The Academy Twitter account officially announced the nominees for the upcoming 94th Oscars earlier this morning. The nominees for Best Animated Short Film were five in total, one of them you can see right now for free courtesy of The New Yorker. The short is called Affairs of the Art, and it perfectly illustrates the obsession that comes with being a creative individual.
The short follows Beryl, a woman who feels like her best years are behind her. She wanted to go to art school, but a surprise pregnancy put a stop to it. She talks of her sister, Beverly, and her own string of crazy obsessions. What started as a morbid curiosity over death leads to the killing of a pet spirals and blossoms over the years, leading her to new habits and eventually leaving the country. Beryl talks of her son and his own obsessions, a relationship with a pet pigeon and hyper-fixations on numbers and calculations. As Beryl recounts these events, she jumps from one art project to the next, expressing her own anxieties and regrets throughout her life. The film gives a remarkably human look into the lives of these family members, giving an impressive amount of layers crammed into a short movie just a little over sixteen minutes in length.
Affairs of the Art was a co-creation between Joanna Quinn and Les Mills. Quinn, who’s history is primarily in animation, served as the film’s director, storyboard artist, and lead animator. Mills served as producer, color design, and screenwriter. The film was traditionally animated on a lightbox and took more than 24,000 hand drawn frames to produce. The coloration was done on the program TVPaint and composited all together in Adobe After Effects. So in short, if you’re a fan of animation and miss the days of hand drawn work then this is a film you don’t want to pass up! Quinn released a very neat behind the scenes video on her Youtube channel that was filmed during the short’s production.
Beryl Through the Years
For anyone new to the leading lady, Affairs of the Art isn’t the first short Beryl has been the star of. The character made her first appearance in Quinn’s first animated short, Girl’s Night Out, released in 1987. In the short, Beryl is a bored housewife who enjoys a wild night with her gal pals to celebrate her birthday. Girl’s Night Out would go on to win the Special Jury Award at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival as well as the Silver Dragon in the Krakow Film Festival. Beryl would star in her second short, 1990’s Body Beautiful, which showed Beryl struggling with her own body image. The film would win the BAFTA Cymru Award for Best Animation. Beryl would take a break until 2006, where she re-appeared in Dreams and Desires: Family Ties. The film follows Beryl as she takes up a new appreciation for film and attempts to record a friend’s wedding, of course, things get a little crazy, but it makes for an unforgettable watch. The film would earn a whopping eighteen different award nominations, taking home thirteen of them as the winner!
Along with the Beryl shorts, Quinn has also made a name for herself for animating various commercials over the years. Her most famous commercial work is most definitely the Charmin Bears! She’s also created other shorts such as 1993’s Brittania, 1996’s Famous Fred, and The Wife of Bath segment for the 1998 television series The Canterbury Tales.
Affairs of the Art won’t be Joanna Quinn’s first round with the Oscars. In 1998 she was nominated for Best Short Animation for another project of hers, Famous Fred. This would, however, be Les Mills’s first nomination by the Academy. Both figures have been longtime collaborators and have won numerous awards either together or on different projects. Let’s hope with this year, the two, and Beryl, will get a bit of the coveted gold! In the meantime, most of the older Beryl shorts are free to watch on the official Beryl Productions Youtube channel.