Montreal animator Torill Kove attends a reception for Canadian nominees for the Academy Awards, at the Consul General of Canada's residence in Los Angeles, Thursday, Feb. 22, 2007. Kove is celebrating her third Oscar nomination, this time for "Me and My Moulton." THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP/Damian Dovarganes

TORONTO - Montreal animator Torill Kove is celebrating her third Oscar nomination, this time for the short "Me and My Moulton," which closes a chapter of stories based on her life and her native homeland of Norway.

"It's actually quite autobiographical," Kove, 56, said in a phone interview shortly after the Academy Award nominations came out Thursday. "In a way, it's a memoir basically of a period in my life when I was young and my parents were young."

"Me and My Moulton," about three sisters growing up in an unconventional Norwegian family, is nominated for best animated short film. Kove won the Oscar in that category in 2007 for "The Danish Poet," and received her first nomination for best animated short in 2000 for "My Grandmother Ironed the King's Shirt."

Kove said the three films, which were all co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada, are based on stories from her own history and that of Norway.

"This third film kind of closed a trilogy in a way, so it does feel like a nice closure," she said. "I think my next film will be about something else. I'm kind of anxious to dive into a different territory."

Kove said "Me and My Moulton" is the most personal of the three and stirs deeper feelings of poignancy going into the Oscars this time.

The story centres around a seven-year-old girl who's embarrassed by her parents and longs to be like "other normal Norwegian families of the 1960s." Things take a turn when she and her two sisters ask their parents for a bicycle one summer.

Kove said a lot of the events in the film, as well as the mood of the story, are taken directly from her childhood.

"I did have parents I thought were kind of weird and I was grappling with these conflicting feelings of not being completely satisfied with what my parents were giving me, even though I should have been," she said. "So it's all pretty much true."

As adults, Kove and her two sisters would tease her parents about how they raised them. They often joked about the dresses their mother made for their dance-school ball, as well as their dad's "incredibly embarrassing" moustache and the same bicycle that's depicted in "Me and My Moulton."

Her parents aren't alive anymore (she lost her father almost 20 years ago and her mother this past fall), so "Me and My Moulton" is "intended to be a tender homage" to them, she said.

"A kind of way of saying: 'Yes, there were troubles but basically you guys were great.'"

"Me and My Moulton" is up against "The Bigger Picture," "The Dam Keeper," "Feast" and "A Single Life."

Although this is Kove's third time going to the Oscars, she still finds it exciting. When the nominations came in, she and a bunch of colleagues were gathered in an NFB conference room watching a live stream of the press conference.

"It's really a nerve-wracking experience," she said. "You just kind of sit there and my hands were getting increasingly sweaty. 'Me and My Moulton' was the fourth on the list that they announced and it was a fun experience, I have to say. There was just kind of a roar. We had some champagne."

Kove is hoping to attend the Feb. 22 awards ceremony with her 12-year-old daughter, who was at school when her mother received her Oscar nom.

"She was not aware of this happening today," said Kove. "I didn't tell her because I'm trying not to make too a big deal out of it. I think it can be a mixed blessing to have a parent who's in the limelight for the 15 minutes of fame."

She added with a laugh: "But I remember when 'The Danish Poet' was up for an Oscar and won one, my daughter who was then much younger — she was five or six — went around telling people that 'Mommy won the big contest,' which I think really summed it up."

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