I will always have a soft spot for animated shorts. Maybe it’s because I’ve been looking forward to them ever since I saw my first Pixar film in a theater, and discovered how elegant a simple but poignant story could be. Or maybe it’s because the medium’s visual language is so easy to slip into. In any case, this year’s animated slate ranged widely in subject matter, from friendship, first crushes, and the color blue to menstruation, puppetry, and driving school. 

Betrayer was a personal favorite: ‘Momma said I’m a betrayer and deserve to die/ white goo came out of her vagina scattered with dirty clothes and dishes/ grandma’s turned into a spider, spinning a web with the eternal string of suffering…’ Dark in theme, pencil-drawn in look, and striking in tone, the film moves through spiders and family and pain to evoke the cyclical effects of generational trauma. Jincheng Driving School finds profundity in the mundane, while Boudoir Doll imagines a world where strings are quite literally attached. Authentic dialogue and fantastical imagery respectively drive their narrative engines. 

On the other end of the spectrum, Three Seals unfolds as a heartwarming fable set to a funky soundtrack. A Drop of Dew is brief and sweet, capturing the whimsical perspective of a little girl, while Han, What’s Taking So Long? evokes the gentle nostalgia of first encounters (and reminds me of my mom). Echoes of Soul conveys a child’s innocent longing for warmth and friendship, while Shapes of Blue falls somewhere between light and dark, a graceful French-Japanese meditation on color and life.

If anything united the program, it was a willingness to experiment – visually, emotionally, and narratively – on themes of womanhood, coming-of-age, and feeling itself. From intimate diary to surreal dreamscape, these shorts were a reminder of just how expressive the form can be. Playful, unsettling, and beautiful in turns, the films make a quiet case for animation as a humble but powerful medium: compact, yes, but all the more so compelling for it.