Most of the features in contention for the Academy Awards have been screening in town for months, but this week brings your first (and, in some cases, probably your last) chance to see the nominated short films. Music Box screens the best documentary shorts in two different programs, and Landmark’s Century Centre presents the best live-action and animated shorts. I confess that I look forward most to the animations, if only because they tend to be a little more adult than the nominees for best animated feature. Not being a parent, I have a hard time dragging myself to stuff like DreamWorks Animation’s The Croods, Universal’s Despicable Me 2, or even Disney’s well-reviewed Frozen—to name three of the features nominated this year. Meanwhile, such beautiful, philosophical, resolutely grown-up animations as Michel Gondry’s Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? and Terence Nance’s An Oversimplification of Her Beauty go unnoticed.
Even creepier than this nocturnal vision is Daniel Sousa’s Feral, a hand-drawn fable about a boy who bonds with wolves but can’t adapt to the world of humans. Sousa worked on the project for five years, while he took commissioned projects and taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, and the primarily black-and-white images are haunting; the boy is rendered without eyes, just a maw full of sharp teeth, and the wolves are black silhouettes with sharp snouts. Brought to the city and clad in a little suit and hat, the boy clashes with his schoolmates, dropping down on all fours and snarling; in a climactic reverie he sheds his clothing, races away, and rotates against a black field, becoming a wolf, a white dove, a leaf. In white silhouette, he takes a deep breath and blows himself away, his profile disintegrating into snowflakes. The hallucinatory quality is only enhanced by the fact that the story transpires without a single word.
