Historia de un Oso

March 5, 2016 5:45 AM

Bear Story won the Best Animated Short Oscar 2016. It is an allegory of Chile in the '70s.

Spanish language background: the grandfather; Chilean animation.

posted by andrewcooke (16 comments total)

Saw this movie when animated Oscar-nom shorts ran last month, and loved it (by which I mean I cried). Very human and charming; I am very pleased that it won.
posted by Atrahasis at 6:17 AM on March 5, 2016

I really wanted World of Tomorrow to win the Oscar, but I am okay with Bear Story winning since it was my second favorite.

So, for those who saw it, (spoilers follow) is the ending meant to be ambiguous as to whether he reunites with his family for real?
posted by FJT at 8:06 AM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

is the ending meant to be ambiguous as to whether he reunites with his family for real?

What I took from the ending was that something terrible happened to his real family, but in the story he created inside the box, he made himself a happy ending.
posted by ourobouros at 8:09 AM on March 5, 2016 [9 favorites]

This is really beautiful, and deserving of the win. I just wish Don Hertzfeldt could have also won as well.
posted by oflinkey at 8:12 AM on March 5, 2016

I was also really surprised World of Tomorrow didn't win, since I think it's a better-completed story/complete package. I do wonder about the voting, what criteria they were voting by.

The visuals of Bear Story are very lovely, mainly the in-the-mechanical-box part, but yeah, I wasn't fully satisfied with it because it felt like the whole package is just a tiny bit underbaked as far as the framing story. Agree with ouroboros that I took it he doesn't really reunite with his family and the story-in-the-box is him inventing a happier story for himself.

It's good that Chile got an award, and the backstory is interesting.
posted by LobsterMitten at 8:13 AM on March 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

Also: early on in the framing story when the camera pans back to show the bed - (a) heartbreaking shot, and (b) the impressions of their ears on the pillows!
posted by LobsterMitten at 8:14 AM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

One of the things that bugs me about this category is that so many of these shorts look the same. The properties of 3-D animation can allow for much more variation than this, but the Pixar aesthetic has sort of taken over. Hertzfeldt looks like nothing else (or more correctly, now other people try to look like Hertzfeldt) and the narrative in WoT was more complex but also rendered better, as LobsterMitten noted.
posted by oflinkey at 8:26 AM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Without the framing of the creator's personal history, Bear Story was too heavy handed and too cloying for my tastes.
Admittedly, I'm not very familiar with Chilean history, but I couldn't tell that it was a specific allegory. Families being ripped apart, although tragic, does not automatically equal a good story. Lacking context, it might as well have been an ad for PETA.

I was intrigued by the spark of dark humor when the giraffe is taken away, and a bit more narrative awareness along that vein might have saved the short for me. As it was, the group I watched it with were all in agreement that the art and visuals were amazing, but Bear Story seriously lacked depth. (Also, how was that young bear not completely wrecked after witnessing the story-in-the-box?)

As others have mentioned, World of Tomorrow was terrifically told and creatively presented. Another favorite was We Can't Live Without Cosmos, which somehow managed to take a familiar topic (astronauts!) and do something completely unique and charming with it.
posted by redsparkler at 8:36 AM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yes - the Russian nominee, We Can't Live Without Cosmos, was also really good, and also in the minimalist hand-drawn vein.
posted by LobsterMitten at 8:37 AM on March 5, 2016

Fanfare thread on the Oscar-nominated shorts (Animation), btw.
posted by soundguy99 at 10:26 AM on March 5, 2016

Here in Chile, various right wing politicians, who publicly supported and/or participated in Pinochet's regime, tweeted their congratulations and were promptly skewered for their complete lack of self awareness and understanding of basically anything.
posted by signal at 10:50 AM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

That's great, by which I mean terrible. How has the short been received more generally there? Did people know it before the Oscars?
posted by LobsterMitten at 11:36 AM on March 5, 2016

Not really, my wife is a film critic who knows most of the filmmakers in Chile and we hadn't seen it before the day of the Oscar's.
posted by signal at 12:05 PM on March 5, 2016

I saw the ending as him hiding a detail of the personal struggle he faced, skipping over a detail that would make it less digestible to the next generation (the child bear on the street). Purposefully, he wanted to show younger minds the injustice of authoritarian rule but didn't want to burden them with HIS individual story. And so he keeps ringing his bell, calling attention to a dark history and educating future generations but hiding his own sadness.

As the saying goes, those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it and I think this bear is silently doing what is necessary so that no one else will repeat his loss.
posted by intelligentless at 1:08 PM on March 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

As the saying goes, those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it

Interestingly enough, wasn't that also the point of Prologue?
posted by rokusan at 4:19 PM on March 5, 2016

Purposefully, he wanted to show younger minds the injustice of authoritarian rule but didn't want to burden them with HIS individual story.

That's a good perspective, intelligentless. I wonder if it would have worked better for me if he had been human outside of the story in the box, but retold his story through the bears, and we slowly realized that the story he's telling is a fictionalized version of his personal horrors.
posted by redsparkler at 10:16 AM on March 7, 2016