Only You: An Animated Shorts Collection (now on HBO Max) is the final result of an HBO/Warner Bros. program that gave a dozen filmmakers training by industry professionals, a production budget and materials to create five-to-seven-minute movies. The goal was to spotlight underrepresented voices, and possibly funnel artists into the animation profession. It’s no surprise then that the eight films comprising Only You offer a diverse collection of voices and visual styles, presented by HBO Max as “episodes” – so let’s see what these artists have to say, starting with Chris Fequiere’s Burning Rubber.
ONLY YOU: AN ANIMATED SHORTS COLLECTION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Closeup: A blue wallball and gloves on a table.
The Gist: In Burning Rubber, Duane is a minimum-wage slinger of food-truck hot dogs, and his existence is brought to life via Into the Spider-Verse-style comic-book pointillism visuals and anime-esque comic exaggeration. It’s probably not where he expected to be at this point in his life. The Burning Rubber Wallball tournament is today, and the prize money would cover the back rent he owes – but it means not only skipping out of work, but raiding the till in the hot dog truck. Yeep. He does it, of course, but does he have the grit and skill he needs to not only win, but escape his current dead-end conundrum?
Welcome to 8th Street (directors Yoo Lee and Xin Li) is a puppety stop-motion story of a couple who’s just moved from California to urban Noo Joisey. Their new neighbors are odd ducks, including three old ladies, a weirdo trying to sell them steaks out of his car trunk and a wacko turkey gobbling away. I dunno if it’s a warm welcome they receive, but it’s definitely a weird one.
Kent Hammer (Dominick Green) just got a promotion to “financial analysis revenue technician,” whatever the hell that means. One thing it means is more work, so his boss – who, in this neo-CG-animation short, looks like an all-grown-up Boss Baby – gives him a pile of paperwork to dwarf the Burj Khalifa. Question: Are Kent’s briefcase, stapler, copy machine, etc., all actually talking, or is he losing his mind?
Yellowbird (Jerred North and Tsvetelina Zdraveva) is a glossy 3-D animation in which a Bulgarian woman in New York spots a dead bird on the sidewalk – then goes home to learn her father died. She wants to fly back to her home country for the funeral, but that means checking in at the immigration office and learning her legal status may be at stake if she leaves the U.S.
Monstr (Tank Standing Buffalo and Xstine Cook) is a surreal, nightmarish short rendered with bold, broad lines and features (think Genndy Tartakovsky). A man painstakingly lugs a log through a dark and disorienting forest, and as reality and dreams blur together, he faces his demons. Why? A woodcarver awaits to finish a totem pole.
Aroon (Miriam Presas) is a mythic-storybook-style tale – rendered in a blend of 2-D construction-paper and 3-D styles – about a hero whose pursuit of a dangerous tiger becomes a spiritual journey rife with strange characters and symbols and metaphors that might be above my head, but are nonetheless compelling and beautiful.
Kimotiwin: The Act of Stealing (Keara Lightning and Caeleigh Lightning) offers traditional Studio Ghibli-inspired anime visuals for the story of Tiska, who attempts a dangerous journey to find the specific flower that symbolizes her relationship with the woman she loves. The story takes a couple of surprising turns as the reality of the setting comes into focus (hint: it looks like some sort of apocalypse has happened).
And finally, Leech (Aalaa Mohamed) is a richly colored 2-D animation in which a woman uses a self-help app to connect with a life coach who offers to help her lose weight with a diet and exercise program. But what she doesn’t realize is that the coach is an honest-to-gosh vampire feeding her all the guilt and shame of regressive diet culture.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The tone and style of these shorts will appeal to fans of Tartakovsky’s work (especially Samurai Jack and Primal), and brought to mind The Simpsons, the film Persepolis, 1990s show Batman: The Animated Series and (gulp) Davey and Goliath.
Our Take: Like any anthology, Only You consists of hits and misses, and your mileage may vary per your personal taste. But to my eye, there are far more hits here, and each short is distinctive either in tone, content or visual style. Rubber and 8th Street are pure comedy; Kent Hammer’s corporate-culture satire is rooted in palpable anxiety; Yellowbird offers understated, melancholy social commentary; Monstr and Aroon function as parables; Kimotiwin takes an unusual angle on sci-fi; and Leech feels deeply personal, eminently relatable. Some are provocative, some are thoughtful, some are whimsical, one is fascinatingly obtuse, and a couple are pure of heart but heavy of hand. But nitpicking flaws is to miss the forest for all the trees, because Only You is a consistently engaging, visually inspired compilation.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Our Leech protagonist does a peaceful backstroke in a swimming pool.
Sleeper Star: Lee and Li really lean into the eccentricity of their tone and style – for what it’s worth, the consistently funny Welcome to 8th Street is my favorite of the bunch. (And make sure you get a load of the steak salesman’s nasty, nasty toenails. Details!)
Most Pilot-y Line: A choice decontextualized line from Welcome to 8th Street: “That’s what ya get for shittin’ on my meat!”
Our Call: STREAM IT, of course. There’s some wonderful, creative, inspired stuff in every short here.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
