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By Timothy Chow
 I watched the 75th Academy Award Short Film winners of 2003 last night. The great thing with short films is that they're short, mandated at less than 40 minutes by the Academy's rules, yet they still manage to pack a surprising punch, engaging us completely in the few minutes that they have. The ChubbChubbs! was the winner of the Best Animated Short Film category and was one of the two better animated films, the other being Das Rad (The Rocks). The former tells of an alien who works as a cleaner at a pub on some distant planet, but dreams of making it big as a singer. After offending the head-lining performer he gets unceremoniously kicked out of the pub, only to see a great cloud of baddies with armour and all sorts of scary weapons running towards him from off in the distance. Concerned, he runs back in, trying to alert the other people. He tries and tries to get through the the pub's occupents but doesn't get to say his spiel, instead getting thrown out again.
Finally, somebody else runs in and yells out that “The ChubbChubbs” are here. Everyone runs outside, hilarious things ensue. The people associated with the film did a good job of incorporating and dropping little nods to famous aliens from Hollywood, from the Aliens to ET. Cute and entertaining, this was like a six-minute version of movies like Shrek and Finding Nemo. Overall I thought the animation category was fairly weak - mostly style, little substance.
On the other hand, all in all, the Best Live Action Short Films were fairly excellent. Der Er En Yndig Mand was the winning entry from Denmark, a 29 minute long film about Lars Hansen, a native-born white Dane who attends a job training program. Accidentally, his identity gets mixed with an El Hassan from Pakistan and he gets assigned to take Danish lessons since he's apparently an immigrant. He tries but is unable to fix the error. When he learns that his attractive teacher and ex-classmate, Ida, will lose her job if El Hassan doesn't show up to class, he dyes his hair, fixes a moustache and puts on makeup to pose as El Hassan.
Then he tries flirting with her as Lars, but that fails when she finds out that El Hassan might lose his job at the print job to Lars. So she becomes friends with El Hassan. I don't know about you, but this Ida's awfully stupid to not be able to tell that the two are the same person. Either way, hugely entertaining story, kind of amusing and highly appropriate in that it deals with latent racism in the Danish population.
J'Attendrai Le Suivant is the 4 minute entry from France about a man who gets onto the subway and begs, not for money, but for love. From one station to another, he doles out a beautiful monologue about wanting love and wanting to find someone who shares his same ideas and belief in a better world. I can not believe that a film like this can pack so much emotion in such a short period of time. It makes feature-length films look kind of shoddy.
Fait d'Hiver is also a really good short film, from Belgium. A man is stuck in traffic and calls home with his new cellphone. His daughter picks up the phone and he asks for mommy. She says that she's with Uncle Wim upstairs. Confused and fearing the worst, he doesn't understand and asks her to go upstairs to tell mommy that daddy's in the driveway. Bad things happen. What a “WTF-that-DID-NOT-just-happen” ending.
If you can find these films, do so - they're worth the effort.
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