The Animation Show 2005

Curated by animators Don Hertzfeld and Mike Judge, this is a 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 worthwhile for fans of animation aimed at an adult audience. If Volume 2 isn't quite as filled with gems as volume 1, I was still very glad to have seen it. And given that Volume 1 and 2 currently seem to only be available as a pretty inexpensive 2-DVD box set, the total package - with a nice booklet with a biographical sketch on each of the artists represented, and a decent number of special features and extras - was an small investment I was very glad to have made

The best of Volume 2 for my taste were: Jonathan Nix's wistful and imaginative 'Hello'. and Don Hertzfeld's wondrously funny, dark and sometimes sad "The Meaning of Life" - an oddly but potently poetic cartoon. But even the less brilliant are all interesting, with only a very few real clunkers in the bunch.

Note: For me, the best of the available collections was the later Volume 3, which has a tremendously high ratio of hits to misses.

I won't review each short here separately, but in general this series is intriguing and definitely worthy a view. It starts off on the silly side with "Guard Dog", a short that, albeit a bit predictable, is still humorous and a little odd. The shorts don't really get funnier after that, but then again animation doesn't have to be funny.

While I'm not too knowledgeable on the subject of why these were put together, I believe it has something to do with showcasing creative talent in animation that would otherwise pretty much go unwatched, which in my case is true being that I wouldn't have heard of any of these animators if it wasn't for Mike Judge's and Don Hertzfeldt's names put above the title. However, besides Hertzfeldt's "The Meaning of Life" (which is the weakest Hertzfeldt short to date, methinks), the real stars are the other animators.

The strongest short is "Ward 13", a stop-motion animation about a patient trapped in a hellish hospital and trying to escape. It is hilarious, disturbing, and amazing all at the same time, a combination that results in the viewer staring at the screen with jaw agape once the credits start rolling at the end. It is so powerfully done with all three emotions that they tend to battle inside of you and leave you wondering what to think.

If it happens to be showing somewhere around you, I'd strongly suggest going to see it. Even if you don't like the separate shorts as a whole, the feature is definitely something intriguing and creative, and it's always nice to show what can be done with a creative mind at work.

--PolarisDiB

While not every short in this collection is a gem, the four or five that are impressive are unbelievably creative. Guard Dog is a gut-bustingly hilarious opening from the great Bill Plympton, with a great combination of clever, uproarious comedy with a twist of tragedy. Ward 13 is one of the most impressive action movies I've ever seen. That's quite a lot to say for a short animated film, but check it out and you'll see what i mean, it's relentlessly kinetic and dynamic. There's a short called Pan with Us that's an interpretation of a poem by robert frost that is a unique, ingenious form of animation unlike anything else out there. It's unfortunate that Don Hertzfeldt felt the need to make something so epic and out of character for his work because i think it left most of the audience disappointed, but it still had glimmers of his simple, comic genius. Thankfully, there are plenty of other works that cover up the less exciting ones. With the previous ones i mentioned, plus the gorgeous motion paintings of The Man With No Shadow, the perfect auditory love story of Hello, and thoughtful, subtle interconnected story of livestock humanoids in When the Day Breaks, the Animation Show Volume 2 is an amazing collage of the best modern animation in the world.

I was a huge fan of the first Animation Show disk, so I was sure to see this second collection. However, I was very disappointed because the films just weren't very funny--as they tended towards "arsty-fartsy" films that just made my head hurt.

One of the biggest disappointments was the virtual absence of Don Hertzfeldt's cartoons throughout the DVD--only having the bizarre and not particularly good MEANING OF LIFE. Likewise, PAN WITH US and MAGDA were too artsy and I disliked them. Fortunately, WARD 13 was a sick and twisted and funny film and the rest of the films were adequate.

Fortunately, THE ANIMATION SHOW does get much better with Volume Three. Three is NOT funny like one, but features much more amazing and mind-blowing films--and one of my all-time favorites, the unsavory and cool RABBIT.

It pains me to write a mediocre review of this animation collection, but compared to the first year's collection, this batch doesn't measure up.

The first Animation Show collection had a good balance between technically-interesting animation and shorts that were down-right entertaining. It was so good I saw it three times in the theater, was on the waiting list for the first round of the DVD release, and have since shown it in my home theater to friends numerous times. Naturally, I was very eager to see the 2005 collection.

This year's show favored shorts that were remarkable for the technical superiority of the animation techniques, unfortunately at the expense of including many shorts with actual entertainment value. Are these shorts works of art? Undoubtedly, but I have a feeling they won't achieve anywhere near the cult-status of many of the shorts in the first collection.

The only exception to my observation was Bill Plympton's "Guard Dog." Despite not being a fan of Bill Plympton, I found this short to be pretty good and worthy of a few chuckles, even if it was predictable.