Feast (2014)

Feast arrives as a six-minute Disney short in which a Boston Terrier named Winston narrates, without narration, the romantic fortunes of his owner James, as measured in scraps. The film premiered at Annecy in 2014, rode into theaters ahead of Big Hero 6, and collected both an Annie and an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Patrick Osborne, making his directing debut, built the thing out of one-second increments of daily life, which is why it moves like a flipbook of dinners. James meets Kirby the waitress and eats vegetables under her influence. He loses her, reverts to burgers, and is reunited by a dog carrying a sprig of parsley across town. The camera keeps the humans soft and out of focus until Winston bothers to look at them. It is a formal conceit executed with discipline.

There is very little here for the cultural archaeologist to excavate. The cast is a standard ensemble of Disney voice performers, none of them visible, all of them grunting and murmuring as unnamed humans. No character announces an identity. No institution is indicted. The diet subplot concerns a dog's palate and a man's heartbreak. It is not about body image, corporate agriculture, or the moral status of the chicken nugget. Kirby nudges James toward kale and then exits the plot as a romantic objective. Winston's triumph is a return to cupcakes. The film takes no position on anything except that dogs love food and that people are, on the whole, improved by owning one.

This is a vintage with nothing to decant. It is charming, wordless, and entirely innocent of the decade that followed it. We score it accordingly and move on to the next bottle.