DVD Reviews

The Animation Show: Volumes 1 And 2

Over the last few years, Mike Judge & Don Hertzfeldt have been spreading the gospel of their craft through a travelling circus of sorts: The Animation Show, a compendium of hand-picked shorts from around the world, strung together for feature-length-ish viewing. Various incarnations of the show continue to tour North America, gaining a kind of cult status... or reinforcing it, since modern animated shorts already exist on the fringes.

Ostensibly, this is animation for grown-ups, a distinction most animators, who are generally well-connected to their childhoods, would scorn as decades past obsolete. I'm using "grown-ups" to mean people who can integrate the stuff they liked as a kid (the basis for most of this material) into the scope of animation's artistic possibilities. Look no further than Aria by Pjotr Sapegin (yay, NFB!). The story of Madama Butterfly is told with dolls against sets pulled from a grade-school diorama; it's a direct channel to childhood by way of one of the great operatic tragedies, with a surreal ending that deconstructs the animated short itself. If that's not fully realized humanity in an art form, nothing is.

Dating from 1986 to 2005, containing four Academy Award nominees, too many stand out to give them all their due. Some use minimalism to maximum effect, some are hectic and crowded, some have social import (The Rocks follows two stone creatures over millions of years and condemns mankind as a blip on nature's radar), and most achieve the correct balance of heartbreaking and hilarious, like Adam Elliot's three autobiographical claymations about his eccentric or troubled relatives. Many films are as notable for their soundscapes as their visuals—George Schwizgebel's elegant yet manic La course a l'abime, with its allegorical brush-stroke images moving to the cadence of its Berlioz score. The overall sound is suitably brassy and nuanced when needed, occasionally glorious.

Even the conceptual duds are fun. Corky Quakenbush's Ricardo series is pointless, but the claymation is vibrant and innocent. Jennifer Drummond's F.E.D.S. would have made a better live-action documentary, but digital rotoscoping adds a wacky dimension. And then there are the shorts that beggar description. Take Alex Budovsky's Bathtime in Clerkenwell: calling it the dream of Terry Gilliam if he were an autistic 1930's Disney staffer barely does it justice. Don Hertzfeldt's stick figure stories culminate in the final film of volume two, Evolution, a tour-de-force of simple images plumbing the meaning of life.

Tomek Baginski takes the dazzling CG skills on display on volume one (The Cathedral) and injects one missing element for volume two: humour (Fallen Art). The special features relating to him are well-chosen examples of how much labour goes into these films. Animators are real techies, and they love explaining their work: what their machines do, how their storyboards look, which shots were left out. You can't appreciate the creativity of Pes' bonus film Kaboom without the shot-by-shot breakdown. We see Mike Judge's first MTV Liquid Television short, the direct ancestor of Office Space. The commentaries and "100 Years of Animated Shorts" are a little pedestrian. For context, sink your teeth into the booklet, with incisive feature articles/interviews on every artist. 

And no, action/sci-fi fans won't be let down. The Cathedral and Fifty-Percent Grey ooze symbolic future dystopia. Rockfish and Ward 13 are two of the wildest, scariest, most adrenaline-fuelled rides you'll ever take in under 15 minutes. There can be no doubt that in this century, animated shorts have made phenomenal leaps in art and technology. This set will not only create a larger audience for its films—it will inspire new ones. You'll feel like rushing out and making your own.

Review By Michael Rottman