Scrat stars in his own film, Gone Nutty. Property of TCF 2002.

Gone Nutty
Here’s a refreshing change of pace: an Oscar®-nominated short you can go out and rent. Technically Gone Nutty dates from 2002, when it debuted on home video as part of the Ice Age DVD supplement. Director Saldanha was co-director of the Ice Age feature, which contained as one of recent cinema’s greatest running gags the character Scrat, a sabre-toothed squirrel so high-strung he could break the sound barrier just darting his eyes. Since then this classy Looney Tunes-esque short has screened theatrically and won several prizes at various international festivals, thus qualifying for a well-deserved Academy Award® nomination.

Scrat’s got a nut, and he’s got a place to stash it; but when he tries stuffing it into the last available hole in the center of a sunflower-arrayed sea of nuts filling the top of a hollow stump, he impatiently stomps and stomps in order to force it into place. There’s a foreboding rumble, and down the nuts go, flowing out a knothole in the stump and rolling down the glacier to oblivion. Flabbergasted, Scrat pursues the avalanche of acorny goodness even as he and it are cast by gravity off the edge of the glacier into nothingness.

In the best tradition of the Warner Bros. Roadrunner cartoons, this glacier is apparently 40,000 feet in altitude, and Scrat begins the long, long drop to the planet’s surface. But the racing wind has a calming effect on the rodent, and soon enough Scrat is gathering all the errant acorns Busby Berkeley-like in an aerial ballet set to strains of Tchaikovsky. With the nuts collected in a neat sphere, Scrat suddenly realizes his situation hasn’t improved, and tries, to no avail, to avoid the inevitable impact. The ultimate gag in this short is priceless, so for the sake of non-initiates I’ll leave it out, but let’s just say plate tectonics have never been funnier.

Scrat’s mass of facial tics, the way his fur billows in the wind, and the squash-and-stretch durability of those giant eyeballs when squeezed are just a few of the triumphs of animation technique on display in Gone Nutty, another impeccably-timed crowd-pleaser from Blue Sky Studios.

There you have it — six of the year’s best animated shorts, all of which are guaranteed to earn no more than seven seconds of airtime on Oscar® night. So remember everybody: come February 29, clear the sofa, find the remote, pop the popcorn and — Let’s Go Bowling! ®™

Taylor Jessen is a writer and archivist living in Burbank. He has written over a dozen impossible avant-garde screenplays, as well as the short stories Chateau Tempestuoso and The Footnote Conspiracy. His article on the production history of the animated feature Twice Upon a Time will appear in Animation Blast #9 in April 2004.