Sightlines · reception

How Tower was received

2016 · Keith Maitland · Tower on Sightlines

The arc

An instant SXSW 2016 sensation — it took both the Documentary Grand Jury and Audience awards — and then became one of that year's notorious Oscar stories when it made the Best Documentary shortlist but missed the final five. A decade on, it's a fixture of 'the Academy blew it' lists and a quiet canon entry for animated documentary.

What’s debated

The perennial fight is over the rotoscoped animation itself: is animating a real mass shooting a distancing aesthetic gimmick, or the only humane way to put you inside that day without exploiting archival horror?

Its footprint

Alongside Waltz with Bashir, it's become a go-to reference point for what animated documentary can do, and it gets re-invoked in the discourse every time campus gun violence returns to the headlines — its release landed almost exactly on the event's 50th anniversary.

Where it stands

On Letterboxd it lives as a beloved hidden-gem documentary — the four-star doc people press on friends with 'trust me, the animation is the point' — and a standard answer to 'best doc the Oscars ever snubbed.'

Did you know? The film grew out of Pamela Colloff's 2006 Texas Monthly oral history '96 Minutes,' and its SXSW 2016 premiere ended with a rare double win: the Documentary Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award — with Today show veteran Meredith Vieira among its executive producers.