Five great movies are nominated for the best animated short Oscar this year.

Five extraordinary shorts were nominated for the Academy Award for best animated short this year: Birthday Boy (Sejong Park), Gopher Broke (Jeff Fowler), Guard Dog (Bill Plympton), Lorenzo (Mike Gabriel), and Ryan (Chris Landreth). In late February, AWN talked with each of the directors about their shorts, the process of making shorts, and the challenge of getting them seen in today’s marketplace. If you haven’t seen these short films, we’re obligated to offer the following SPOILER ALERT: You need to see them for yourself right now, ‘cause we’re about to ruin ‘em all.

A child of the Korean War, Sejong Park (left) made the heartbreaking short Birthday Boy, which uses the war as its backdrop. Photo credit: Hamish Gregory. Birthday Boy image © AFTRS.

Birthday Boy is a quiet, heartbreaking film about a day in the life of a child growing up during the Korean War; a day he finds quite ordinary, but that the viewer discovers is fraught with a devastating secret. It was written, directed and animated by Sejong Park, a Korean émigré who lives in Sydney, Australia.

Park was born in Pusan, the second-largest city in Korea, and after high school he moved to Seoul for his university degree. A child of the Korean War, Park lived and worked half his life in Seoul, teaching art and working as an art director for movies and TV. In the 1990s he was credited on a feature-length compilation of music videos for a popular Korean rock band, which split up in 1996. “I moved down to Sydney in 1998,” Park says, “because I had an Australian girlfriend. Now she’s my wife.”

The artist first tried animation doing commercials for TV. He also made three animated short films prior to Birthday Boy, but don’t look for them in theaters any time soon. “I won’t say what they’re called,” he laughs. “I have them in my garage. I haven’t shown them anywhere; they haven’t gone to any festivals. They were mainly your souvenir type of long-process animation. It was a long time ago, and some of the animation took two or three years. It’s all hand-drawn. I shot them on 16mm, but they’re not done properly. I did it to see how the process works.”

The Australian Film Television & Radio School in Sydney provided production facilities for the making of Birthday Boy. Park did enroll as a student, but not to earn a degree. “I just wanted to make my film,” he says. “A lot of people ask me if this is a student film. It is, because it was made at a school, but I didn’t go there for the degree. A lot of people come to that school to make their own films. Many of them are already industry professionals.”

The story of Birthday Boy took six months to work out, and making the short took another 18. The resulting film is serene and unassuming, demanding the viewer’s attention not through spectacle but taciturnity and a reserve that demand an audience’s full focus. (See August 2004’s Fresh from the Festivals for a capsule plot summary.) After wandering through his war-torn village, making a magnetic toy by placing a metal shard under the wheels of an approaching train, and playing soldier with grenades made of rocks, the boy of the film’s title arrives home to find a present on the doorstep. He can’t read the label, but we can read the meaning of the contents — it’s dog tags and a wallet, and somewhere, far away, his father is dead.

Most of the story’s settings and situations were mined from Park’s own childhood. “These are places I used to see on the way home from school, and the way the boy plays on the railway track is how I used to play, and how I used to make toys. When I got home at night I was alone until nine o’clock because I was the youngest. The father dying in the war, that’s fiction.

“Because the Korean War is very current history, we learn a lot about that. There were a lot of documentary and fiction movies made in Korea in black-and-white a long time ago to build up nationalism. People are very educated about the war.”

In addition to directing his crew, Park animated all the little boy’s scenes. The voice of the boy is his Australian neighbor’s son, who incidentally can’t speak Korean. “I had to teach him the Korean words, songs and dialogue, how to pronounce them. He’s speaking phonetically. It still works well for a Korean audience,” Park says.

Birthday Boy has screened at more than 50 festivals around the world and earned many critical kudos, but Park would like to move on. “I spent 16 hours a day on it for two years. I had no life. Everybody else went through the same thing, and if I have to, I’ll do the same thing again for two years, but I have a family. Making short films, it doesn’t give you any quality time. The next story I want to make is a feature, and there are some companies interested in putting money together for something. But I’m still crazy about animation.”