Wall▪E eventually struck out in its bid to match 1991’s Beauty and the Beast as the only animated film to ever score a Best Picture Academy Award nomination, but its widespread critical praise helped underscore the notion — once somewhat radical, now more firmly rooted — that animation is a medium, and not a genre unto itself. More proof comes courtesy of this year’s slate of nominees for Best Animated Short Film.

Running only three minutes, French entry Oktapodi is the shortest nominated film, and it’s also the slightest — a case of colorful but empty style masquerading as entertainment. The story finds two octopi fighting for their lives in an out-of-water, air-quote comical escape/rescue mission through the streets of a small Greek village. Nothing about this short sequence makes much sense, and those inclined to give it a good-natured, shrugging pass need only be reminded of Finding Nemo‘s thrilling, funny aquarium escape scene, which didn’t ignore basic biological facts about its subjects, but instead incorporated them into the story.

House of Small Cubes, Japanese writer-director Kunio Kato’s 12-minute effort, is an elegiac offering
about an old man battling a rising tide to save his house; there’s a
children’s-storybook-come-to-life quality to the animation, and it draws a viewer in slowly. Near wordless nine-minute British entry This Way Up, a slice of funeral slapstick from Adam Foulkes and Alan Smith in which two morgue attendants try to deliver a coffin to rest, is gorgeously sketched, but, like Oktapodi, a bit hollow, narratively.

The theatrical pre-show entertainment to Wall▪E, and part of its DVD celebration as well, Disney/Pixar’s five-minute Presto (above) is about a turn-of-the-century magician who, after failing to feed his rabbit, enters into a wild on-stage game of one-upsmanship with said animal. Writer-director Doug Sweetland’s is the crown jewel of the nominated flicks, a kinetic, funny little farce that also manages to slip in a few touching grace notes about the mutual dependence of its characters. Easily the second-best entry is Lavatory Lovestory, a spare, mostly black-and-white, 10-minute Russian film from writer-director Konstantin Bronzit about a lonely female toilet attendant who attempts to uncover the identity of her secret admirer. Formally, it’s nothing like Peanuts, but its mixture of externalized daydream and (swallowed, in this case) interior monologue recalls Charles Schulz’s skill at mixing the wry and the wistful. A tender score helps matters, too.

Many big cities are hosting theatrical exhibitions of the films, but look for them down the line, collected, on DVD, if they don’t make it to your area in the coming weeks. The animated program includes five more “commended” bonus shorts from Marc Crase, Bill Plympton, Matthew Walker and Jeremy Clapin not screened for review, hence its listed running time below. For a review of the 2008 Oscar live action short film nominees, click here. (Shorts International/Magnolia, unrated, 88 minutes)

The Academy Awards on February 22 offer up all sorts of major league intrigue, but the undercard is pretty compelling too, at least for those who’ve seen the 10 short-form (five live action, five animation) Oscar nominees. As a kid I always wondered why these didn’t road-show, and while the truth is they’re too arty to make it worth a distributor’s while in broad fashion, if you live in a big city there’s a decent chance you’ll be able to catch them this month. Otherwise, make yourself a Netflix note.

Director Reto Caffi’s On the Line, a joint Swiss/German entry that runs around half an hour,  is about department store security guard, Rolf (Roeland Wiesnekker) who’s secretly infatuated with Sarah (Catherine Janke), a clerk in the store’s bookshop. When he witnesses who he presumes to be a love rival being attacked on a train, he abandons him — a decision that carries with it devastating consequences. The premise is very Brian De Palma, but the acting here is restrained and beautiful, and the melancholic whole conjures up a slightly sunnier Michael Haneke, maybe cross-pollinated with late ’90s-era James Mangold.

Also fairly long-form, Denmark’s The Pig, scripted by Anders August and Dorte Hogh and directed by the latter, is a sublime treat. When Asbjorn Jensen (Henning Moritzen) is admitted to the hospital for surgery (“in the butt,” as he bluntly tells the nurse), and held over so that some additional tests might be run to determine whether he has cancer, he takes comfort from an unusual source — a whimsical painting of a pig. When it’s removed by the Muslim family of his new roommate — who finds the image offensive — Asbjorn wigs out, demanding its return. His lawyer daughter gets involved, and there’s a wheel-spinning stalemate. It’s a funny concept, rendered in a very rooted, humanistic yet amusing fashion.

French entry Manon on the Asphalt, from writer-directors Elizabeth Marre and Olivier Pont, is a 15-minute tale of subjective remembrance — think of it very loosely as a disciple of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, though vaccumed free of bold-stroke visual style — told from the point-of-view of a girl struck by a car while riding home on her bicycle. Eleven-minute Irish entry New Boy, meanwhile, from writer-director Steph Green, is based on a Roddy Doyle short story. In it, Joseph (Olutunji Ebun-Cole, above), a young African immigrant, struggles to find a place for himself during his first day at a parochial school, as flashbacks make clear a distressing classroom past in his homeland.

The most ploddingly obvious of the bunch, and the only real misfire, is Germany’s 14-minute Toyland, from director Jochen Alexander Freydank. Of course, since it’s about the Holocaust (a mother tries to convince her young son that their Jewish neighbors, and his piano teacher, are going on a journey to “Toyland,” which then complicates things, because of course he wants to go too), it stands as good a chance as anything here — and probably much better — of winning. It’s exquisitely costumed and framed, no doubt, but the “how to save a life” story is a wan Schindler’s List rip-off. I won’t pretend to be a handicapping genius with respect to the “mini” Oscars, but I’d rate The Pig and On the Line tied as top-shelf keepers, New Boy a strong second and respectable tone poem Manon on the Asphalt third of the bunch. If Toyland wins, it’s only because of its thematic focus, and it could signal a big evening for The Reader. For a review of the 2008 Oscar animated short film nominees, meanwhile, click here. (Shorts International/Magnolia, unrated, 94 minutes)