A history lesson just in time for Olympics season.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscars Quest ’26 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony on March 15th, including all the shorts we’d never heard of before the Academy brought attention to them.

Each year since 2009 (except for 2021’s pandemic lockdown marathon) I’ve ventured out to the few Indianapolis theaters carrying the big-screen releases of the Academy Award nominees for Best Live-Action Short Film and Best Animated Short Film. Results vary each time and aren’t always for all audiences, but I appreciate the opportunities to sample such works and see what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences deemed worthy of honoring, whether I agree with their collective opinions or not. My wife and adult son usually accompany me on the journey and we make a family outing of it, even though Oscars Quest is not their problem.

One caveat to anyone else out there planning to see any of the shorts collections in theaters: all three are advertised as being “Presented by Taika Waititi”. That does not mean he shot host segments for them. Apparently he’s just a title sponsor, kinda like the sports stadiums near you that are all named after major corporations, or any TV show that boasts Executive Producer Steven Spielberg’s autopenned assent. Waititi may have helped behind the scenes in making this year’s shorts programs a reality, but he otherwise assays the role of Sir Not Appearing in These Presentations.

First up: this year’s five Best Animated Short Film nominees, ranked, none of which are from the giant American studios you’d expect. Links or streaming options are provided where available in non-pirated form.

1. Papillon (“Butterfly”) (The Jewish Film Institute on YouTube). An elderly Algerian Jewish swimmer reminisces about childhood, love, Olympic triumph, stark oppression, and survival against the odds. The deceptively swirly reflections, which French director Florence Miailhe rendered entirely in oil paintings, take a dark turn when the filmmakers reveal it’s all based on a true story set about Olympic athlete Alfred Nakache, whose story intersects with exactly the worst regime at the wrong time. Beautiful and horrifying at once.

A churl with a pearl not hoisted from boisterous oysters.

2. The Girl Who Cried Pearls. Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski (makers of the 2007 Oscar nominee Madame Tutli-Putli), return to the stage with a Dickensian stop-motion tale (narrated by For All Mankind‘s Colm Feore) in which a wealthy man tells his granddaughter about the time he was a mere ragamuffin squatting in abandoned houses, and how he discovered a fantastical income source derived from someone else’s suffering. Every frame pops with exquisitely crafted puppet-squalor infesting every dreary set. This was a hairbreadth away from taking the top spot, if not for the idiot-plot twist at the end that’s amusing enough to entertain kiddos but is the least thoughtful part.

MYTH: After retirement you’ll accomplish all your remaining dreams. REALITY: You’ll spend 16 hours a day on Facebook.

3. Retirement Plan (The New Yorker on YouTube). The funniest short according to us middle-agers, our wizened narrator (Domhnall Gleeson) lists the 1,001 things he plans to do after he retires, which he might just fit in assuming he lives to be 250. A few sight gags provide value-added chuckles, but this could’ve been just as effective — and maybe gotten a wider audience — if they’d tweeted out the script as a poem on Shel Silverstein’s birthday instead.

A young Smokey the Bear learns to love forests.

4. Forevergreen (the makers’ official YouTube channel). The latest iteration of that beloved childhood story template in which a benevolent lifeform adopts a completely different lifeform and raises it to adulthood, culminating in either heart-warmth or heartbreak. In this case, it’s a Christian faux-stop-motion fable (complete with trendy low-frame-rate jitters) about a tall old tree that adopts a bear cub. The verse from John 15 at the end is a keeper, and it’s a colorful enough diversion for any kid who’s tired of rewatching all their parents’ old VeggieTales tapes again and again.

An extremely lo-fi Gilligan’s Island meets Petticoat Junction.

5. The Three Sisters. 2-D clip-art animation is BACK, baby! Konstantin Broznit (previous nominees Lavatory – Love Story and We Cannot Live Without Cosmos) returns after several painstaking years with lightweight silent comedy. The titular trio lives in a triplex on their own island, stressed but mostly peaceable until one day a man shows up. Yep, a MAAAY-UUN! Hilarity ensues! I chuckled some, but the last scene is an awfully pat non-ending that robs the whole of any unified meaning beyond “It’s best if you don’t have to share.”

But wait! There’s more!

Harvey Comics presents Li’l Red Sonja!

Because the five nominees barely add up to an hour’s runtime, theater-goers are treated to a bonus short: Eiru, from the frequently Oscar-nominated Irish studio Cartoon Saloon, who first came to U.S. attention with The Secret of Kells. Director Giovanna Ferrari (Wolfwalkers, The Breadwinner) maintains the CS quality control with the story of a tiny girl in a quasi-Viking clan who wants to prove her warrior mettle but gets sidelined until a task comes along that no one else fits. Her seemingly independent journey to self-worth digresses a tad, ultimately connecting her to other disparate peoples because it was never just about her land. A Moral of the Story about selflessness is a timely lesson a lot of public figures and internet users could stand to learn, but anyone who wants only a concentrated dose of female empowerment may feel short-changed.