The Animation Show

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!

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!

A collection of nineteen animated films. `Das Rad' is the story of the rise and fall of the human civilization as witnessed by two rocks. At the end conditions return to how they were before man and the human existence is seen as only one part of the cycle of the world. `Parking' is about a man who has a pristine parking lot ready to open when he discovers a weed. In his battle with the weed the parking lot is never opened. The moral of the story: keep the big picture in mind and don't get consumed by the details. Another, which is a look into the afterlife, depicts the torture of an inescapable eternity. A soldier who finds himself in heaven tries to kill himself, which takes him to purgatory, again tries to kill himself and ends up in hell where he is out of bullets. Last of my favorites was a Japanese cartoon in which a man who saves everything he finds grows a tree out of his head. People begin to live there. When he gets angry at their excesses he tears the trees from its roots creating a hole. But the hole gathers water and people still congregate. In the end the man, who is the symbolic conservationist, dies from the excesses of the people leading to the ultimate demise of nature. Some of the comedy pieces I didn't think were very funny but overall I would recommend seeing this for the above-mentioned films.

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.

Curated by animators Don Hertzfeld and Mike Judge, this is a tremendously wide ranging collection of animation; computer, clay, hand-drawn, dramatic, funny, abstract, documentary. You name it.

As with any collection of many shorts the quality is wide ranging too, and personal taste will play a big part in how a given person responds. But the best bits here are quite brilliant, and make this set very worthwhile for fans of animation aimed at an adult audience.

Among the best for my taste: Alex Budovsky's gorgeous shadow-play Bath-time in Clerkenwell, Adam Elliot's wonderful 3 clay stop motion character portraits of his screwed up family members: 'Uncle', 'Cousin', and 'Brother' – all 3 are both hilarious and but also truly heartbreaking, Don Hertzfeld's simple, blackly comic 'Billy's Balloon'; painfully, sickly, laugh out loud funny. But even the less brilliant are all interesting, with only a very few real clunkers in the bunch.

The collection is available as part of a very reasonably priced 2 DVD set, along with "The Animation Show, Volume 2". For me, this 2 DVD set is more slightly more uneven than the later Volume 3, which has a tremendously high ratio of hits to misses. The set also comes with a nice booklet with a biographical sketch on each of the artists represented, and a decent number of special features and extras.