Vague Visages’ animated short films review contains minor spoilers. This article covers The Girl Who Cried Pearls (2025), Butterfly (2024), Forevergreen (2025), The Three Sisters (2024) and Retirement Plan (2024). Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

After decades of Disney and Pixar dominance, the two powerhouse Hollywood animation studios have quietly but suddenly stopped making work eligible for the Academy’s Animated Short Film category. Pixar pivoted to developing new talent via their SparkShorts program (only one of which, “Burrow,” wound up with a nomination, belatedly getting attached to Soul [2020] for its 2024 re-release), and the few theatrical shorts released by either studio are lazy brand extensions — spin-offs of everything from Up (2009) to Frozen (2013). It’s a major loss when it comes to helping new animators find their feet within the studio system, but it’s also an undeniable gain for a wider array of international filmmakers, with American shorts now few and far between in the post-COVID nomination slates.

As for the 2026 nominees, the independent animation Forevergreen is the one best placed to fill the gap left by those studios all but vacating the race, with anthropomorphized characters and an unapologetically tearjerking storyline that would be at home in a Pixar or Disney production. Unsurprisingly, this is the product of two Disney veterans in the form of directors Nathan Engelhardt and Jeremy Spears, an animation supervisor and storyboard artist, respectively, with big-deal credits including Moana (2016), Encanto (2021) and both Zootopia films (2016, 2025). If anything, the biggest criticism I could throw at Forevergreen is that it’s by far the most polished crowd-pleaser of this year’s crop, the most risk-averse in how it adheres to a tried and tested studio formula in its tale of an unlikely, lifelong friendship between a bear and a tree (both designed with maximum cuddliness in mind), and the impending emotional devastation of a forest fire. But I’ll be damned if Forevergreen isn’t effective, landing the laughs in its early silent comedy mode and still managing to bring me to the verge of tears even as its narrative machinations couldn’t be more belabored in the way they’re engineered.

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The biggest misstep arises after Forevergreen’s bittersweet finale, as a bible quote appears onscreen just before the credits roll; an out of place inclusion considering that Engelhardt and Spears’ story builds to the devastating effect natural disasters can have on the environment. It’s a send-off that retroactively made me feel far more cynical about a fable that managed to work its magic on me. As dramatically well-earned as the optimistic ending may be, coupling it with a verse from scripture undermines any real-world concerns about a worsening climate the drama references. Rather than presenting a resolution demanding collaboration and change to protect these worsening habitats — much like the denouement to Wall-E (2008) — it becomes a fantastical happy ending about overcoming obstacles, where the moral is a broad sentiment about friendship and family. It’s a case of a short falling at the very last hurdle, and it doesn’t stick the landing like the emotive Pixar tales it aspires to emulate.

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Forevergreen is the only one of this year’s nominees unambiguously aimed at a young audience, but older children should hopefully get a kick out of the dark stop-motion fairytale The Girl Who Cried Pearls, the latest effort from previous Oscar nominees Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski. Described by the pair as their attempt to make a traditional story in the Hans Christian Andersen mold, the short utilizes the framing device of an elderly man (voiced by Colm Feore) telling a story to his granddaughter about growing up homeless in early 20^th century Montreal. That the narrative jumps back and forth several decades later only accentuates the feeling that it’s the latest retelling of a family folk tale. I also found the short invocative of Charles Dickens’ very best child-focused stories, as the directors refuse to sanitize the hardships faced by a boy left squatting at a young age, with the narrative mysticism representing a moral dilemma: should you profit off another person’s misery? In this case, the protagonist witnesses his abused next-door neighbor’s tears transform into pearls before his eyes, rolling into a crevice between her apartment and his squalid dump next door.

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The Girl Who Cried Pearls’ directors have described the short as their first effort with a conventional narrative structure and a plot development which could be considered a twist. For filmmakers whose prior work has been far more experimental, Lavis and Szczerbowski likely regard this as their riskiest move yet, and it’s a gamble that paid off. The evocations of Dickens’ dispatches from below the poverty line, combined with the dark fantasy reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, gives The Girl Who Cried Pearls an out-of-time quality, with the eerie, expressive puppet designs and expansive recreations of turn-of-the-century Montreal ensuring it never feels like a mere homage to those storytellers. Unlike the filmmaking duo’s prior short, The Girl Who Cried Pearls sticks the landing but still feels lacking. The story builds to a revelation which recontextualizes the drama as one about myth-making but does little beyond this “gotcha” moment to explore why moviegoers have remained fascinated by the darkest, most depressing stories about poverty and suffering for countless generations. The Girl Who Cried Pearls is a great modern fairytale, but there’s something even more impactful left in the margins which could have elevated it beyond an effective homage into something singular.

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Another nominated film which feels out of time is The Three Sisters, which — as a British viewer — feels like a dispatch from the 1970s; it has the same bawdy humor as a saucy seaside town postcard or double entendre-laden sitcom from that decade. Even though it’s lacking spoken dialogue, you could still call it “Carry on Sailor,” with its cheeky, gleefully immature brand of sex comedy that’s comparable to the mid-20^th century British comedy franchise Carry On. On an animation level, the craftsmanship is by far the weakest of the five nominees, and a quick glance at Letterboxd reveals that most viewers seem baffled by a regressive sex comedy about three sisters on a remote island pining after a sailor. I encountered more than one throwaway review from a user offering a variation on the line, “it’s obvious a straight man directed this.” I can’t pretend I didn’t laugh multiple times, even if the biggest joke might be that something this devoid of ambition managed to sneak into the final five.

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The biggest story might be that director Konstantin Broznit had previously submitted The Girl Who Cried Pearls to festivals under a fake name and nationality, which he has claimed wasn’t an elaborate ruse to obscure his Russian origin. Since the nomination, Ukrainian media has seized on a picture of him receiving a prize from Vladimir Putin in 2016 following his previous Best Animated Short nomination, even though Broznit criticized Russia’s war and signed open letters condemning it in the years since. Personally, I can’t help but find it funny that the rare Russian story to have received international acclaim since the 2022 invasion is a sex comedy about three women pining over a smelly sailor — it’s hardly like the work of Andrei Tarkovsky making its way beyond the Iron Curtain.

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Next up, Butterfly — a hand-painted biopic about the Jewish-Algerian swimmer Alfred Nakache, a short which possesses an ambition that’s lacking in The Girl Who Cried Pearls. Florence Miailhe’s film ticks off all the stereotypical narrative beats you’d expect from a real-life sporting figure tale, including Nakache’s success at the 1936 Olympics and getting stripped of both medals. However, the director seems commendably uninterested in playing these beats to cynically tug at the audience’s heartstrings like a standard biopic would, transforming a life story into a haunting memory piece as each career landmark dissolves into the next via gorgeously realized watercolor paintings. Butterfly is a staggering achievement in animation, but one that quite deliberately doesn’t have the lasting emotional impact you’d expect. Miailhe’s subject looks back on his career, refusing to succumb to sentimentalization, with every flashback to concentration camps or the loss of his family members addressed matter-of factly. A straightforward live-action biopic would be nowhere near as attention-grabbing, but Nakache — a forgotten historical figure — is incredibly deserving of a proper feature.

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Finally, the shortest of the nominees proves to be the most profound; Irish animator John Kelly’s Retirement Plan, a seven-minute dose of existentialism with comforting Domhnall Gleeson’s narration helping to create an overpowering feeling of dark comfort. Initially a comedic short where the unnamed protagonist prepares a retirement plan — from making more time for friends and vacations to sexual experimentation and extreme sports — Kelly subtly ages up the simplistic character design as the narrative progresses, banking on warm humor to distract viewers from the lead’s physical decline. Even with the slightest runtime, Retirement Plan is the most effectively realized character study of the five nominees, as it touches on universal anxieties about fear and aging but never feels like a broad attempt to resonate with as many viewers as possible. In a highly emotive crop of nominees, Kelly’s short film offers the most well-earned tears of the bunch.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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