The Animation Show
Now Playing: (2003, various directors) [seen in theatres]
Since most of us don't get to see a lot of the new animation out there (stupid dial-up Internet), we have Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt to thank for this. Together they've taken roughly twenty animated shorts from around the world and assembled them into a mini-animation festival, now in limited release. The earliest in the series is an excerpt from Ward Kimball's Msrs and Beyond (1957), originally commissioned by Walt Disney as part of a series of sci-fi shorts. The creativity of vision and sheer weirdness in display in this piece not only serves as an example of how far Disney studios have fallen, but also points the way for future animators represented here. Three of last year's Oscar-nominated shorts are included in the series. Mt. Head (2002, Koji Yamamura) is about a stingy man who eats cherry pits and begins to grow a cherry tree out of the top of his head. Cathedral (2002, Tomek Baginski), almost certainly the series' most visually striking work, with a strange humanoid creature who is absorbed into an organic sort of cathedral. And Das Rad (2003, Chris Steiner, Arvid Uibel, and Heidi Wittinger) is a strangely affecting look at the relative nature of time, as the rise and fall of a civilization is seen from the point of view of two slowly-changing rocks. I also enjoyed seeing Tim Burton's poignant 1982 short Voncent again, marveling how autobiographical it must have been for him, and how fully formed his style was even then. There were a few shorts in the bunch which weren't quite up to snuff in my opinion- the claymation Ident (1989, Richard Goleszowski) was an interesting idea that didn't play out especially well, and I'm not a Bill Plympton fan so his latest film Parking didn't do much for me. But the great thing about this series is that there's so much to choose from. The presenters even get in on the act themselves, with Judge (of Beavis and Butt-head fame) contributing a number of early films including the original Office Space short. Hertzfeldt brought even more to the table, not only drawing a few humorous pieces especially for the series, but also contributing two of his lo-fi classics. Billy's Balloon (1998) is a bizarrely funny piece about a balloon bullying the child who is holding it. The 2000 short Rejected is even funnier and more surreal- it's mostly composed of snippets commissioned by the Family Learning Channel and The Johnson and Mills company, then promptly rejected by them (hence the title). It's easy to see why they didn't cotton to the films- Hertzfeldt clearly took the money and ran, to hilarious effect (one short shows a character tearing a hunk of flesh off another's body and beating him with it; another advertises as Johnson and Mills product by saying "now with more sodium!")- but the animator got the last laugh, when in the short's final sequence the animated characters' world is thrown into chaos, with the backgrounds crumpling and the drawings sucked into a black hole. Even amidst all the fancier stuff, Rejected was my favorite of the series, and I'm eager to see Hertzfeldt's other work. If you dig animation- even if you're up for something outside the mainstream assembly line- check this out when it comes to where you are. Unless it's already come and gone, in which case pick up the DVD this spring.