Need the Betting Edge in Your Oscars Pool? Stream the Animated Shorts, Which We’ve Just Ranked

This weekend’s Oscars are seen largely as a race between One Battle After Another and Sinners, two terrific movies that are available to stream on HBO Max after lengthy theatrical runs. In fact, all of the Best Picture nominees are pretty accessible to stream; only two of them are currently outside of a subscription service that you may already have! But what about those deeper-cut categories, like Best Animated Short? Sometimes those include a popular short that’s played in front of a Disney or Pixar movie earlier in the year, but this year’s crop is a little less mainstream — though still worth seeking out! Fortunately, you don’t have to go far to find most of them; four of the five shorts are currently streaming for free on YouTube. (They’re also playing in theaters together as a package, with an additional short to round them out. As is often the case with the in-theater package, the extra material is better than several of the nominees.)

But if you don’t have an hour to spare or just want a preview of which shorts are better than others, or want some insight on what might actually win the Oscar this weekend without a widely-seen heavy-hitter, well, there’s always a hierarchy, and we’ve got you covered there. Here are the five shorts, ranked from weakest to strongest, and an accompanying rundown of their chances.

1. The Three Sisters

   Oddly, perhaps the least impressive of this year’s nominees is the only one that’s not available to stream on YouTube ahead of the ceremony. The Three Sisters has a nice picture-book-for-adults quality to its minimalist animation and fable-like story about three sisters living in three adjoining houses on a remote island, competing over the affections of their new boarder. But the form and content match almost too well: The visual jokes of this dialogue-free film aren’t hilarious enough and the animation isn’t eye-popping enough to make it feel especially rewarding.

2. Forevergreen

   Picture-book-core seems to be a theme among this year’s animated shorts. Forevergreen boasts a neat aesthetic, with characters and environments designed to look like wood-cut, stop-motion-style creations. The story, however, is pretty treacly imitation-Disney stuff, with a tree watching over a growing bear cub, with the parent figure eventually prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice. Hey, what if Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy was all noble suffering and not really funny? And, for that matter, what if an animated short didn’t actually use stop-motion, but wanted the handmade look of it while mostly using computers? Forevergreen gets some points as the most overtly kid-friendly of this batch, but both its storytelling and technical execution are pretty shameless. Voters might warm to it for precisely that reason, but there are other, more inventive options to distract them.

3. The Girl Who Cried Pearls

   Now here’s an actual stop-motion piece, and one that’s loyal enough to the concept of constructing physical puppets and sets that it sometimes foregrounds their static facial expressions, blurring the line between stop-motion and just plain puppetry. That’s far more refreshing than the more common confusion between what’s actually stop-motion and what’s computer-animated to look that way. The style fits with the ornately strange not-quite-fairy-tale of The Girl Who Cried Pearls, which admittedly offers a fairly long and winding (to the tune of 17 minutes) story given where it ultimately ends up. But the tactile details of the film makes up for how insubstantial it might ultimately feel. It’s probably too self-consciously old-fashioned to win, but it stands out in a computer-dominated field.

5. Butterfly

   I think we have our winner. From an animation perspective, Butterfly is the most purely beautiful of these five shorts, taking lofty inspiration from the movement and color of classic paintings to tell the story of Alfred Nakache, a French-Algerian athlete who swam in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin before he and his family were sent to Auschwitz during World War II. He later became one of just three Jewish athletes to compete again in the Olympics after surviving the Holocaust. Despite that distinction and an impressionistic approach to Nakache’s story, this is easily the most heart-wrenching of this year’s batch. That’s not always a recipe for success, but the gorgeousness of the animation combined with the seriousness of the subject makes it seem tough to beat. Understandably, too; it’s eye-filling on multiple levels.

6. Retirement Plan

   In terms of pure technique, this short may be the least accomplished of the five. The animation style isn’t wildly different from the art you might see on a set of airline safety instructions. But that antiseptic graphic simplicity is the perfect delivery system for the funniest nominated short, where Domhnall Gleeson narrates a hopeful and lengthy (and, as such, hilariously over-optimistic) list of things to accomplish during retirement, which quickly turns into a lifetime’s worth of aspirations, regrets, and deferred dreams. But, again: funny! Now, it can be reductive to simply call the funniest animated short the best of the bunch, because there’s long been an American bias towards the idea that animation should, first and foremost, make you laugh like classic Looney Tunes. But the specific way that this short uses its impersonal-looking visual design and highly specific narration to form a relatable core of amused frustration is more akin to an expanded New Yorker cartoon (no wonder that the magazine’s YouTube channel is hosting it). And a good one, too, not the kind that vexed Elaine on Seinfeld. Retirement Plan probably isn’t thematically hefty enough to win, but it’s a sneaky charmer.