The Animation Show

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.

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.

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.

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!

I recently watched this DVD and was impressed by the overall quality of the animated shorts. There were some definite duds on the disk--the worst of which were THE ADVENTURES OF RICARDO shorts--they were just cruel and NOT in any funny way. However, despite these few, there were so many wonderful shorts that it makes this a must-have DVD. Included among the good are the Oscar-nominate DAS RAD, PARKING (by Plympton), three of Adam Elliot's brilliant shorts (UNCLE, BROTHER and COUSIN), the bizarre but fascinating MT. HEAD (also Oscar-nominated), and some very cruel and very funny simple shorts by Hetzfeldt--and several others that were good but I don't have time to mention. I can't wait to see the next volume.

PS--Many of these better animations can be found on other DVD collections. For example, DAS RAD and MT. HEAD are both on the ART OF THE SHORT FILM DVD by Film Movement.

FYI--There are, at present, three volumes to this collection. My review was based on the first one. The second, was far inferior--with very little humor and too many "artsy" films. I'd rate that one a 5. The third was very different--less funny but very surreal and amazing--I'd score it an 8.