One of these is Brazilian animator Guy Charnaux’s aggressively simple “Business Meeting,” which works perfectly as a sendup of last year’s infamous Cabinet meeting when President Donald Trump’s underlings lavished praise on him for the cameras. Sticking a dagger in conformity in under two minutes, this sharp, peremptory film turns the tension between its loose, surreal line drawings and rigidly uniform dialogue into zany fun.
Equally provocative is “Grands Canons,” a stop-motion animation by French artist Alain Biet, who bombards us with thousands of his startlingly precise watercolor drawings of everyday items and gadgets. At once dazzling and disorienting, this frenetic montage prompts us to pay more attention to the deluge of objects we’ve ushered into our lives.
A sadder, more confessional mood is evoked by the fascinating German short “Carlotta’s Face,” in which an artist with prosopagnosia — also known as face-blindness — describes the challenges of living without the ability to recognize faces, including her own. Working from the first-person account and self-portraits of the artist herself, directors Valentin Riedl (who is also a neuroscientist) and Frédéric Schuld deftly communicate a journey from confusion and isolation to artistic consolation.
Also from Germany, Veronica Solomon’s wonderfully original and weirdly hypnotic “Love Me, Fear Me” is a stop-motion claymation toying with themes of transformation and pandering. As a shape-shifting, gender-switching performer gyrates across a stage in a desperate dance for the approval of an unseen audience — whose applause or tense murmurs direct each mutation — the movie’s ominous tone is a welcome departure from the cautious inoffensiveness of much of the program.
Again hewing to the darker side, Dutch animator Jorn Leeuwerink’s deceptively childlike “Flower Found!” creates an allusive pastel nightmare of mistaken identity and mob injustice. Digitally animated on painted watercolor backgrounds, the story follows an anxious mouse who learns that enlisting a search party of woodland creatures to find his stolen blossom might not have been the best idea.
Not all the films are content with suggestion or subtlety. In the overly literal and soggily sentimental “One Small Step” — one of three here on the Oscar shortlist — a Chinese-American shoemaker selflessly supports his daughter’s dream of becoming an astronaut. And in another Oscar hopeful, John Kahrs’ “Age of Sail,” a near-suicidal sailboat captain (voiced by Ian McShane) finds renewed hope when he rescues a feisty teenage girl who has fallen from a steamboat. Set in the North Atlantic in 1900 and clocking in at a hair over 12 minutes, the movie features precise artwork that ultimately can’t sustain a story that feels at least six minutes too long.
By contrast, the gorgeously hand-drawn “Weekends,” by Canadian filmmaker Trevor Jimenez (the third Oscar finalist), fully earns its 15-minutes-and-change running time. Set in 1980s Toronto and based on the director’s personal memories, this gently touching story of a domestic breakup is seen through the eyes of the confused little boy at its center. As the child shuttles between two wildly different parents, the soft and poignantly detailed art marks time in passing seasons and the child’s chaotic dreams. Hints of male violence and female pain flutter between the lines; nothing is spoken or spelled out, and yet everything is right there.
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Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.