Movie reviews: ‘The Oscar-Nominated Short Films 2011’

Shorts programs are by their nature mixed bags of ambition, art and quality. One that packages the 10 live-action and animated nominees for the Oscar, however, carries a greater sense of anticipation.

That said, modest charms are what distinguish this year’s academy-tapped batch. The animated five in particular help dispel our often fatigued prejudices about that format as a haven for all things digital, 3-D, snarky and kid-marketed.

Bastien Dubois’ style mash-up “Madagascar, Carnet de Voyage,” in particular, is a vibrantly impressionistic travelogue of the French filmmaker’s trip to the African island nation, rendered as a scrapbook come alive. “The Lost Thing,” meanwhile, from Andrew Ruhemann and Shaun Tan, takes the story of a boy’s affinity for a misshapen creature he finds on a beach but includes an adult’s ruminative perspective.

Animation giant Pixar is in the mix with Teddy Newton’s frisky, yin-yang celebration of friendship, “Day & Night,” while Geefwee Boedoe’s hand-drawn educational film spoof “Let’s Pollute” takes aim — if a little too easily — at our wasteful environmental ways.

Too draggy, however, is Jakob Schuh’s and Max Lang’s painstaking adaptation of the beloved children’s book “The Gruffalo,” about the crafty survival instincts of a mouse in the woods. Though visually lovely and spotted with big-name voices — Helena Bonham Carter, John Hurt, Robbie Coltrane — its bedtime-reading pace seems ill-suited for the dynamic potential of film.

The live-action shorts, like last year, seem heavily weighted toward the plight of youngsters. Tanel Toom’s “The Confession” brings the specter of tragic guilt to a 9-year-old British lad awaiting his first priestly unburdening, but the film is so obvious and grim its impact is blunted. Even more one-note (and creepy) is “The Crush,” from Ireland, Michael Creagh’s ill-timed bad joke about an obsessed boy, the teacher he wants to marry, her fiancé and a gun.

Faring better is Ivan Goldschmidt’s tense and darkly comic “Na Wewe,” set amid genocidal terror in Burundi in 1994 and which dramatizes a rebel African militia’s absurd difficulty in sorting out ethnic Tutsis from a halted vanload of passengers.

On a lighter note, writer-director-star Luke Matheny’s roughly winning “God of Love” uses Woody Allen-esque comedy to tell a modern-day Cupid story of jazz, darts, unrequited love and destiny.

The standout, however, is Ian Barnes’ “Wish 143,” a sterlingly acted piece of wry melancholia about the scheming surrounding a cancer-ridden teenage boy’s libidinous response to a charity’s wish-granting gesture. Unexpectedly funny and effortlessly touching, it’s a story of rapidly diminished time conveyed with fittingly economic artistry, the hallmark of any truly memorable short film.

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No MPAA rating

Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes (live action); 1 hour, 25 minutes (animated)

Playing: At the Nuart, West Los Angeles; Regency Theaters South Coast Village Plaza, Santa Ana