Oscar Short Film Race: AI Experiments, 2D Horror and 40-Minute Bets

Forty minutes or less. That's the ceiling binding every film now jostling for position in the Academy's three short categories — live action, animation and documentary — and this year's field runs from a Pixar veteran's AI pipeline test to an Oscar winner directing Michelle Yeoh for a fashion house.

The shorts race has always worked as a double engine: a launching pad for emerging directors and a lab for veterans who want to experiment outside feature-length constraints. Modest budgets and little or no distribution push filmmakers toward risk. The result, across this year's contenders, is intimate character studies, boundary-testing animation and documentaries tackling volatile subjects with striking economy.

What's driving the documentary field?

Anne Sundberg's "A Month in Minnesota" chronicles the fallout from the fatal ICE shootings in Minneapolis, and her focus is structural: how a community organizes after violence.

"The first thing was I really wanted to bring people inside the experience of what it was to be in Minnesota at the time that this happened," Sundberg says. "There were networks that developed. There was a clear sense of purpose. This could have been any city in the U.S."

She adds that people "learned quickly how to form networks, how to trust each other, how to figure out who needed what."

Taliesin Black-Brown's "Listen" takes the opposite approach — one person, one struggle. It follows sound recordist Hank Lentfer as he documents sounds in nature while caring for his mother, who is in the final stages of dementia. "It's my real hope that it just inspires people to listen, to maybe pause and then to kind of just experience nature and the sounds around them," Black-Brown says. "Just to make space to sit in a park and listen to a bird. It can be really healing."

How is animation's tech debate playing out?

The animated short category is where this year's rule-and-technology story gets sharp. Two frontrunners represent opposite poles of the craft-versus-AI argument.

Joe Hsieh's "Prising Mantis" — hand-drawn 2D horror — took about four years to complete. The Taiwan-based director frames shorts as proof of concept for genre fusion. "Short films are a very, very good way to show that horror and animation are full of imagination," Hsieh says. "You start with the idea of the character and you build from there to make a story for the audiences."

"Dear Upstairs Neighbors," about a frazzled insomniac chasing sleep, runs the other direction. The team trained an AI model on artist-created paintings, with artists guiding the assembly. Executive producer Marcia Mayer, formerly of Pixar, compares the controversy to CG's disruption of the hand-drawn pipeline decades ago.

"Short films are often done as a test of new technology in animation," Mayer says. "We scanned 35 paintings and trained a model on the different styles of painting. We're using AI to create the look the filmmakers always wanted and it's making it possible to make this film in a realistic timeline." The process, she says, let director Connie He "make the film she wanted to make."

What does the live action slate look like?

The live action field mixes micro-budget personal work with brand-backed prestige.

Kathryn Kalucki's "Jozefa," about her grandmother's early experiences as a refugee, was shot in Burbank on a one-week prep and a "very feverish two-and-a-half days" of shooting. "We were able to make something powerful, even with all those limitations," Kalucki says.

Patrick Willems, a YouTube filmmaker with a long-form film criticism channel, directed "Power Trip" — and found the compressed schedule familiar. "I'm used to having almost no resources and having to do everything myself," Willems says. "So making a short like this feels amazing... You learn there's no time to waste."

Mekhai Lee's "Them That's Not" treats the short as its own form, not a feature audition. "It's like the novella to the novel," Lee says, citing James Baldwin and Octavia Butler. "The way that this film was executed in this time, in this space, within these parameters, that is exactly what and how it needed to be done."

Then the big names. Sean Baker, the Academy Award-winning director of "Anora," made "Sandiwara," starring Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh, through fashion house Self-Portrait's residency program. "I never consider myself an expert filmmaker," Baker says. "When these opportunities come around and I connect with the idea, it's just an opportunity for further learning."

Maggie Gyllenhaal, commissioned by Genesis, directed "Flesh Impact" — on Marilyn Monroe's life, starring Ellen Burstyn and Dakota Johnson. "I think some stories are meant to be 17 minutes, like mine," Gyllenhaal says. "Short films don't get distribution. It's not realistic to finance something like this." Her image for the form: "these little geodes that look like a rock from the outside but when you turn it over it's full of something unexplainable."

The race is wide open. The common thread is constraint — of runtime, money, schedule — and what filmmakers build inside it.