What a shame that “My Year of Dicks,” nominated two years ago, couldn’t have shared company this year with the two animated shorts featuring stop-motion penis. Such is the 2025 slate’s preoccupation with male genitalia that we aren’t entirely sure we haven’t accidentally ingested one of the perception-altering, totally-not-drugs enjoyed by the main character in Nishio Daisuke’s nominated “Magic Candies,” in which a sentient couch begs a young boy to tell his father to stop farting into the cushions. (We’ve all been there.)
Already typically the toughest of the short categories to forecast, this year’s animated shorts contest is even harder than usual because almost none of the benchmarks we typically lean on to help handicap the field are in play this time around. To boot, none of the nominees are backed by Netflix, Pixar, Disney+, or even the one-time quiet heavyweight of this category, the National Film Board of Canada. None of them boast what we’d call an easy layup of a political statement like such recent winners as “Hair Love,” “If Anything Happens I Love You,” or “War Is Over!”
And while it often pays off to be the only English-language candidate in a short film lineup (with bonus points if you have a marquee name attached), the sole qualifying contender in that lane—Nina Gantz’s “Wander to Wonder,” which features Toby Jones in its voiceover cast—is unquestionably the most off-puttingly grotesque entry, even outside of its copious amount of dong. Nicolas Keppens’s “Beautiful Men,” the other peen-showcasing nominee, registers only slightly more normal in that its centralizing of the secondary needs of three unremarkable, middle-aged, paunchy, Barenaked Ladies cover band-looking men is, well, plenty commonplace.
Almost by default, this feels down to the most esoteric nominee of the bunch and the simplest. Shirin Sohani and Hossein Molayemi’s “In the Shadow of the Cypress” operates in parable (hint: the whale is a symbol), but it’s impossible to miss its commitment to articulating the specificity of PSTD’s cyclical effects, both among those afflicted and those duty-bound to help, and the animation is full of surprising little ideas, even if they ultimately run out after a while.
In contrast, Loïc Espuche’s “Yuck!” has but one visual idea: A group of rambunctious youths wrestling with the grossness and allure of romance can literally see when people are about to kiss as their lips begin to shimmer in hot pink. Pitched at both kids and kids-at-heart, and boasting a teasing, if fleeting, pro-gay moment, “Yuck!” is a down-the-middle defense of love in a world that’s arguably careening ever more perilously toward hate.
Will Win: “Yuck!”
Could Win: “In the Shadow of the Cypress”
Should Win: “In the Shadow of the Cypress”
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