Bear Story won the Oscar for best animated short on Sunday night at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.
Bear Story, from writer-director Gabriel Osorio and producer Pato Escala, out of Punkrobot Animation Studio in Chile, beat out Prologue, from director Richard Williams and producer Imogen Sutton; Pixar’s Sanjay’s Super Team, from director Sanjay Patel and producer Nicole Grindl; We Can’t Live Without Cosmos, from director Konstantin Bronzit; and World of Tomorrow, from writer-director-producer Don Hertzfeldt.
Bear Story follows a bear who is separated from his family when he is taken to perform in a circus. Earlier in the week at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ ‘Shorts’ program, Osorio said the 10-minute short was inspired by his childhood in Chile, during which the political unrest meant that he grew up not knowing his grandfather.
Calling Bear Story “a very Latin American movie but with a universal feeling,” Osorio said, “I tried to tell the importance of a family being together. … The message is that we must try not to make the same mistakes of the past.”
