Here are this year’s Academy Award® nominees:

Boundin’ (left) could appear at the head of The Incredibles this fall while Harvie Krumpet would fill a half-hour viewing window gracefully. Boundin’ © 2003 Pixar; Harvie Krumpet © Melodrama Pictures.

Boundin’
Harvie Krumpet
Unfortunately no viewing copies were made available of Boundin’, though a short clip can be viewed at AWN’s Oscar Showcase. Harvie Krumpet was previously reviewed in this column. I should recommend them both. Boundin’ is the latest short product from animation giant Pixar, who, as of this writing, can still do no wrong. Harvie Krumpet was animated independently by Adam Elliot and has won a slew of awards, including most recently Honorable Mention at the Sundance Film Festival; Audience Awards at both Sitges Anima’t, Spain and FIKE 2003, Portugal and Best Animation Award at Australia’s Flickerfest,

Boundin’ could conceivably appear theatrically, if its tone proves appropriate for placement in front of The Incredibles this November. Harvie Krumpet is too long to follow suit — but, remarkably, it is exactly the right length for filling any given half hour of primetime television. Imagine that. Executives take note — you’ll never find a cheaper way of filling 30 minutes.

Small bites add up in Chris Hinton’s Nibbles. © Acme Filmworks 2003.

Nibbles
Deranged Canadian director Chris Hinton is responsible for a splendid barrage of comic animated shorts going back 25 years, including 2001’s Flux and the 1988 classic A Nice Day in the Country (collected on Animation Celebration Volume 3, if you can find it). If you’ve never seen one of his manic shorts, imagine the filmic equivalent of Eric Idle’s 100-mph skit “New Radio Quiz Game” from Monty Python’s Previous Album. Hinton is capable of subdividing comic beats into fragments so small hummingbirds are in awe of his timing.

Nibbles is all about a fishing trip the animator took with his two sons; they packed the car, you see, and drove straight to Lake Kipawa, stopping only for soft drinks, ice cream, donuts, pizza, French fries, pierogi, more soft drinks, chewing gum, gas, something that looked like dumplings, and more soft drinks along the way. Then the mosquitoes ate them. Then the fish ate their bait, and they drove back, stopped for sushi, stopped for chocolate milk, stopped for spaghetti, stopped for iles flottantes, copiously avoided stopping for liver and onions and went straight home, where they ate the fish.

Nibbles is an American/Canadian co-production from Acme Filmworks. (In the interest of full disclosure, the short’s producer is Ron Diamond, publisher of AWN.) According to the artist it was produced in a very small studio, “standing up, with a micro-microprocessor and only one RAM.”