Watch the Oscar-Nominated Animated Short 'We Can't Live Without the Cosmos'

To be a true Oscar completist, it’s not just enough to have seen all the Best Picture nominees: you’ve also got to dive into the short film categories. All 15 of the nominated shorts are touring the country in three programs — Animated, Documentary and Live Action — in limited theatrical release, with a VOD premiere scheduled for Feb. 23 ahead of the Feb. 28 Oscar ceremony. But you can cross one of those nominees off your list right now: Russian animator Konstantin Bronzit’s retro-Space Age cartoon, We Can’t Live Without the Cosmos. (Two other nominees, World of Tomorrow and Last Day of Freedom, can be streamed on Netflix.)

Related: Our Complete Guide to the 2016 Oscar-Nominated Shorts

The 16-minute short details the friendship between two cosmonauts, whose bond grows stronger as they train for their first mission…which ends in tragedy. “My film is not about the space program, and it is just partly about friendship,” the director recently told The New Yorker. “It’s about loneliness. About the very close links between people. About our inability to live in human society without exiting, sometimes, to a different area, an open space where we can really breathe deeply and freely.”