top. It left me feeling satisfied and I love the website for the film (https://www.thedamkeeper.com/) and it's nearly as creative as the film itself.UPDATE: This film lost to the Disney short. Perhaps it might sound snarky, but I assume many of the folks who voted for these films probably didn't see them all---and "Feast" was the only one that had widespread release (with "Big Hero 6"). That's the only way I could explain "The Dam Keeper" not winning.