To see clips from the nominated animated shorts, visit 2007 AWN Oscar Showcase.

Director Roger Allers filled The Little Matchgirl with rich watercolor textures. All The Little Matchgirl images © Disney.

The Oscar category of Best Animated Short has, traditionally, been dominated by product from passionate minor-leaguers from outside the Hollywood mainstream. This year the animated shorts category looks like the filmic equivalent your local parking lot: most of the vehicles you see come from just a few majors. In 2007, three out of five nominees are from feature film houses with massive cultural renown and overhead to match -- Disney has released The Little Matchgirl, a re-telling of the Hans Christian Andersen story; Ice Age producers Blue Sky present a Scrat short, No Time for Nuts; and blockbuster farm Pixar has produced the hilarious sci-fi vignette Lifted.

In the category of smaller budgets, but big artistic heritage, is Canada's National Film Board, co-producers of the fourth nominee, The Danish Poet; and millions of scrappy indie animators worldwide are represented by nominee #5, Maestro, a micro-budget personal project from Hungary. Together these five vehicles with their disparate means of production are getting the audience they deserve in a program of animated shorts from Magnolia Pictures, along with five fine items from the Oscar shortlist (see Magnolia's website for program details, times and venues). Animation World Network talked to all the nominated directors, and as usual be warned that if you'd like to come fresh to these films as a moviegoer STOP READING NOW because we are -- remorselessly -- about to ruin the surprise.

Roger Allers, most recently the co-director of Open Season, directed last year's animated Disney short The Little Matchgirl. Allers is pleased to no end with the film's fate, and not just because it looks and sounds -- and ends -- just the way he wanted it. Not only did it get made -- a rare-enough success for a short film in a studio environment -- it's now on home video attached to the hugely successful homevid title The Little Mermaid. He does hope, though, that the kids who will be watching Mermaid 150 times will remember to check the DVD supplements. "Does anybody watch those things other than all us film geeks?" he laughs. "I don't know. My mother will watch it."

The Little Matchgirl, a retelling of the classic tearjerker about a girl trying to sell matches who eventually freezes to death in a snowdrift, came together over several years using whatever parts of the massive Disney talent pool that weren't otherwise occupied. "It actually was a kind of catch-as-catch-can production," Allers says. "It was like, 'Let's do this for no money!' I mean obviously they had to pay the color modelists and so on, but basically we used people while they weren't busy with their own projects. We did get to use the Paris studio for quite a while. It was guerilla filmmaking. People came and went."

The short, like Lorenzo, One By One and Destino, was originally conceived circa 2001 as an element in an internationally themed feature-length Fantasia sequel that never quite came together. And as Roger had always loved the original Andersen story, when Don Hahn dangled the opportunity to direct it, Roger jumped. "I had worked on Kingdom of the Sun," Allers says, "and I helped out on Lilo & Stitch for a while, and then we animated a new sequence for the Lion King DVD. That's what I was doing when Don said 'Are you interested in doing something for the Fantasia?' That was a dream come true. Fantasia for me always represented the pinnacle. I like verbal humor, but boy -- it makes it feel almost like a different art when you're just putting images to music. It's like dancing."

Allers and crew worked to perfect the color scheme. The cold St. Petersburg winter is made palpable by a palette of basic greys with leanings toward the violets, greens, and blues of a vibrantly-colored world desaturated by a cruel Russian winter.

The Little Matchgirl fills the screen with rich watercolor textures -- the backgrounds built from real drawings done the usual analog way on paper, the characters colored and textured digitally. Allers credits the look to Disney inspirational artist Hans Bacher. "He came on to help, just to noodle some visual ideas, and he was playing with images of the girl. He often works in ink wash because it's really fast, and I got excited about the way that pigment would soak into the paper. It had a grittiness and a romanticism, a suggestive quality." Allers and art director Mike Humphries went through many grades of watercolor paper to see just how much tooth the paper could have on-screen without being distracting.

Allers and his crew worked endlessly to perfect the color scheme, where the cold of an overcast St. Petersburg winter is made palpable thanks to a palette where basic greys all have slight leanings toward the violets, greens, and blues of a vibrantly-colored world desaturated by a cruel Russian winter. It looks cold, it feels cold, and the texture can be rough and unforgiving -- all pretty daring for a studio famous for kid-friendly fare. "That's the cool thing about shorts," Allers says, "that you can experiment with technique. It makes you stop and think -- how long could we look at this technique? Would we tire over the length of a whole feature?... but I think an audience will travel with it, whatever it looks like, as long as they can stay connected to the characters' experience.

"It's like Don Hertzfeldt's Everything Will Be Okay, which I think is such a brilliant film. I go, 'Oh my God, these are little stick figure guys, and I am so emotionally connected to this story of this little character.' Not that I'm proposing Don do a feature in that style," he laughs, "but it's so interesting how much you can convey with so little."