This year's nominations for best animated short range from heartwarming to slightly strange. Pixar's La Luna, directed by Enrico Casarosa, mixes nostalgia and fantasy, as a boy embarks on a life-lesson sojourn with his father and grandfather. Inspired by Italo Calvino's story Ladder to the Moon, it offers a clever child, twinkling stars, and a celebration of laborers.

Earnest but in an appealingly whimsical way, William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg's The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore celebrates books, their charms and magnetisms here made literal, as they find the downtrodden protagonist and proceed to adore, tease and make demands on him. In turn, he dedicates himself to their preservation in an assortment of brief comedies, playing doctor, companion and father to the needy volumes.

Wild Life, directed by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby, follows the travails and misapprehensions of an Englishman in Canada who's determined to become a rancher even as his new neighbors voice their doubts.

More antic, Patrick Doyon's Dimanche features a young boy grappling with boredom and unexpected adventures on a random Sunday— going from church to time with grandma to escapades too close to the train tracks. While it relies on Looney Tunes-ish violence, its take on the changing subjects and styles of entertainments is entertaining in itself.

(@cfuchss)