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.