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This batch of eight shorts includes the Academy Award nominees and winners from the animated and live-action categories, and it’s worth seeing if only for the animated winner "Ryan," Chris Landreth’s piece about Ryan Larkin, an Oscar-nominated (for the 1968 "Walking") animator turned homeless burnout. It’s psychedelic, stirring, and beautiful to watch. Jeff Fowler’s fluffy "Gopher Broke" is a cartoon about a chubby gopher trying to snag some veggies. Quiet in comparison is Sejong Park’s "Birthday Boy"; set in Korea in 1951, it follows a little bear cub of a boy wandering around his empty village where war looms. In the live-action set, Ashvin Kumar’s "Little Terrorist" features a young Pakistani boy who accidentally crosses the border into India, with his innocence playing predictably against the politics of his mistake. In "Two Cars, One Night," an atmospheric piece from Taika Waititi and Ainsley Gardiner, the New Zealand accent sometimes makes English sound like another language. Spanish director Nacho Vigalando’s "7:35 in the Morning" is a funny, dark musical in which a man considers how to woo a woman in a café. And "Wasp," the well-deserved live-action winner, is Andrea Arnold’s story of a young, fiery British mother of four little girls who’s alternately neglectful, hysterical, and loving. (87 minutes)
BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN
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