Mr. Hublot

The animated short category of the Academy Awards has never really garnered a lot of attention, if any at all. Which is why, this year, when the Disney-made short "Get a Horse!" was up for best animated short, people more or less wrote off everything else in the category. For the most part, the rest were obscure, foreign made cartoons that people had never heard of; unless you had been to a film festival or saw them in a limited release in some art house theatre, there's a really good chance you've never seen any of the other contenders. "Get a Horse!" was just the opposite: it was the lead in to Frozen, the critically acclaimed box office smash that just made over 1 billion dollars globally. People had seen it.

So it came as a shock to most people when a man - who, according to his IMDB page, had never before written or produced a film of any kind - took the win right out from under the feet of one of the largest companies in the win. That man - Laurent Witz - made the film "Mr. Hublot." Haven't heard of it? Yeah, me either. 

My desperate attempts to find the short online have come up empty-handed (the best I can do is this demo of the animation used in the film...which looks really great) but from what I can gather, Mr. Hublot is about a man living in a futuristic city who takes it upon himself to adopt a puppy-like robot. The man, who shows symptoms of OCD (*cough cough "Cracked" cough) takes care of the dog as it grows bigger and bigger. The official website has some more information, such as the festivals it has been in, awards it's won, and where it will play next. 

I know next to nothing about the animation besides that it looks really, really good and that it was partly funded by the government of Luxembourg. I've tried to find videos showing the 'making of' of Mr. Hublot, but to no avail. So unless someone is able to find the short illegally online somewhere (please let me be the first to know if this happens) than I guess some of the mystery surrounding Mr. Hublot will just continue to grow. 

*EDIT

I was actually able to just find this short 'making of' video that shows a few of the techniques Witz used to animate the film. It's actually asking for donations so that they make a book showing the artwork of Mr. Hublot. Pretty cool.