I don’t get out much to festivals for (mostly) economic reasons, but there’s quite a bit of animation available online.
The Oscars
I did recently go to see a showing of the 2026 Oscar-Nominated Animation Shorts in the theater, which included:
“The Girl Who Cried Pearls” (the winner). Trailer:
I also found the entire movie on Daily Motion, but it’s probably not a legit release.
When I saw it, I questioned whether I was looking at stop motion or a CG production. Turns out, it’s basically both — these animators use a VFX workflow to create eye movement and lipsync. Which in this case, means they can make both English and French lipsync versions. Very appropriate for a Canadian production, I suppose!
Also, looking at it again, I see that the flashback story appears to be mostly, if not entirely, plain stop motion, while the frame story (the old man telling the story to his granddaughter), uses the VFX technique to make the characters more realistic and animated.
“The Three Sisters”. Trailer:
This is 2D animation, although I think there is at least some 3D rotoscoping going on when the camera moves around the island at the beginning. It’s really a series of brief skits, but tells the story of three sisters on an island who take on a male boarder, compete for his affections, and generally get up to partying and shenanigans. Not a film meant to be taken too seriously, but fun.
“Forevergreen”. Full movie (13 min):
This one is a fairly basic 3D animated parable with a bear and an anthropomorphic tree. I have to be honest: I didn’t really like this one. It seemed preachy and not super-original. But it was very competently animate, and the “wood carved” style of the characters is appropriate to the material.
“Papillon”/”Butterfly”. Full movie:
This one was beautiful and extremely moving, emotionally. It’s about an Olympic swimmer reflecting in flashbacks on his life, which included triumphs, but also immense tragedy from the Holocaust. It is presented with a highly-expressionistic animated painting effect. I do not know very much about this animation technique other than the look. But it is very effective.
“Retirement Plan”. Full movie:
Honestly, the animation was the least interesting thing about this entry. It’s just simple, efficient, 2D line animation. I think what raised it to Oscar nomination is the spoken-word narration, about the author’s ideas of retirement — and mortality. It’s funny and insightful and an important nudge to get busy with living now, especially if, like me, you’re getting older and feeling that clock ticking more.
The collection ended with a bonus animated short from Cartoon Saloon (who previously gave us the features “The Book of Kells” and “Song of the Sea”), called “Éiru”, which was apparently on the “short list”, but I guess, not “nominated”? Anyway, I enjoyed it.
“Éiru”. Trailer:
There’s also a website for Éiru. I don’t know how you can see the whole movie, but I hope you do.
Afterwards (obviously), I spent some time trying to find either the films or trailers on YouTube. Mostly to get clips for my daily log, but also so I can show them to other people.
Branching Out
Naturally, the YouTube algorithm got the idea that I like short animated films, so it started making suggestions — some old and some new.
Short films have a similar problem to poetry — they’re hard to market individually, and opportunities to find them in collections can be pretty limited. So, a surprisingly large number of them are free on YouTube or other platforms.
I particularly enjoyed this older film by the same people who made “The Girl Who Cried Pearls”, called “Madame Tutli Putli” (2009), which can be found in its entirety on YouTube:
Note the same fantastic work with the eyes. I’m pretty sure this is the same VFX workflow for the frame story in Pearls. Of course, the stop-motion work is also top notch in these films.
After this, I did a fair amount of search through the suggested titles, and also followed links back to animation schools and festivals of interest. I really should keep a list of these close to hand for future reference! I spent most of Saturday morning watching these. As an X-er kid, Saturday morning and animation always seem to go together!
I’m not going to try to pile the whole list on you. But let me mention a few of the ones that stood out for me, and also some of the sources that are worth checking out.
“Rag Doll” (2021)
This is stop-motion (mostly), with fabric puppets instead of plastic or clay, which is interesting in itself. But it is also a powerful story about resisting oppression. The ending is a bit unexpected — I guess I won’t spoil it, but here is the 18-min film:
“Crow: The Legend” (2019)
A nice presentation of the Native American story about Crow bringing back fire. So many animated shorts are limited by a lack of dialog, so it’s kind of nice to have characters with voices and significant story. From the CG Meetup YT page:
“One Small Step” (2018)
Not super-original, but timely and meaningful to space junkies like me. It’s a story about a girl studying and ultimately becoming an astronaut, many years later.
“Windup” (2021)
This one is technically pretty interesting, as it was made with the realtime 3D engine in Unity, so it took a lot less computing power.
“Green Light” (2019)
Weirdly, I got two different movies named “Green Light”. This one is another from the CG Meetup account. Competent 3D animation with some good mech character design, albeit a few cliches can be seen. Good sets and landscape. The story left me with some issues — it seems a little unclear what’s going on in some cases. But it looked cool.
“Au Revoir Jerome!” (2021)
This is a hark back to a much older 2D animation style. I was reminded of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine”, with the hugely exaggerated feet and legs. Sort of the opposite of the usual cartoon conventions. Also full of surreal imagery, in much the same way.
Sources
A number of the above were from the CG Meetup account, a festival event, focused on CG animation, of course.
“The Girl who Cried Pearls” and “Madame Tutli Putli” were from the National Film Board of Canada account, which of course, has a lot of other good material (and not all of the same style).
Several of the interesting student shorts I watched came from ESMA, which has campuses in France and Canada.
And some are just independent animation studios.
This was just a bit of fun, and a little bit of looking into what is popular with film festival audiences, as I contemplate what I’m going to do to market our pilot episode.
I did not focus on Blender films this time. Perhaps I’ll do a later post on that.
This article is mostly YouTube links. I don’t know how long they will last. I’ll do my best to give more durable links, but some will likely break over time. This is, unfortunately, the ephemeral nature of the Internet, and the World Web Web has never felt more fragile to me. Which is why I’m trying to move my own presence more to PeerTube, and also putting what I consider import stuff on the Internet Archive as well (I don’t like to overload a public resource, but I expect it will outlive me, which can’t be said for self-hosted content).
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