In this Movie List from The Film Magazine, we are looking at these movies in particular. The films that have spoken to us as a culture, have lasted long in our public consciousness, have been present for many a warm Christmas memory. These films are all under one hour in length – you can find our feature length selection in our 50 Unmissable Christmas Films list – and must be exclusively festive in nature. These are the most important, the most memorable, the most beloved, the 10 Best Christmas Short Films.

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10. Frosty the Snowman (1969)

Rankin/Bass are one of the most famous animated short producers in film history, their contributions to seasonal fare living long in the public consciousness of those in the United States and beyond since their releases more than fifty years ago. The animation of this production house was so beloved that Jon Favreau famously fought for it to be paid tribute to in his 2003 Christmas film Elf (a unique aspect of this contemporary live-action film that separates it from many of its competitors). Rankin/Bass’s legacy is one that continues to find fondness generation after generation.

Frosty the Snowman was the final animated short made for (and released on) television that Rankin/Bass released in their most popular decade, the 1960s, and the first of a few Rankin/Bass films to make this list.

Based on the song of the same name by Walter E. Rollins and Steve Nelson, this 1969 version of the seasonal tale is harmless and fun, animated with all the soft lines and wholesome glow of the best Rankin/Bass films. It tells of a snowman and a small girl being pursued by a magician for the snowman’s magic hat, and aside from a few slightly scary scenes offers all the warmth and heart of the season.

Recommended for you: 5 Reasons ‘Elf’ Is a Gen Z Christmas Classic

9. Olive, the Other Reindeer (1999)

This uniquely animated Christmas musical released by Fox Television and Flower Films just before the turn of the century is as star-studded as it is lovely.

Based on the 1997 children’s book of the same name by Vivian Walsh and J. Otto Seibold, which in turn was based on the misunderstanding of the lyric “all of the other reindeer” as “Olive, the other reindeer” in the Christmas song “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, Olive, the Other Reindeer follows Drew Barrymore’s titular Jack Russell Terrier who travels to the north pole to help pull Santa’s sleigh when it is discovered that Blitzen is injured and unable to fly.

Nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program, the seasonal short is stylish and beautifully brought to life by the voice actors, with the type of story that will bring plenty of smiles to faces, especially at Christmas. There’s even a song by Blitzen’s cousin Schnitzel, voiced by R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe. What more could you need?

Steamboat Willie (1928)
Directors: Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney
Screenwriters: Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks
Starring: Walt Disney, Charlotte Jamquie

It all started with a rabbit. That’s right, around a year before Mickey, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit who, despite starring in dozens of shorts, was unceremoniously ditched in favour of another anthropomorphic animal character Disney could retain control of because of a series of fascinating legal wrangles and rights issues with Universal. Almost a full century on, how does Disney’s game-changing breakthrough cartoon short that introduced Mickey to his public hold up?

Mickey Mouse works on a steamboat under the gruff Captain Pete. On his way down the river transporting livestock, he picks up his girlfriend Minnie Mouse and puts on an unusual impromptu musical performance involving all of the farm animals on the boat.

Steamboat Willie is proclaimed proudly in the opening credits as a “A Mickey Mouse sound cartoon”, setting out Disney’s character branding and chief selling point from the off. Technically this isn’t Mickey’s first appearance, as Plane Crazy was made and previewed first, but Steamboat Willie was the first Disney cartoon to see a wide release and essentially helped put Disney (appropriately sometimes today known as the “House of Mouse”) on the map.

About the only major studio to keep the tradition of a short film preceding the main feature alive during cinema exhibition is Pixar, which has of course become a subsidiary of Disney. As a reference to its past, for the longest time an image of Mickey whistling from this short was the production logo for Disney Animation Studios, but when cinema hit mass popularity with the invention of synchronised sound in the late 1920s, it was standard practice for every studio to produce short subjects and B-movies in support of their main events.

Clearly revolutionary for its time, capitalising on the incoming synchronised sound revolution caused by the release of The Jazz Singer, Steamboat Willie introduces increasingly elaborate musicality during its 8-minute runtime. This really emphasises Disney’s talent as a businessman, his ability to spot the next big thing to capitalise on, as well as his need to step back from animation, giving way to cartoonists like Iwerks for the good of the company. 

No matter how cartoony and unrealistic this short is, to the modern eye it’s difficult not to notice how much (admittedly creative) animal cruelty is employed by Mickey just to make music. He turns the tail of a goat who has swallowed sheet music to use it as a gramophone, he strikes at a cow’s teeth to improvise a xylophone, and he pulls on suckling piglets’ tails to make them squeal to add another musical layer. You can’t help but think of the classic Monty Python sketch where Terry Jones is hitting a row of mice with a hammer to produce a musical scale and is forcibly dragged off midway through by his shocked onlookers. 

We should probably reference the links to minstrel shows here. Taking a minstrel musical standard (“Turkey in the Straw”, which had a much more offensive original title that won’t be repeated here) and using hallmarks of the morally dubious entertainment style in Mickey’s appearance, from his white gloves to his exaggerated body language, can’t be ignored given early cinema’s links to vaudeville and sideshow attractions, but nor is this a call to “cancel” Mickey. 

You have to acknowledge that Steamboat Willie is 95 years old, and looks it. Ub Iwerks was the master of the stretch-squash cartoon with a slightly surreal, mischievous edge, but the burgeoning Disney Studio had a way to go before their moving drawings transitioned from curiosities to magic. Sometimes the animation looks cheap and rushed, and is mostly held together by sheer exuberance and the clever matching of cartoony ideas to the building musical accompaniment.

Steamboat Willie is a fascinating artefact of film history and remains a pretty enjoyable way of spending just under ten minutes of your time. It’s certainly not polished and overall quality-wise it’s solidly in the middle of the Mickey Mouse canon, but a first step is always an important one, and the ideas tried out here cleared the way for many years of escapist amusement for audiences of all ages.

Score: 18/24

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Alas, The Last Movie was almost a prophetic title. Instead of a straight forward narrative that bopped along on a striking soundtrack of rock and roll standards like Easy Rider had two years prior, The Last Movie was a disjointed, non-linear, visual and audio assault. The film was a condemnation of the exploitative nature and practices of Hollywood moviemaking and U.S imperialism, interference, and colonialism. Immensely disliked by the executives and financial backers at Universal Studios who had handed Hopper a one million dollar budget and complete creative control, the film was only given a two week opening stint in a select number of theaters and drive-ins. Although it was awarded the prestigious Critics Prize at the 32nd Venice International Film Festival, The Last Movie was buried and Hopper’s directorial career was considered over. Hopper retreated to his New Mexico compound, drank a great deal, took a lot of drugs, and entered into a sulk that would last for the next fifteen years.

As he was ostracized from mainstream film, Hopper spent the 1970s working as an actor in a wide-range of American independents and foreign films. The best of these could be considered Mad Dog Morgan (1976), Tracks (1977), and The American Friend (1977). The worst might be eurotrash obscurities such as Last In, First Out (1978), and The Sky Is Falling (1979).

However, The Last Movie would not turn out to be Hopper’s last directorial film. In a stroke of good luck, good timing, and an inexperienced director who bailed on the project, Hopper took control of the Canadian film Out of the Blue (1980). What was originally intended as a family-friendly television movie, Hopper repositioned as an urgent-two fingered salute from the punk rock generation to the hippies. The film didn’t have a wide release and due to its subject matter of familial destruction, substance abuse, and incest, was handed the same fate as The Last Movie; buried and left to be forgotten.

Thankfully, both these films, from the lost period of Hopper’s exile, have faced renewed interest over the past few years with restorations, reissues on DVD and Blu-ray, screenings at international film festivals, and extensive documentaries and articles re-examining Hopper’s iconoclast films.

From 1986 onwards, a clean, sober, and healthy Hopper reaffirmed his position within mainstream Hollywood and independent films alike. Three successive performances in Blue Velvet, River’s Edge, and Hooisers (all released in ‘86) introduced him to a new generation of film audiences (the hippies’ kids) and reminded those that were present during the 1960s what an extensive force of nature Hopper was. He was welcomed back with open arms.

It was inevitable that Hopper’s re-entry into Hollywood would offer him opportunities to direct films again. They came thick and fast, starting with Colors (1988) and proceeding in fairly quick succession with Catchfire (1990), The Hot Spot (1990), and his final feature film Chasers (1994). This quartet of films demonstrated Hopper’s quality, finesse, and expertise as a steady film director. They might lack the fire, passion, iconoclast tendency, political commentary, and capturing of the zeitgeist seen in the trifecta of Easy Rider, The Last Movie, and Out of the Blue, but, as demonstrated by Colors, Hopper knew how to sell the film to a younger, hipper, and more in-tune audience with the inclusion of a solid soundtrack of hip-hop standards. Colors should perhaps be regarded as a bridge between the works of independence seen in Easy Rider, The Last Movie, and Out of the Blue and the works as a Hollywood director for hire on Catchfire, The Hot Spot and Chasers.

The bawdy sex-comedy Chasers unfairly ended Hopper’s tenure as a feature film director. The film is technically Hopper’s very last movie. Yet it wouldn’t be the final time Hopper took up residence behind the camera. There are two directorial credits that follow Chasers. The digitally shot short film Homeless (2000) and the Gwyneth Paltrow-starring advertisement Pashmy Dream (2008). While both these short films don’t offer the bravado of previous works, they are worth investigating as a way to understand where Hopper might have gone if allowed to continue on his directorial path.

In Homeless, a young unhoused woman spends her days pushing a shopping cart of belongings around a seaside California town. In flashback we see that the woman was once an exotic dancer. Hopper doesn’t layer the film in any romanticism, and instead uses grainy and flat digital film to produce an up-close and voyeuristic documentary of this unnamed woman’s life. She glides through the city unacknowledged by passers-by. In the flashbacks of her days as a dancer, we see her dance semi-naked to music. Her face is made up and her blonde hair is gleaming and clean. In the present day, she looks more or less the same, but her body is hidden under tatty and baggy clothing. Her face is covered in grime and her hair is tattered and dirty. She is the same person, but she is invisible in her current guise. Her time as a dancer would have no doubt drawn a crowd who would have considered her attractive, but wouldn’t look at her now.

Homeless was produced as part of an online film festival that was to have been hosted and judged by Hopper and Quentin Tarantino sometime in 2000. The film was intended as an example of the type of entries they were looking for. With the cancellation of the festival, the film has instead entered (alongside his abstract paintings, sculptures, and photography) the lexicon of Hopper’s artistic works and was shown on a loop as part of his many worldwide exhibitions.

Homeless had been an idea of Hopper’s for a while. He had told American Film magazine way back 1988 that he was keen to direct a “a little, De Sica-like film about the homeless in Los Angeles.” Hopper’s referral to Italian director Vittorio De Sica hinted at an interest in telling stories from the perspective of the poor and the working class of American society. De Sica had taken this perspective in many of his films, most notably in his Oscar-winning Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1968).

Interest in the marginalized certainly extends to Hopper’s first four directorial films. He profiled the counterculture, the hippies and other societal outcasts in Easy Rider. Through the lens of Hollywood movies, he shone a light on the exploitation of indigenous populations in The Last Movie. In Out of the Blue he sought to explore the hardships of a working class family ripped apart by drugs, alcohol, and abuse in a small community torn apart by tragedy. And, while coming from the perspective of LAPD police officers, he gave exposure to the trend of gang membership, and the emergence of hip-hop music in Colors. These first four films show Hopper to be a canny social critic. Homeless comes from that same stance, but due to some obvious constraints the film isn’t given the space it needs to work as a serious commentary on homelessness and the policies that impact unhoused people. It is a nine minute film, with very little funding, and a lack of narrative. There is a notable lack of music or score which was something of a celebrated trait of Hopper’s previous films. His devotion to the use of popular music in Easy Rider, Out of the Blue, and Colors was intended as a signpost to the eras in which they were made, but also flagged to the audience the politics of the times.

While Hopper’s first four films are interested in the protagonist’s relationship to society and the wider culture, his last three films are more interested in relationships that occur between men and women. The social commentary is dropped from Catchfire, The Hot Spot, and Chasers in favor of sexual politics, streamy affairs, and rotten betrayals. While these films certainly have merit, they are not as fondly remembered, nor have they faced the same critical reassessment as Hopper’s first four films. They are certainly flashier, more expensive, and have a cast of familiar faces in lead and supporting roles. Hopper’s two last movies also exhibit this divide. Homeless comes from the avant-garde, cinéma vérité leanings, and improvisational, on-the-fly nature of Hopper’s earlier works. His final directorial piece Pashmy Dream shares far more with the lavish productions of his last three feature length films.

Hopper’s Pashmy Dream is a modern retelling of the story of Cinderella. In this case the glass slipper that is returned by a charming prince is a Tod’s pashmy bag. Cinderella is Gwyneth Paltrow playing a version of herself, and the prince is a handsome Italian journalist.

Paltrow wanders through an Italian market place and meets with the journalist for an interview about an undisclosed film that has just finished production. She is in Italy for an extravagant wrap party. As the interview begins, the table is suddenly swarmed by paparazzi. Overwhelmed, Paltrow flees the scene. The journalist sees that Paltrow has left behind her plush Tod’s pashmy bag and pursues her across the city with repeated cries of “Gwyneth, your bag!”

Unlike Homeless, which focuses on just one subject with very limited interaction with the surroundings, Pashmy Dream contains multiple performers, elaborate sets, and even music. While the focus is on Paltrow and the journalist, they both move through a vastly populated city and have numerous interactions. Eventually the journalist tracks Paltrow down to a lavish party attended by a multitude of well-groomed guests and circus performers. The journalist reunites Paltrow with her beloved bag and the two share a dance. A nice touch of consistency.

Hopper once stated that “All my films end in fire,” and indeed most of them do. Easy Rider’s last shot is a burning motorcycle, the last shot in Out of the Blue shows the cab of a rig in flames, The Last Movie shows the protagonist, Kansas, repeatedly getting shot and “going down in flames.” Surprisingly, Pashmy Dream ends with a fire breather from the wrap party blowing a flame across the screen. Hopper’s literal last movie ends in flames.

Homeless and Pashmy Dream may only exist as curiosities or footnotes in Hopper’s career as a film director, but they can be considered essential to Hopper’s creative output. They could also be considered as missed opportunities. A longer running time and an assortment of characters and challenges overcome by them could have made Homeless an intriguing document of the unhoused and ignored population of the cities we inhabit. A longer film could have been a damning indictment of the political unwillingness to engage with a societal issue that has only got more apparent and more rampant over the past decades.
Pashmy Dream on the other hand wraps up its premise satisfactorily within the time it’s given. There really isn’t much more meat on the bone to pull off. It borders on smugness which would possibly spill further into cringeworthy and irksome fluff if it went on any longer. Hopper’s aesthetic as a film director would not have gelled with a Hallmark-style romantic movie, which is the film’s only apparent outcome. The tired premise of a handsome man reacquainting a lost item to a beautiful woman has been repeated endlessly for centuries and doesn’t hold much intrigue. The film is, afterall, a prolonged advertisement for an expensive bag. Nonetheless, it’s an extravagant production that at least shows Hopper was able to juggle the numerous challenges that a big budget film would have brought.

What has always been intriguing about Dennis Hopper is the vast expanse of media his life covered. He was a prolific actor, a dedicated artist and photographer, a patron of the arts and an avid collector of artists ranging from Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Julian Schnabel. He appeared in big-budget Hollywood movies and self-funded indie films. He was also a recognisable celebrity with notorious stories of drug-related exploits that fueled the tabloids for decades. He even hosted ‘Saturday Night Live’. But his work as a director is sparse. Seven films spread over a four decade period is limited no matter how impactful one or two of them was to a generation of film audiences. There should have been more entries in Hopper’s arsenal of directorial films, and Hopper himself believed this and expressed regret that the opportunities fell through.

Dennis Hopper’s feature directorial work is just a facet in our understanding of what made him such a unique talent within almost all the creative fields he explored. Be it a cameo role in a Hollywood movie, a supporting role in an indie film, a series of abstract paintings, a collection of polaroids of gang graffiti, a TV spot selling life insurance or a sensible car, or a television advert for a posh bag starring a Hollywood actress. He surfed high art and low culture effortlessly. It is worth investigating even his smallest contribution to popular culture or art to further that understanding.

Written by Stephen Lee Naish

Stephen Lee Naish (he/him) is a writer and visual artist. His work explores film, politics, and popular culture. He often examines political undercurrents present in films and their potential for social commentary and critique. He explores a wide range of topics, including the impacts of COVID on theaters, the class war of the 1% upon the rest, and the climate crisis. He has written essays for various journals and periodicals, including Candid Magazine, The Quietus, Albumism, Aquarium Drunkard, Film International, and Dirty Movies. He is also the author of several books including “Create or Die: Essays on the Artistry of Dennis Hopper” (AUP), “Deconstructing Dirty Dancing” (Zero Books), and “Riffs and Meaning” (Headpress). His latest book is “Screen Captures: Film in the Age of Emergency” (Newstar Books). He lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

Linktree: Ste L Naish
Twitter: @RiffsandMeaning

An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It (2022)
Director: Lachlan Pendragon
Screenwriter: Lachlan Pendragon
Starring: Lachlan Pendragon, John Cavanagh, Michael Richard, Jamie Trotter

What a breath of fresh air this 11-minute short film is. What a joyful expression of artistry. An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It is 2023’s only stop motion nominee in the Animated Short category at the Oscars, and it tells of a disgruntled office employee suddenly realising that he’s a creation for a stop motion film. It’s form-shaping work, which you could say is appropriate for a stop motion production.

The opening shot of An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It is of a camera shooting the stop motion scenes, human hands playing at super speed in the background as we watch the stop motion in “cinema time”, real time, via the monitor. As the characters converse, go about their day, look out the window, we see hands just out of focus altering the characters for each frame. This is, of course, an interesting position to put us in, a fourth wall break in one of cinema’s most obviously constructed forms; why disguise the creation of the film itself in a medium that so purposefully appears constructed? It’s self-aware, it’s playful, and it illustrates actor, screenwriter, director, animator Lachlan Pendragon’s knowledge of his form and his subject.

The office scenes fronted by Pendragon himself as Neil, an employee on the brink of being fired due to bad performance, are slow, the dialogue almost monotone as if taken from the play book of fellow Oceanian Taika Waititi, the construct of a disgruntled employee searching for meaning in life being a self-aware take from Fight Club and The Matrix. The latter Matrix is perhaps the best bed fellow for this film, for after a short period in which Neil is confronted by dysfunctional green screen, then notices his seated co-worker doesn’t have a keyboard… or legs, we are thrust down the rabbit hole, Neil becoming a self-aware puppet, the animator’s hand like an evil force attempting to restrain his now sentient mind. It’s Neo unhooking from the Matrix, Alice falling down the rabbit hole, and in the case of this film it’s a stop motion creation falling down a hole in the set and into a pit of spare parts… each a replica part of his own face. It’s a fascinating idea illuminated by intelligence and a sense of humour, such a unique expression of creativity that it’s impossible not to sit wide-eyed and smiling.

Films like An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It are proof that ideas, that creativity, can still thrive even far away from the tried and tested formulas, the “ordinary” way of things. Creator Lachlan Pendragon is a 27-year-old film student from Brisbane, Australia. He had an exceptionally creative idea, he put it to screen, and he made it to the Oscars. What a story, and what a deserved achievement to cap it all off.

The movie industry can at times feel at odds with its own creators and exploitative of its own viewers, but films like this feel different. Cinema of the type that is An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It can restore balance, even restore faith. This great medium through which human history is told, politics and emotion unravelled and remoulded, can still cause the purest elation, celebrate big ideas from relatively unknown creators, change and evolve and push boundaries, just as it always has. Lachlan Pendragon’s film won’t make $2billion or earn a merchandising deal, but it will put a smile on your face, it will make you think about the form of cinema and the ways in which its constructs can be reshaped like little stop motion figures. For that reason, it’s enchanting, it’s wonderful, it’s unmissable.

Score: 24/24

You can watch An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It in full for free on Vimeo. More coverage of the Oscar-nominated short films can be found on our Short Film page.

My Year of Dicks (2022)
Director: Sara Gunnarsdóttir
Screenwriter: Pamela Ribon
Starring: Brie Tilton, Jackson Kelly, Klarissa Hernandez, Chris Elsebroek, Sterling Temple Howard, Mical Trejo, Sean Stack, Chris Kelman, Laura House, Pamela Ribon

My Year of Dicks is probably the 95th Academy Awards’ best film title. And it’s a film that presents exactly what it promises: a year of dicks. The person whose year it is, is screenwriter Pamela Ribon, adapting her own memoir “Notes to Boys (And Other Things I Shouldn’t Share in Public)”. Pamela was a teenager in the early 90s, and her tale is told across five distinct chapters. In each chapter is an encounter with a dick. Across the length of this 25-minute short film, this very important coming-of-age period for a 15-year-old girl becomes one of the most enchanting stories of the year; Ribon finding that very particular part of growing up that we can all relate to. From idea to construction, from animation to sound to voice acting, My Year of Dicks is magic.

Ribon is credited as creator as well as writer on this Animated Short nominee, the very honest and particular presentation justifying such a personal approach. Live-action footage recorded on a home video camera in 1991 is interspersed with each animated chapter as if title cards intended to remind us of the real human beneath the elation, the heartbreak, the fear, embarrassment and the confusion experienced during this presentation of sexual awakening. In this sense, My Year of Dicks is very much authored, though its uniquely personal presentation only enhances the universality of the experiences shared. Through Pamela Ribon’s own willingness to search the embarrassment of missed opportunities or making mountains out of mole hills, and the honesty of pursuing a sexual awakening as some kind of end point for childhood, it’s easy to look inward. More powerfully, it becomes easier to accept those parts of yourself that (by the time you see this film,) you might have buried.

There’s an energy to My Year of Dicks that is somewhat punk, but it’s the kindness this film spreads that makes for such an engaging and ultimately emotive experience. Boys are gross, yes, but this isn’t about them, it’s about Pam. Pam (Brie Tilton in a fantastic, youthful voice performance) is desperate to transition from what she has always known, she’s besotted by different boys at different times, she’s somewhat self-destructive, she’s unaware of how she’s putting herself in danger. She’s young. And that’s what people do when they’re young. My Year of Dicks is well aware of this. As an adult, it’s easy to look back through the cracks in your fingers and think ‘that was real dumb’, or to cringe at how stupidly you fell for some douchebag for no reason, but as a teenager you can’t help feeling overwhelmed in both good and bad ways, you’re naturally inclined to pursue new experiences, you’ve evolved to have new desires during this period and to not quite know how to handle them. It’s adolescence. My Year of Dicks presents that as well as any great teen movie, and does so in the acknowledgement of how alien and lost it can feel to be such an age. It does so with a coolness that you can never quite establish as a teen, as if the author herself is now the person that little Pam always wanted to be. And better yet, it’s as if cooler, older Pam is reassuring her younger self that little Pam is pretty damn cool regardless.

This is a woman’s story. One that makes a start on filling the gaps left by generations of women storytellers who were ushered into the margins as men took centre stage. Gross-out teen comedies from eras past will no doubt always have a place, but films like My Year of Dicks absolutely should too. Presenting the other side of the objectification that cis heterosexual boys place on girls should be considered vital to our cultural understanding of ourselves, and seeing girls and women experiencing sex and love in an abundance of ways can only help to normalise those life experiences that remain stigmatised to so many.

My Year of Dicks leads with empathy and love first-and-foremost, earning powerful women-forward messaging by its very existence. The punk attitude that underpins everything, that tells us that there’s no limit to how grossly embarrassing these moments can get, that teaches us to love ourselves regardless, is in itself revolutionary. The animation, told in a variety of styles and animated by just a handful of people, is engaging, emotive, at times so creative and different that you can’t help but to smile, the supporting cast is brilliantly accurate to the age they’re playing, and the sound design and score are pitch perfect.

Short films don’t get any more personal than My Year of Dicks, a film so loving, touching, relevant to our times and to our pasts, that it should be added to school curriculums. We could all do with looking at ourselves a little more kindly, and hopefully My Year of Dicks encourages you to do that.

Score: 24/24

You can watch My Year of Dicks in full for free on Vimeo. More coverage of the Oscar-nominated short films can be found on our Short Film page.

The Martha Mitchell Effect (2022)
Directors: Diane Alvergue, Debra McClutchy

Have you ever heard of the Martha Mitchell Effect? You probably should have. It’s the term used when a person’s reality is professionally labelled as delusional and later revealed to be true. Martha Mitchell was the wife of John N. Mitchell, the United States Attorney General during the republican terms of Richard Nixon. John N. Mitchell served between 1969 and 1972, and sandwiched his tenure with the role of Nixon campaign manager for each of his presidential terms. He was arrested and imprisoned for his involvement in the Watergate scandal that forced Nixon into resignation and labelled the president a disgrace. Martha Mitchell was telling the press of the party’s wrongdoings before it ever got out. They – the republican party of the time, including her husband and the president of the United States – imprisoned Martha Mitchell, drugged her, and committed to a smear campaign aimed at silencing her. She was proven right. The republican party under Richard Nixon was corrupt. Martha Mitchell is, to this day, arguably the most well-known person to have been proven to have suffered gaslighting by her own nation’s government.

It’s a story that is more than fifty years old, but it feels painfully relevant to the corruption of our times and the dirty tricks played in big-league politics to this day. You can probably think of people who’ve been labelled as insane, over-zealous, or completely unreliable, seemingly out of nowhere after years of being indulged and even promoted. Martha Mitchell was this exact person. She was a lobbyist for the republican party, entrusted with earning the votes of women and for getting the right press onto Nixon’s side. She was a little eccentric, sure, but charismatic and self-assured in a way that translated to the housewives of the era and made her a fascinating celebrity for her time.

What she suffered was horrifying and tragic, but directors Diane Alvergue and Debra McClutchy don’t commit to the gruesome realities that she suffered personally. Instead, they do what all good documentarians must: they contextualise her horrors in the time, the politics, and the gendered oppression that made such abuse possible, and teach us a lesson on one of the contemporary era’s most public victims of a now well-known issue, gaslighting.

The Martha Mitchell Effect seems to be the result of hours and hours of work from teams of people. There are the big, typical documentary selections such as television interviews, behind-the-scenes footage from campaign videographers, and the like. But there is also footage of house parties, moments in the oval office, paparazzi-style recordings of Martha on the streets or just leaving her apartment block. Much of the film is told through this footage, the rest told through the voiceovers of well-known and heavily involved individuals. The way these more recently recorded voiceovers are introduced is nothing short of astonishing, particular party campaigners and members of the press found among the masses of people in the archival footage and presented to us as proof of each person’s credentials. It must have been a monumental task to find them.

As with any political documentary, criticism of the agenda of the filmmakers themselves can be levelled. In the case of The Martha Mitchell Effect, such criticism can be tied to how the film overlooks some of Mitchell’s more problematic political stances, glancing an eye at them to prove her association to the republican party of the time, but forgetting about their negative impact and spreading of hatred in favour of painting a more positive picture of this former public figure, that (in the opinions of the filmmakers) being a hero for our times.

At 40 minutes, it’s not like The Martha Mitchell Effect gets distracted in its efforts to reach the goal of re-evaluating one of the most influential women in mainstream American politics of the era. It does so with great effect, establishing her trauma and suffering as a vehicle through which to better evaluate gendered oppression, and presenting her track from party campaigner to part-party whistleblower as one of the great American stories of being faithful not to parties and people but to the nation itself. Martha Mitchell is, in The Martha Mitchell Effect, the ultimate American patriot.

Films like this will always be fascinating. Their focus on the elements of stories not often considered important enough for filmmakers from eras past make them invaluable additions to our society’s re-evaluation of itself, of our understanding of the machinations of our world. The Martha Mitchell Effect is not all-encompassing, but it reaches its goal and establishes its intentions with aplomb.

Score: 15/24

You can watch The Martha Mitchell Effect on Netflix. More coverage of the Oscar-nominated short films can be found on our Short Film page.

The Flying Sailor (2022)
Directors: Amanda Forbis, Wendy Tilby
Screenwriters: Amanda Forbis, Wendy Tilby

6 December 1917. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Two ships collide in the harbour, causing the largest accidental explosion in history. A man, a sailor, is blown skyward from the deck of his British cargo steamer. He lands 4 kilometres away, stark naked but alive. This is his story.

2023 Oscars Animated Short nominee The Flying Sailor is one of the shortest films nominated across the 95th Academy Awards. At just 8 minutes, one of which is taken up by the credits, the abruptness of this project is akin to to the explosion itself. But this isn’t a blunt-force dramatisation of extreme impact and epic-scale suffering, it’s more philosophical than that. Exactly what happens during such an event – the pain, the trauma, the fear, but also an entire life being remembered – is evaluated and put to screen, childhood memories interspersed with the deep reds of bloody impact and the somewhat off-kilter comedy that comes from a naked animated man propelling through the air.

It’s not exactly funny, The Flying Sailor, but it is certainly tongue-in-cheek with regard to certain elements. The human body shouldn’t be a laughing matter, but the manner in which this particular creation with caricatured proportions rotates through the air, penis on show, against the backdrop of billowing smoke and flying objects (including a comically placed fish), cigarette in mouth, is amusing. It’s fitting, too, for a story as almost unbelievable as this one – who’d have thought a man could survive such an event? That he’d be so cruelly stripped naked during his long-distance propulsion?

Equally as memorable, but certainly more poignant, are the sequences in which the flying man sees his life flash before his eyes. Played to a timeless and beautiful piano-led orchestral score from David Christensen, these moments are given the shimmer of old 8mm video tape projected onto a wall, memories of ships and waves and women and fights (some of which are shown in live-action) propelling the poor sailor towards an otherworldly experience. This experience, in which he flies directly towards the sun, takes a different form of animation, a minimalist one, with the flying man reduced to a pink ball as if returning to the source of his own creation in a manner not too dissimilar to Terrence Malick’s existential universe sequence in The Tree of Life, the dust of the universe flinging him back as if re-establishing life itself, the score raging like a classic Disney animation, the man bluntly re-entering consciousness as a new being touched by whatever force it is that binds us all.

It’s all so beautifully done. The score is decisive, impactful, pointed. The animation is a 2D and 3D amalgamation that creates an off-kilter look, helping to smuggle the deeper meanings of the piece into your mind through its comedic sensibilities. What it has to say is more impactful than you might expect, especially for a film without dialogue and no particular reliance upon ordinary presentations of success and failure.

The Flying Sailor is one of those animated shorts that you can engage with for just a short while, giggle at and think about, then forget about later. But if you do stop to think a little more about this little story, you’ll come to recognise the intricacy of what filmmakers Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby have constructed, and see the epic scale of the monumental story beneath its short run-time and basic structure.

Score: 16/24

You can watch The Flying Sailor in full on YouTube courtesy of The New Yorker.

More Oscar-nominated short film coverage can be found on our Short Films page.

Haulout (2022)
Directors: Maxim Arbugaev, Evgenia Arbugaeva
Starring: Maxim Chakilev

The Siberian Arctic. A dense ocean mist engulfs the horizon, covering sea, sand and objects in a deep grey. What’s beyond this place could be anyone’s guess. Then a man, armed with stick in hand, walks into shot. It’s like something from the pioneering early documentary film Nanook of the North, an experience of peering through something to see someone just out of view. The film lingers, the ocean swirls, we hear waves crashing, then water trickling down a new landscape, this one of rocks. “September 7”, reads the man to a radio, his body a silhouette against the coarse grey backdrop of clouds that engulf his presence at the top of a cliff. “Dense fog. Can’t see them yet.” It’s almost post-apocalyptic.

Alone, amongst a desolate landscape, he takes shelter in a wooden shack not too dissimilar to Charles Chaplin’s in The Gold Rush, his one person dinner table and dilapidated coffee mug framed beside the window like the one in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Soon after, we see the man peering into the dark of his cabin at night, torch on head. We hear the wind creak the wooden structure of the house, it growling like a bear, the creaks of wood under foot invasive to our ears just as man is invasive to such an environment. He opens the door. Suddenly, thousands of walrus – mounted side-by-side and on top of one another – immediately outside. It’s like something from a horror film, like Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse: a fever dream, a nightmarish moment of awakening.

This is Maxim Chakilev, a wanderer of the Siberian arctic, a marine biologist who measures walrus migrating patterns. He estimates that there are 95,000 walrus on the beach directly outside his accommodation, 6,000 more in the water. The more walrus there are, the more dangerous it is for the walrus themselves. As title cards later reveal, such an event is named a “haulout” (the title of the film), and is indicative of when walrus are unable to take rest on sea ice during their migration. When on land, they are more at risk. At risk of predators hardly, more of panic, exhaustion and stampedes. In 2020, he counted 600 walrus to have died on the beach he overlooked.

Haulout is a fundamentally cinematic experience. Every frame is still, boxed, like a timeless photograph of a netherworld. It’s like silent cinema, evocative of Nanook. Only 8 words are spoken across the opening 9 minutes of the film, and only several more for the remaining 15. The visuals tell the story.

We see a walrus scare itself when trying to climb into the shelter, its paw knocking down a metal container. We see another, this time a baby, sneak into the sheltered outdoor area soon after Chakilev has attempted (and failed) to seal it off with a wooden plank. These are huge, intimidating animals, but they seem investigative, sadly anxious.

The camera’s stillness paints the picture of an opposite viewing gallery, one in which we are the observed. The frames of the wooden hut are used as visual frames, the mountainous walrus passing by to take a look. It’s less that we are observing them, and more that they are observing us; a human zoo.

Documentary filmmaking has rarely been this utterly astounding cinematographically. The frames and the composition are at times breathtaking, one shot in which the camera peers inside through a window lit by a fire being timelessly evocative. The sound design is utterly tremendous too, its attraction to the sounds of the walrus themselves indicating a respect for the majesty of these unique creatures and the trying circumstances that have brought them to this place.

As a product of cinema – and Haulout is certainly cinema – this is one of the great documentary projects of our time. A short film it may be, but no amount of time here is lost to meandering, the impact of big moments heavy and memorable.

Haulout’s lasting message is that the edges of the world are now as broken by us as the parts we know to have long been, and it’s a sobering message to receive. Life, even on the outskirts of existence amongst the fog and the cold and all the power of the ocean, is struggling at our behest. For this, and the ways in which it magnificently brings such a unique story to life, Haulout must be seen as the extraordinary documentary of the Oscars’ Documentary Short Subject category in 2023, and an unmissable piece of documentary filmmaking for the entire 21st century. Truly, Haulout is a special film.

Score: 24/24

You can watch Haulout in full on YouTube courtesy of The New Yorker.

Stranger at the Gate (2022)
Director: Joshua Seftel
Featuring: Richard McKinney, Bibi Bahrami, Saber Bahrami, Zaki Bahrami, Kent Kurtz, Dana McKinney, Emily McKinney

Our current space is filled with division, with otherness, with hatred and vitriol. Stranger at the Gate, a Documentary Short Subject nominee at the 95th Academy Awards directed by Joshua Seftel, begins with a glimpse at the heart-wrenching worst case scenario for all of this misunderstanding, presenting a True Crime-style opening of racism and murder before dissolving to reveal the remarkable and true story of love, acceptance and understanding that is this film’s subject.

Richard McKinney was a US Marine for a quarter of a century. Upon returning home and being reintroduced into normal life in Muncie, Indiana, McKinney – motivated by his time at war, and the 9/11 terror attacks – saw Muslims as the enemy. He planned to blow up a local place of prayer, even building an improvised explosive device (an IED) that he thought he could kill up to 200 people with. After a chance encounter his adopted daughter had at school, he visited the place of prayer for reconnaissance. The warmth and love he would receive from strangers would divert his life onto another path; a path of light, of love, of what McKinney himself describes as “what true humanity is all about”.

It’s a remarkable story, and it is told so honestly by the subject himself and the loved ones who were there through his process or have learned to love McKinney as a friend in the years since.

This is the power of Stranger at the Gate, and of the Oscars’ Documentary Short Subject category in a wider context. It can turn left when it promises to turn right, it can celebrate the story of love conquering pure hatred, it can paint characters in shades of grey rather than safe, box office-ready, investor friendly, black and white.

It’s not a film told with as much clarity as you might expect, the majority of this issue arising from its intention to switch the formulaic (and never-more-popular) True Crime genre on its head, its title cards, re-enactments and restricted use of archival footage at times distracting from the talking heads whom recount their stories in such a precise and understandable way. The opening few minutes are quite frustrating as a result, especially if you’re going into this short film without knowing what to expect, but the filmmakers ultimately understand the power of a tale like this in such a divisive era as that which we’re living through, and as such the power of the message is what you’ll ultimately take away from this film.

Richard McKinney had been convinced that Muslims were the enemy. This, combined with PTSD, drove him to nearly become a mass murderer. Our individual lives may never sink to such drastic plans of action, but the prejudices that were present in McKinney are applicable to almost any religious or political discussion ongoing in our current zeitgeist, and as such his unlearning of absolute racism can be seen as a beacon of hope that we too can learn to outgrow our division.

Shot clearly, in the modern and ever-streamable style of the True Crime documentary, Strangers at the Gate offers something that extends that tried and tested formula into the realm of honest to goodness human empathy, encouraging love and understanding even in the face of fear.

As McKinney’s own potential victim did when hearing of his would-have-been crimes… invite that opposing voice in for dinner, win them over with love. You may save a life.

Score: 17/24

You can watch Stranger at the Gate in full on YouTube courtesy of The New Yorker.

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (2022)
Directors: Peter Baynton, Charlie Mackesy
Screenwriters: Charlie Mackesy, Jon Croker
Starring: Jude Coward Nicoll, Tom Hollander, Idris Elba, Gabriel Byrne

The BBC and Apple TV+ animated children’s story book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is 2023’s all-star offering in the Oscars’ Animated Short category, experienced British and Irish actors Tom Hollander, Idris Elba and Gabriel Byrne lending their voices on the screen, with Emma, The Phantom of the Open and ‘Fleabag’ composer Isobel Waller-Bridge providing the score.

Adapting from the beloved 2019 children’s book of the same name are directors Peter Baynton and the book’s author Charlie Mackesy. Through a beautiful 2D hand-drawn animated style, the pair faithfully bring the illustrated tale to life, the film’s unique “sketch lines still visible” approach an endearing quality that presupposes that imperfections aren’t always bad.

In the case of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, these lines illuminate the animation’s hand-drawn artistry, allowing for a visual spectacle that people of all ages can enjoy alone or, as the film proposes, together.

This is an animated short that offers all the life lessons of a classic children’s novel. We see messages of acceptance, a celebration of kindness, an encouragement of intuition and intrigue, and a heap of wilful self-belief. It then reaches further, offering modern lessons on being emotionally available, open to pain and hurt and anxiety, but loving one’s self all the same. The children watching this film will no doubt have positive lessons reaffirmed, and the adults should feel as if old lessons have been retaught.

The voice work of the adults in the cast is no doubt stellar. Tom Hollander, known for so often playing despicable characters on British television, is a kindly mole here, and his voice work is soft, his words rolling out of his mouth as if a kind gift. His is the standout performance, but credit is due to young lead Jude Coward Nicoll, who anchors the whole piece with a warmth that reaffirms the film’s values. His is a vocal performance not handicapped by usual child performance woes, such as a whiny tone and questionable cadence, his is as mature and homely as the rest of the short film.

“When the big things feel out of control, focus on what you love. Always remember, you’re enough just as you are.” The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is enough just as it is, a short film with both classic and modern messaging neatly bowed by some beautiful animation and exceptional voice work; a real triumph of its author turned screenwriter turned director, and a cosy, encouraging and beautiful little piece of cinema.

Score: 20/24