The National Film Board of Canada is an institution that you always find at the Oscars in the animated short category and 2022/2023 is no exception there. However, it was probably the name of this renowned body that helped "The Flying Sailor" to make it among the final five this year. Forbis and Tilby have a rich history with the Academy and they have collaborated on two other animated short films that managed to get nominated in the past and there was always a bit of a ten-year gap you could say. The first nomination came in the first year of the new millennium and Tilby has another nomination from almost a decade earlier. Their newest work we have here has also garnered some awards attention especially in America, but also in Europe. I am not sure why though. These eight minutes were not particularly good. I would say it was both mediocre in terms of story-telling and animation. A bit of a pity. I expected more here. There are no talking characters, so we also do not have any voice actors. What we do have is a man who, as the result of an explosion, was "flying" several kilometers through the air and he lived to talk about what happened.
The by far most (almost only) interesting thing about this film is really that it was based on an actual event. The man you see here existed in real life and survived this catastrophe if you wanna call it that. The film heavily relies on this real-life reference. It is mentioned more than once in this pretty short film (even for a short film it is a short film) that it is not a fictitious work. So if Tilby and Forbis succeeded with anything, then that they made me curious to check out the actual events from back then that were relatively early in the 20th century if I remember correctly. I am sure the family and grandchildren, or maybe those are not alive anymore either, are fairly happy that there is this little film about their ancestor. I am not sure if you could have turned the story into something longer, but if so, you would have needed a great deal of fiction writing and this would have gone against the big idea in general here. That is all then, I assume. Nothing else really stayed in the mind here except maybe that the guy was naked throughout the film. For me, this is the weakest link from this year's Oscar nominees in the animated short film category. I would be shocked if it actually wins. It is also the only one from the quintet with an imdb rating under 6/10 at this point, even if not by much. As you can see from my rating, I think it is still too high. I give "The Flying Sailor" a thumbs-down, even if the title is a perfect summary in three words here of what happens.
The by far most (almost only) interesting thing about this film is really that it was based on an actual event. The man you see here existed in real life and survived this catastrophe if you wanna call it that. The film heavily relies on this real-life reference. It is mentioned more than once in this pretty short film (even for a short film it is a short film) that it is not a fictitious work. So if Tilby and Forbis succeeded with anything, then that they made me curious to check out the actual events from back then that were relatively early in the 20th century if I remember correctly. I am sure the family and grandchildren, or maybe those are not alive anymore either, are fairly happy that there is this little film about their ancestor. I am not sure if you could have turned the story into something longer, but if so, you would have needed a great deal of fiction writing and this would have gone against the big idea in general here. That is all then, I assume. Nothing else really stayed in the mind here except maybe that the guy was naked throughout the film. For me, this is the weakest link from this year's Oscar nominees in the animated short film category. I would be shocked if it actually wins. It is also the only one from the quintet with an imdb rating under 6/10 at this point, even if not by much. As you can see from my rating, I think it is still too high. I give "The Flying Sailor" a thumbs-down, even if the title is a perfect summary in three words here of what happens.