The Animation Show

A collection of 19 animated shorts from all over the world assembled by animators Don Hertzfeldt and Mike Judge (the creator of "Beavis and Butthead"), "The Animation Show" is an absolute blast, easily the most fun I've had in a theater thus far in 2004.

They range from silly to deadly serious, and pretty much every style of animation is represented here, from stick figures to stunningly beautiful CGI.

Here are my favorites (in the order they were presented).

Excerpt from "Mars And Beyond" - This trippy 1957 work from the late, legendary animator Walt Kimball is a spooky and fascinating tour of what scientists thought Mars might look like at the time, including many bizarre hypothetical life forms.

"Ident" - an alternately funny and unsettling claymation film about...well, I THINK it's about all the different masks we have to wear in society, the way we're constantly molding our identity to fit those around us.

"The Cathedral" - A creepy and eye-popping, beautiful CG film about an explorer who ventures into a large and strange alien structure and finds that he shouldn't have.

"Vincent" - I hadn't seen this funny and slightly disturbing 1982 Tim Burton claymation short (about an imaginatively morbid 7 year-old) since I was a little kid, and I remember being extremely creeped out by it. Hasn't changed.

"Rejected" - By far the funniest of the group, this is a collection of surreal and frequently disgusting commercials that Don Hertzfeldt submitted to the Family Learning Channel and various corporations that were rejected. All of them are absolutely hysterical.

"Das Rad" - Probably my overall favorite, this is a stunning and surprisingly powerful short, about the entire rise and fall of human civilization, as witnessed by two unchanged rocks.

"Welcome To The Show", "Intermission In The Third Dimension" and "The End Of The Show" - These Hertzfeldt shorts that come in the beginning, middle and end of the collection, feature 2 talking cotton balls that Hertzfeldt loves to torture (kind of like all the figures in his drawings) - they are great.

There were only 3 that I didn't care for: "Strange Invaders", "The Adventures Of Ricardo" and Bill Plympton's "Parking", with "...Ricardo" being the definite low point.

Those aside, it's a fantastic roller-coaster ride of an experience.

In a year of regurgitated ideas and mindless sequels, The Animation Show proves that there are still value left in the art of moving pictures. Don Hertzfeldt's simple yet excruciatingly genius segments hurdle you through a gaggle of shorts produced with love and thought. I was a bit surprised to see Mike Judge's contributions were small, but they are still welcome.

The excerpt from Ward Kimball's "Mars and Beyond" animated film proves how the Disney company could once produce, in just a few minutes, something that contained more ingenuity than an entire 2 hour animated Disney film today. I still haven't mentioned the thought provoking shorts Mt. Head or Ident. And I'm sure this doesn't give justice to some of the other animated segments that deserve credit in this wonderful anthology.

I beg of you all to see this collection while it is still in theaters so we may be blessed with a second volume come next year. Enjoy it while you can!

Many of the short films screened in this collection are fantastic. The Hertzfeldt shorts, in particular, were so funny that I often couldn't breathe because I was laughing so hard. If "Rejected" had gone on much longer, I might have passed out.

The other shorts varied a great deal in style and content. While it was nice to see such variety mixed into the show, it felt less coherent somehow than, say, a Spike & Mike's festival. Expect odd juxtapositions and the occasional short that really grates on your nerves.

Much of Judge's work was comprised of ultra-short pencil tests, some of them quite entertaining. The animated test for Office Space was especially welcome.

Other highlights:

"Parking Lot" by Bill Plympton-- standard Plympton fare, but great fun.

("Head Mountain?"-- unsure of title) Japanese short about a stingy man who finds a cherry tree growing from his head. Surreal and well drawn.

(title unknown) There's a beautifully hand-painted short set to classical music centering around a pair of riders who transform repeatedly. It's an odd piece, but very pretty and worthwhile at the end.

Lowlights:

"Cathedral"-- Pretty CG for its own sake was worthwhile when the medium was new. But these days you really ought to have a compelling narrative or at least make the gimmick less obvious. Overlong and slow.

"Ricardo"-- it *is* intermittently funny, but it's a bit amateurish and vaguely offensive. Features a mentally retarded hispanic guy with a speech impediment. Yes, that's the gimmick.

Overall, it's certainly worth watching, but Spike & Mike's may be more consistently entertaining.

1st watched 12/29/2008 OK group of animated shorts presented by Mike Judge of "King of the Hill" and "Beavis and Butthead" fame and Don Herzfeld. Supposedly the DVD shows different shorts than the original theatrical release that traveled to various film festivals, so I this is definitely not a review of the original but instead of the DVD version but here goes with the version I viewed. The added 3 shorts to round out the feature by Don Herzfeld were fun, the three adventures of Ricardo are pretty bad, the three uncle, bother and cousin British claymation shorts were kind of strange and pretty serious stuff for this medium, which I guess is at least unique if nothing else. The short films surrounding these efforts were pretty good foreign entries but it doesn't make for a complete good film as a whole. Probably the best two were a video game-like entry where the character gets assimilated into an outdoor-like Cathedral and a computer animated entry about cloning. These thought-provoking entries surrounded by silly stuff doesn't make the feature flow very well. It would probably be better to watch a particular artist's shorts all the way thru instead of this weird mix, but maybe the original was better—I guess I will never know until they release it as it was in the theatres.

This is quite simply the strongest animation festival I've ever seen, and I've been attending them for over 30 years now! There is not one bad film in the lot, as opposed to your typical festival of animation, in which you're usually lucky to find a small handful of gems amid a bunch of junk.

The other animation festivals that are still around out there are either in the toilet or completely out of gas. Animation as a basic film medium really needs this kind of fresh show right now - if this is playing in your area, PLEASE go and support this kind of film-making!