Debra J. Solomon isn’t quite Joni Mitchell, and her animated diary-musical Getting Over Him in Eight Songs or Less isn’t quite what a Bill Plympton adaptation of Blue might look like, but there are enough traces of the bruised feminism of the former and the fearless fluidity of the latter to warrant a casual comparison. The 30-minute short, which will air smarmily as part of HBO2’s Valentine’s Day lineup, propels us through the Kübler-Ross-like cycle Solomon experienced after the expiration of her marriage: She slogs from desperation to barbed self-criticism to clingy extroversion to sexual doubt to, finally, acceptance and anticipation of the future, examining each step toward newfound independence with raw candor, bulbous caricatures, and three-chord (or less) piano ditties.

Solomon’s vision isn’t terribly ambitious (the self-analysis in each respective stage of heartbreak is never any more nuanced than “I don’t know how to live without my husband” and “I think I’m gonna be okay after all”), but she compensates for her lack of complexity with an unusually likeable animating style, not to mention a mercifully brief running time. Her choppy, amorphously mobile sketches, in which corpulent characters are continually shape-shifting into anthropomorphic gender symbols and swimming in seas of nervous squiggles, may provoke comparisons to curvy, jittery Red Bull commercials, but they also resemble some of the deceptive crudity of Signe Baumane’s early work, particularly in the manner that they askewedly dote on female anatomy with pudgy, hyperrealist fascination. In one especially vulnerable number entitled “Teach Me to Be a Woman,” Solomon’s hand-drawn avatar peers up at an apartment window and sees in the svelte lower half of a nude, freshly sexed female everything she isn’t; the irony is that the anonymous Venus is only a few steps away from a plump Monty Python cutout with a shriveled head and ballooned mammaries.