Oscar Shortlist Interviews: ‘The Shyness Of Trees’ Directors On Their Favorite Shot (EXCLUSIVE)

We invited the filmmakers behind each of this year’s 15 Oscar-shortlisted animated shorts to share their favorite shot from their film and explain why it’s special to them.

Nomination voting starts on January 12 and runs through January 16.

Today, we hear from the team of Gobelins student filmmakers behind ‘The Shyness of Trees’: Sofiia Chuikovska, Loïck Du Plessis D’Argentré, Lina Han, Simin He, Jiaxin Huang, Maud Le Bras, and Bingqing Shu. The group created the short as part of the school’s Master’s program in character animation and filmmaking.

Set in the hushed French countryside and rendered in soft, lineless 2D animation, the short follows forty-year-old Hélène, who visits her aging mother and finds the house and garden overgrown with plants. Unsettled, things only get stranger when Hélène later finds her mother in front of an old oak tree, swaying in the breeze, mimicking the plant. As luminous dancing insects and leaves of all shapes and sizes fill the frame, it becomes clear that something otherworldly is happening in the old woman’s garden.

Here’s the group’s favorite shot, and why it’s such an important moment in the film’s narrative:

There are many reasons why this shot feels like the most important in the movie to us.

First of all, from a storytelling perspective, this is the emotional climax of the movie. The fear of Hélène of seeing her mother leave is happening before her eyes, and she tries to stop it in one last desperate effort. Symbolically, it is also important as it is where we see Hélène turning back into a child, accentuating her feeling of vulnerability and helplessness in front of the inevitable loss of a parent.

Finally, it was one of the most technically challenging shots, combining a moving camera, animated background, a transformation, and emotional performance from the character, all executed beautifully by our animator Simin, who worked on it for almost a month.