2026 Oscars Short Film Contenders: ‘Jesus 2’ Director Jesse Moynihan

Welcome to Cartoon Brew’s series of spotlights focusing on the animated shorts that have qualified for the 2026 Oscars. The films in this series have qualified through one of multiple routes: by winning an Oscar-qualifying award at a film festival, by exhibiting theatrically, or by winning a Student Academy Award.

Today’s short is Jesus 2, directed by Jesse Moynihan. The short qualified for the Oscars through exhibition as part of Don Hertzfeldt’s traveling animation roadshow, Animation Mixtape.

Jesus 2 is a wildly surreal reimagining of the Second Coming as an off-kilter, pop-mythological event, following a newly returned “savior” who navigates the orbit of a tortured world where “gifts” its inhabitants with unwanted eternal life. Aesthetically, it blends vaporwave palettes and lo-fi textures to evoke both traditional sacred iconography and profane digital-aged icons. Influences from Moynihan’s time working on Adventure Time and The Midnight Gospel sneak into the film’s look and feel, but this is a much more mature proposition in both narrative and execution.

Cartoon Brew: What was it about this story or concept that connected with you and compelled you to direct the film?

Jesse Moynihan: I was waking up screaming at night from panic attacks about dying for several years. Not every night, but often enough. Therapy wasn’t really helping. One day, I was drawing in my sketchbook, and I drew a string bean-looking guy riding a black comet. I looked at this weird thing and realized he was an evil reincarnation of Jesus who wanted to stop death as a form of torture for Humanity. So art-making would play devil’s advocate to my fear of dying.

What did you learn through the experience of making this film, either production-wise, filmmaking-wise, creatively, or about the subject matter?

I learned that making independent work was a legitimate path for the next phase of my life. I’d spent the past 15 years working gigs at some of the big animation studios, which was fun and gave me health insurance. But my wildest ideas were never really viable in that development environment. I made this short as a test to see if anyone would care if I made something extremely personal and hard to explain.

Can you describe how you developed your visual approach to the film? Why did you settle on this style/technique?

The look of the short is a spiritual successor to the style I developed when I art-directed The Midnight Gospel at Netflix. After working on that show, I had all sorts of ideas about how the next season could look, but we never got a second season. So I transferred those ambitions to the style of Jesus 2, which really means I just channeled the shadow of Lisa Frank.

You mentioned this was initially developed as a kids’ show for Cartoon Network, but it’s now very, very far from that, at least narratively. How did that change come about?

Around 8 or 9 years ago (I can’t remember exactly), I was in development for a show called The Smuggle Brothers. It was a sci-fi buddy comedy about space smugglers that I loosely modeled after Han Solo and Chewbacca. The idea for it came to me while having a nap after speaking to a development exec about pitching premises to them. I woke up and told them, “Han Solo, Chewbacca, but different!” and then I was in development for a year. After it got the thumbs down, I sat on the idea for a long time. During the pandemic, I looked at my Smuggle Brothers sketchbook and realized I could make something a lot better and different.